Physicist, Theo Collaborators Program, Quantum Information

Overview: FirstPrinciples is an independent, non-profit research organization building Theo, the AI Physicist - an autonomous scientific system designed to reason about fundamental physics from first principles. Our long-term vision is to accelerate deep scientific discovery by combining machine reasoning with human scientific judgment.

As part of this effort, we are launching the Theo Collaborators Program: a small, selective group of expert physicists who will work with us to validate, guide, and stress-test the scientific reasoning produced by the AI Physicist in a focused research domain. This is not a tool evaluation program, and it is not a traditional advisory role. Collaborators engage with a concrete scientific direction, help assess whether the system’s reasoning is sound, and contribute to shaping what “good AI-generated physics” should look like.

The Theo Collaborators Program is open to late-stage PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, early-career faculty, and industry researchers with strong theoretical backgrounds.

We operate as a global nonprofit organization , with a Canadian foundation, a US-based 501(c)(3).

Current Scientific Focus (2026): For the initial phase, we are focused on Quantum Information Theory, with emphasis on narrow, formalizable sub-fields where rigorous reasoning and constraint-based results are possible.

Representative areas include:

Structural constraints in quantum LDPC codes

Trade-offs between locality, rate, and distance in stabilizer codes

No-go or impossibility results under fault-tolerance assumptions

Information-theoretic bounds relevant to quantum error correction

Fundamental limitations of decoding or logical operations

The goal is depth over breadth: producing AI-assisted theoretical results that are technically coherent, non-trivial, and respectable to the physics community.

What Theo Collaborators Do: Theo Collaborators engage at critical points in the research cycle:

Question Validation & Framing

Review candidate research questions generated by the AI Physicist’s Question Formulator (QF)

Help identify which questions are:

scientifically meaningful;

tractable;

already resolved in the literature; or

ill-posed.

Provide feedback on assumptions, scope, and framing and help improve the Question Formulator module.

Shaping Question Ranking & Evaluation Criteria

Help us refine how questions are ranked by:

novelty;