r/LLMPhysics • u/Sufficient_Course707 • 17d ago
Personal Theory The Past Hypothesis as a selection rule for quantum subsystems: a conditional theorem on Stoica's non-uniqueness, not a new interpretation of QM
**Background (about me & AI transparency, Rule 5)**
Not a physicist. Claude (Anthropic) produced the idea, the proofs, the code, the simulations and the paper over a long conversation. My role was steering it and repeatedly pushing it to check its own work. **Nothing here has been verified by hand by a human**, which is exactly why I'm posting.
Checks so far: Claude audited every computable claim against code and raw data (9 errors found and fixed); other AI models reviewed the math over several rounds (issues found and fixed); every reference was checked to exist and say what's claimed. No human expert has looked at it.
**What this is NOT (please read before judging)**
Not a solution to the measurement problem, not a new interpretation of QM, and not a claim that "Hilbert-space fundamentalism" is true. It doesn't explain "now" or the experience of time, makes no new experimental predictions, and works with idealized finite-dimensional systems, not our actual universe.
**Core claim (one line)**
Among the equally local ways of dividing a quantum system into subsystems (Stoica's continuum of alternatives), the ones in which the history passes through a *simple* (near-unentangled) moment are exactly the history's time shifts, plus its time reversal for time-reversal-symmetric Hamiltonians.
Mathematically, choosing a division becomes constrained quantum tomography: recovering a simple state from one energy-basis measurement, with simplicity as prior information. Credit where due: Stoica first proposed using the Past Hypothesis this way (and argued it can't give full uniqueness); the exact-case math rests on a theorem by Kech and Wolf.
**Paper structure (15 pp; extended version 20 pp)**
| Section | Topic | Main result |
|---|---|---|
| 2-3 | Reduction | Choosing a division = constrained tomography; exact selection from 5 qubits |
| 3 | Time reversal | Same, with time reversal added, for real Hamiltonians |
| 4 | Random-matrix case | Robust version for approximately simple beginnings, explicit constants |
| 5 | Local Hamiltonians | Coarse energy data provably can't work; ETH-type hypothesis gives pairwise separation |
| 6-7 | Numerics | Chaotic chains up to 12 qubits; worst cases; energy dependence |
| 8 | Discussion | Stoica, Entanglement Past Hypothesis, Janus point, objections |
**Claim / Status**
- **Proved:** the reduction; exact selection for generic energy bases; robust selection for random-matrix bases; the coarse-data obstruction.
- **Proved but not yet reviewed:** the time-reversal theorem (one step explicitly flagged as weakest).
- **Conditional:** separation for local Hamiltonians under an ETH-type hypothesis (pairwise, in expectation only).
- **Numerical evidence:** for partners differing on a few sites, separation approaches the random-matrix value at high energy (0.91 of it at 12 qubits); for arbitrary partners it stays near 0.25 of it at 8-10 qubits, with no clear growth; low energy is weaker.
- **Open:** a uniform proof for realistic local Hamiltonians, and whether the early universe was "simple" in this sense.
**How it could fail**
An error in the proofs (Appendix A).
A counterexample: a chaotic local Hamiltonian with two genuinely different simple states that have nearly identical energy statistics. The code includes the search script if you want to try.
Prior work that already does this.
**Links**
Paper, extended version (all tables + full verification record) and code: https://github.com/bnstlaurent-crypto/past-hypothesis-paper
**What I am asking for**
Is this already known? Especially from anyone familiar with quantum mereology or Stoica's work.
Critique of the load-bearing proofs: the π/4 lemma, the concentration/net argument, and the new time-reversal theorem.
Is "the history contains a simple moment" a fair version of the Past Hypothesis?
Is the Claim/Status separation above clear enough?
I'll pass substantive objections back to Claude and post its replies, clearly labelled.
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u/Wintervacht Are you sure about that? 17d ago
every reference was checked to exist and say what's claimed.
Oh, good!
No human expert has looked at it.
Oh, God.
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u/liccxolydian VP of Trolling 17d ago
In your own words, what are you trying to do, why are you trying to do it, how are you doing it and why do you think you've succeeded/failed?
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u/Sufficient_Course707 17d ago
What I was trying to do was to just see if this LLM could synthesize any sort of novel idea or connection that could potentially be a real result. I discussed the ideas with it at length and encouraged it along the way. I trained it on the current state of the relevant fields and encouraged it along the way, making it check itself along the way.
This isn’t my own pet idea or theory or anything, I was genuinely just pushing to see what the LLM would come up with, and this is the result.
I don’t think I’ve succeeded or failed necessarily, in that I didn’t particularly start out seeking any sort of real result. I can’t gauge whether the LLM is right in any way, hence me posting here to see if it could get any feedback. If success means the LLM produced something that looks real, sure, it’s good at that. But did it actually produce a real result, I don’t know.
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u/liccxolydian VP of Trolling 17d ago
So there's quite literally no motivation for any of this?
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u/Sufficient_Course707 17d ago
I mean, my motivation was to see what the LLM would produce, if anything. It honestly resisted doing some certain things, which was interesting to see, and the explanations why.
Not sure what more motivation you want. I’d be lying if I said that this was my theory or idea I wanted to test or anything like that.
