nasimrahaman_tt

> What if mathematics is unreasonably ineffective at escaping the convex-hull of concepts and patterns found in nature?

Interesting. My intuition here is quite the opposite, that math is vastly overpowered for physics. I don't think we invest a lot of work in figuring out math that isn't useful to describe the natural world.

We have generated a bunch here: https://lacuna.tiptreesystems.com/explore?view=hypotheses

Recommendation: rig up the mcp and have claude or codex trawl the corpus for the kinds of ideas you might care about.

``` claude mcp add --scope user lacuna-research -- uvx lacuna-research-mcp ```

or

``` codex mcp add lacuna-research -- uvx lacuna-research-mcp ```

"The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson

Thank you!

One part of the explanation is that we focus primarily on AI research, and a substantial chunk of physicists gravitate (heh) towards AI research, so we end up capturing more of their work.

Another part of the explanation could be that (AI +) physics papers are just easier to access, so we end up processing more of those.

> I made it to the first figure in the paper before I raised an eyebrow at this term.

I came up with that name, and fair eyebrow. Think of an "atom" as a unit of a working vocabulary (a "token"), not a Platonic form. It's a way of compressing the corpus (paraphrases of the same idea across papers get merged into one symbol, a bit like a tokenizer's vocabulary).

We also talk about some limitations of this framing in page 11 (towards the top).

We haven't done concrete measurements yet, but my intuition is that the quality of Lacuna proposals is a function of density of topics / research directions. Lacuna is most dense around AI topics; for neighboring ones (e.g. bio, physics), I'd join you in tempering expectations.

The one thing I could recommend however is rigging up the mcp (https://github.com/tiptreesystems/lacuna-research-mcp) to your code agent and trawling the database for ideas worth thinking about.

> I find that often a big cluster of papers around a particular topic, none of which seems to move the needle much, is actually an indication that we need a new approach and writing more and more incremental papers just digs deeper into a local minimum.

Yes, I think this can work. We use a similar idea to categorize what papers have been influential or foundational -- look at the ones that have changed the trajectory (in time) of a research direction significantly.