Wanted: physicists exploring AI/LLM agents for actual research reasoning
Hi everyone,
I’m looking for physicists who are seriously experimenting with AI / LLM-based agentic tools for doing research.
I’m not mainly interested in automatic data analysis, paper summarization, lab automation, or workflow scripting, although those are useful. I’m much more interested in the harder question:
Can AI tools help with the reasoning part of physics research?
By that I mean the part that makes physics physics: building intuition, formulating models, checking assumptions, finding contradictions, deriving consequences, proposing toy problems, comparing limits, generating counterexamples, and deciding what is physically meaningful rather than just formally possible.
I’d like to connect with people who are asking questions like:
- How can LLMs or agentic systems assist with theoretical reasoning without producing convincing nonsense?
- Can we design workflows where the AI is useful but still forced to be physically grounded?
- What does “AI-assisted physics research” look like beyond literature review and code generation?
- Can we create agents that help test ideas, derive equations, check consistency, and challenge assumptions?
- What guardrails are needed to avoid slop, hallucinated arguments, and fake insight?
- Could a team of human physicists and AI agents explore a research problem together in a productive way?
My goal is partly to share ideas, but also to maybe try building or testing something together: a workflow, benchmark, agent setup, or collaborative experiment aimed at making LLMs useful for real physics reasoning.
I only know of a general “AI for science” Slack, but it seems quite broad and not very active. I’m also looking for more focused platforms, subchannels, Discords, Slacks....
If you are a physicist, theorist, computational physicist, or AI researcher thinking seriously about this, I’d be very interested to talk.
Especially interested in people working on:
- AI agents for theoretical physics
- AI-assisted model building
- LLMs for derivations and consistency checks
- scientific reasoning benchmarks
- automated conjecture generation
- physics-grounded AI systems
- human-AI collaboration in research
- ways to prevent hallucination and “AI slop” in scientific work
Would love to hear from our community