During my 2017 binge of LW, I recall Yudkowsky suggesting that a superintelligence could infer the laws of physics from a single frame of video showing a falling apple (Newton apparently came up with his idea of gravity from observing a falling apple).
I now think that’s somewhere between deeply magical and utter nonsense.
Some details here: You are likely referring to That Alien Message. In my opinion Eliezer Yudkowsky made a weaker claim than you are implying:
A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam, would invent General Relativity as a hypothesis—perhaps not the dominant hypothesis, compared to Newtonian mechanics, but still a hypothesis under direct consideration—by the time it had seen the third frame of a falling apple. It might guess it from the first frame, if it saw the statics of a bent blade of grass.
To me it does not seem hard for a superintelligence (or 1000 years of Einstein-level thinking) to come up with Newtonian mechanics as a hypothesis from three frames of a falling apple. But I am not sure about the (weakly stated) suggestion that you could derive it from a picture of a bent blade of grass.
Some details here: You are likely referring to That Alien Message. In my opinion Eliezer Yudkowsky made a weaker claim than you are implying:
To me it does not seem hard for a superintelligence (or 1000 years of Einstein-level thinking) to come up with Newtonian mechanics as a hypothesis from three frames of a falling apple. But I am not sure about the (weakly stated) suggestion that you could derive it from a picture of a bent blade of grass.
You are correct. I misremembered the post, and I should edit it to clarify.