Ofc they are because their primary goal is to be useful and to be useful they need to always be relevant.

But considering that Special Relativity was published in 1905 which means all its building blocks were already floating in the ether by 1900 it would be a very interesting experiment to train something on Claude/Gemini scale and then say give in the field equations and ask it to build a theory around them.

I don't know if this is related to the topic, but GPT5 can convert an 1880 Ottoman archival photograph to English, and without any loss of quality.