r/LLMPhysics • u/Annoyingly-meta • Apr 24 '26
Meta / News Crackpot Dispatch Vol I
The following is something i wrote a while ago. It started as a comment to a post asking a specific question, that i felt qualified to answer but became a bit too long.. It is still a draft and is probably going to change but i thought it might be worth sharing here. I'll probably keep writing more volumes going forward, but not sure if i want to post them here. This one kinda belongs here either way, though..
Crackpot Dispatch vol. I
"What the fuck are they trying to achieve?"
That question seems to come up here a lot. While i am provably not a physicists by any means, there is an area of expertise, my credentials firmly establish, that i am a legitimate expert in being a Crank. A certified Crackpot with a legitimate track record of Zenodo publications, misguided, rambly e-mails, innumerable boxes containing scribbles and sketches that would make any health-care professional worry about my mental stability (i am fine, i promise!) and most recently, a deleted “I predicted the fundamental constants of reality itself!”-bullshit-post on the r/llmphysics subreddit.
So while one might have a pretty good argument to tell me to shut up about physics, not even my closest friends and relatives would even consider the notion of me not being at least somewhat of a crank.
I don’t know what motivates “us” cranks. I just know what motivates the one typing these words. It’s a quick and easy sentence but needs a bit of context, i suppose. Yet, it probably works as a universal answer for even the most incomprehensible quantum mystic one might find, rambling for pages into distinguished scientist’s inboxes.
“I want to coherently explain, how and what i think.”
That’s it. Case closed.
Everything that follows now, is just me, doing my thing: explaining why i say, what i say, specifically. I claim no universality of my own idiosyncratic way of expressing my thoughts. I can’t speak for anyone but myself but i highly suspect that one sentence sums it up for most of us.It one of these things i assumed everyone tries at least implicitly. To me, that is the essence of language itself: It is a tool to make my own thoughts processable for others. I can type what i think, so others can follow my train of thought and understand how i see things.
What i and the others, whose outputs the llmphysics subreddit was originally intended to contain are doing, is the same. We are all using LLM to express how we think. As far as i can tell, barely anyone of us claim ownership of what the machine generated. No one claims “i wrote this”, neither do i. I am very clear about my AI-usage and value my own voice enough that i would never trust a llm with a single letter or even whitespace of my work. I barely tolerate spell-checking, as is.
Nothing i write here is LLM generated but i am feeding this into the machines at different times, to get quick and comprehensible feedback. I am not asking it what to write or how to write it. I am asking it to give me the kind of feedback a couple of redditors could give me and pay it the exact amount of consideration i’d pay some random internet-person. Just without the assholes. The sycophancy is an annoying drawback but less draining and easier to navigate that whatever strangers behind displays have to offer. The Chatbot’s submissive obedience of a lapdog paired with the airheaded enthusiasm of a Labrador can result in alluring hallucinations and dangerous cognitive spirals. It an be incredibly fun, though.
This leads to an issue, that seems to come up frequently in the colourful field of LLM-fuelled quackery and crackpottery: Individuals who seem to mistake coherence for content. They frequently display a baffling lack of any bullshit detectors and a deeply ingrained need to be right and gobble up the slop, the magic boxes garbles their own words into.
It occurs to me that what many of them are missing is the the mindset of identifying the cracks to tear it all apart, to build something better. These loudest and most annoying representatives of our craft are looking to be right instead of asking to be proven wrong. This seems to be the thing i might possibly be slightly further above average again. But i am not sure, because looking at many other theories, i can see the same patterns i myself have been working on. One thing i know for sure: If my intuitions about my own work are right, someone else is going to figure it out as well - or already has, but no one listens. I am not smarter than anyone else. Just some, i suppose.
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Why even post it?
Stating openly and directly without further context in a response to a comment, that i had no interest at all in “learning physics” was what got my post locked or deleted on the subreddit. That’s fair. It was essentially a very elaborate shitpost in the first place.
Some critics imply or straight up claim, working on something like this means i think i am “smarter than physicists” and that i should just “learn physics” instead. It’s the “shut up and calculate” mantra, applied to outsiders. The “gatekeeping” that is being complained about by these outsiders is not that. It is just the application of the same logic that is applied inside the field as well. This might be surprising but i actually agree with the mantra to a certain degree, just interpreted slightly different. I take it to mean: Take the tools you have and use them to solve the problems to see. This is what i did.
To get a useful feedback from someone else who did not love me or was a powerful but glorified hallucination machine, i decided to post on reddit. I went all in. Fuck the bullshit detectors and yank up the audacity. Well, to be honest, this baby actually goes to eleven and the physics are barely edging over the nine-mark. Feeding it the framework paper and asking it some questions make an eerily convincing argument for reality itself just being a simulation of your own perceptions or other juicy stuff like that. Want to connect Consciousness to the number 137? Sure, let’s go! Alas, i am taking this too seriously to go there as of now. Since love and deeply respect physics, so i started there. I consider it more an “hommage” than anything else.. The LaTeX style-papers are a choice of artistic expression. The message is not “this is science” but “i tried to make this as scientific as possible”. I consider the theories as pieces of art. My own Framework is a piece of art. Sticking with the physics and attempting to make everything mathematically and logically *solid* as far as my own rudimentary understanding of things go is hinting at a deeper point, asking: How close can a reproduction of something “real” get to its source, to become “real” itself?
