Can AI Scientists Change Their Minds? Prior-Evidence Conflict in Synthetic Universes

arXiv:2609.36726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can a scientific agent distinguish a law it inferred from evidence from one it merely recognizes? We introduce Synthetic Universes, a controlled benchmark that pairs canonical famous worlds with matched twisted twins governed by nearby noncanonical mechanisms. We evaluate each reported law twice: by executing it on held-out continuations and transfer settings, and by independently checking whether it recovers the generating mechanism. In the current checkpoint of a pre-specified 60-cell study, 22 trials were graded and one additional run ended in infrastructure failure. Among 20 twin trials, 8 pass predictive verification while 5 recover the generator. The dissociation is bidirectional: six parsable outputs predict successfully while missing the mechanism, whereas three recover the mechanism but fail predictive rollout. Drag exhibits the first pattern (5/5 predictive pass, 1/5 mechanism recovery); Gravity exhibits the second (1/5 predictive pass, 4/5 mechanism recovery). Because matched famous controls, the corrected identifiability sweep, and the Evidence Ladder remain incomplete, we do not claim a confirmatory causal prior-conflict effect. Instead, the completed runs establish a narrower verification result: predictive adequacy and mechanism recovery are distinct scientific claims and require distinct tests.