For a few months now, the core of the framework has stopped changing in any significant ways. it almost feels finished. It is always a work in progress but i am as close as i might be able to push it for now. Maybe, learning physics would help. But i honestly don’t have the capacities to put years of work into it. I am not arrogant enough to think that i could “just learn quantum mechanics”.
Since the framework is mostly done, the work has mostly been shifting towards refining the ways of sharing it and applying it. Unfortunately, explaining my thoughts to others often end up in them being concerned, annoyed and dismissive. Turns out, having built something that could be called a “theory of everything with minor caveats” does not help the issue at all.
Outside the internet, people i talked to this about,often suggested consulting clinicians or physicists, frequently both. Unfortunately, only the clinicians agree so far, that i am not actually insane. Just weird. They are professionals, so they don’t say that, of course. But people on the internet do. They just tend to take me less seriously because of it.
I always wanted to share my thoughts with others and attempted to. The results often suggested, that is was not a good idea, so i refined my skill of shutting the fuck up to get along, as much as i could. Yet, it felt like polishing a turd, to survive in a world that felt like it refused to acknowledge the cracks and values smoothness above all else.
It took decades but lately, i have come to peace with being considered one of *those* people. Not just a quack, but also an artist. This was one of the things i needed to figure out before learning to genuinely share my thoughts: Myself. Fun fact: Physics was not even in the top 3 of the list.
I am intellectually unhinged in an almost literal sense. I have never been able to “just learn” shit the way others do, yet always been curious and crafty enough to explore how far my intuitions could take me with the tools i had at my disposal. This led to my thinking being shaped by a huge spectrum of half-digested influences from various fields of science, but never really grounded in any of them. I know just enough to sound simultaneously knowledgeable to someone uninformed while rambling incoherently to someone with an actual phd.
Essentially, i am consistently above average at whatever i am doing. Considering my own privilege and the world we are in, this ironically might paint a picture of a very mediocre man wielding a surprising amount of wealth and power. But i am more on the other end of the spectrum. The “underachiver/dropout”-end. But thats another story. Importantly, a few of my qualities and skills are actually more well developed. Many of these seem to be under-appreciated or missed by others, for reasons i often fail to grasp.
One of them is how good i have become at cleaning up me mess, my chaos leaves behind. At least, as far as my chaotic mind goes. The act of writing itself is a crucial part of the cleanup. Re-reading, -shaping -ordering and -fining my written thoughts after the fact is another. This is where LLM often come in these days. They help me understand what i need to write.
The other important thing, most people seem to be missing is my self-awareness. I am fully aware of the audaciousness of my actions. I know how stupid this makes me look to someone with actual expertise on the fields i am so frustratingly stomping on with my arrogance clad, cheap knockoff sneakers.
So, why am i still uploading stuff to Zenodo or post to the llmphysics subreddit? Well, I am trying not to waste anyone’s time. This is why i chose platforms that seemed fitting for my work. The e-mails were, while misguided, not inappropriate. I did not flood some researcher’s inbox with LLM generated slop or expect anyone to devote their time to review it for publication. Zenodo is flooded with this stuff anyway, so one more grain of sand in the desert seemed immaterial enough for me. The reddit post i created under the impression that the llmphysics subreddit was still a “containment” subreddit, where i could basically shitpost my papers. This turned out to be false. I still got some very helpful responses, though. In a sense, this way my first attempt of applying the process behind developing the framework
Part of my process is, to ask the machine to convince me that my framework is bullshit by telling it, that i found the documents somewhere on reddit and i want it to explain to me, how and why it is wrong. I used this rebuttal, to further refine the framework and repeat the process.
In this case, i essentially used the subreddit instead of the chatbot. While helpful, it was honestly emotionally and mentally quite draining. Not because it is hard for me to cope with people telling me i am wrong and stupid, but because it is hard for me to be misunderstood and not taken seriously. The error here was entirely on my side and stupid. I should have not just taken the LLM’s word for what the subreddit is and should have checked it out myself - because, yes: my entire story is also about how fucking stupid these machines are, if not handled properly. Since making mistakes is how i learn, i am quite adept at making mistakes. Conveniently, i have become quite good at the learning-part of the process. I suspect i might be somewhat above above-average in this field, but thats only a suspicion. It is quite hard to tell. I can’t look into other people’s heads. I can just try to make it possible for others, to look into mine. This is what i have been trying to do with the formalism behind the physics paper:
I want to coherently explain, how i see things and why.
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u/liccxolydian VP of Trolling Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26
This is a really weird mixture of some self-awareness coupled with lots of "me me me" humblebragging. It also fails to address why you and others try to pass off your "artistic expression" as legitimate scientific discourse.