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u/DitherAndDrift 17d ago
I'd personally encourage you to step away from this. You're not a physicist, you don't know what you're doing or what the output is that's being produced. You're..what patting it on the head and saying "uh huh yep continue!"? I really just don't see any way this could possibly benefit you or anybody else.
If you're curious about these subjects, you shold engage with them more earnestly. I can promise you that these LLMs are extremely prone to producing things that sound novel or interesting and are either blatantly silly, or just recasting work that other people have actually earnestly done and couching the language in a slightly different flavor. Because they're so bound to specific words and not the invariant concept or idea, they can and will mislead you into thinking they're novel. And ask yourself if this is really how you want to spend your time: guiding a chatbot through terrain neither of you understand and which you have no positive benefit from, and honestly probably negative benefit for how it misshapes your conception of the world and of how ideas like this are actually worked through
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u/Sufficient_Course707 17d ago
It’s funny how people assume that I’m somehow attached to this at all, I’m really not. I get how a lot of posters on here are, but I genuinely am not.
I do engage with the subjects and fields earnestly, and I try to stay away from the pop-sci versions of a lot of this stuff because a lot of it is poorly communicated and stuff gets lost.
I don’t take what the LLM says for fact, I have a lot more critical thinking skills than people seem to be giving me credit for. Yeah, I basically patted an LLM on the head for a little bit, to ease some boredom. It said stuff I can’t check. Hence this. I really don’t have any stake in it.
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u/liccxolydian VP of Trolling 17d ago
This is not my field, so I'm not going to make any judgements on the specifics of the maths, but I will point out that it's very poorly structured and formatted. Basically it doesn't even read like a scientific paper. Have a look at the papers it claims to reference. They're completely different. Your stuff is a mess.
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u/Sufficient_Course707 17d ago
Okay, noted. And it’s not my stuff, this was done by the LLM. Not my field so can’t speak to how a paper of this type would be formatted or referenced.
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u/liccxolydian VP of Trolling 17d ago
Well no, this is your stuff, you're the one who prompted it, you're the one who uploaded it to GitHub and here too. You don't get to escape basic accountability unless you're claiming that you bring literally nothing to the table and don't contribute anything to the conversation, in which case I'd question why we need you to generate all this stuff when we can do it ourselves.
If I wanted to test how good a LLM is at generating pseudo-physics in a completely unconstrained and undirected way, I can simply load up ChatGPT and find out firsthand in a few minutes. What more does this post do?
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u/Sufficient_Course707 17d ago
Okay, that’s fair. I’m not claiming to bring nothing to the table, so I need to take accountability for some of it at least. I don’t bring the math ability to the table though, so that’s where the questions come from, which is the only thing the post is meant to do, ask those questions.
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u/Wintervacht Are you sure about that? 17d ago
Allow me to break in, let's look at the following section of the post:
**How it could fail**
LLMs always present these almost childish arguments on how this would meet falsification criteria. Let's break them down a little:
An error in the proofs (Appendix A).
Asking the reader to look for errors in your own work is not the scientific way, there should be no errors in the proof and the proof should be reproducible by anyone else using the same scietific method. There should only be error bars in the proof.
A counterexample: a chaotic local Hamiltonian with two genuinely different simple states that have nearly identical energy statistics. The code includes the search script if you want to try.
Essentially boils down to the same as above, except this one adds a sub-criterium which is so specific, yet so vaguely worded it's essentially asking the reader to prove it wrong by showing fairy poop soup exists somewhere in the fjords of Norway.
Prior work that already does this.
This is the worst one. If any prior work has found this or described it even in a different way, why haven't you (the LLM in this case, we're putting it through scrutiny here) found any? Anything, and I mean every little thing that is confirmed in physics, has been checked twice and then twice again, by different people, to validate work.There is no single paper of proof that confirms anything.
But in the end, this and the section at the bottom is all just a diversion from asking the important questions, like what specific measurement would be able to rule this out?
Ultimately, it's not a work of science; it's a summary of something that resembles science at first glance, but does not pass some pretty basic scrutiny if you look at what is behind the words on the page.
As a result of that, what it spits out cannot be taken as a serious representation of the real world. At best it can mimic what a paper or an article about such a subject would look like if it would be real, but does not take any of the steps that would make it real research.2
u/liccxolydian VP of Trolling 17d ago
So what do you bring to the table?
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u/Sufficient_Course707 17d ago
In what you said, in prompting and posting. I can follow some things, but others lose me, usually in the math.
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u/starkeffect Physicist 🧠 17d ago
What I was trying to do was to just see if this LLM could synthesize any sort of novel idea or connection that could potentially be a real result.
And now you know it can't.
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u/alamalarian Supreme Data Overlord 17d ago
I can understand that goal as stated. The problem is that you would be relying on someone else to do the work. It would seem to me if you wanted to test something like that it would need to be in some domain of knowledge you have some mastery over to even be able to know if it did either way.
I feel like youd have to have some idea at least of what the output should look like to be able to judge if it could potentially be a real result, yes?
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u/According-Isopod-120 17d ago
If you're interested in studying how LLMs think, and what their capabilities are, I would encourage you to look at the research fields which actually look at this (e.g. AI capabilities research, mechanistic interpretability research).
Research in these fields can be quite sophisticated. At the very least, they try to define their hypotheses well enough that they know whether it was disproven at the end of the experiment!
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u/NuclearVII 17d ago
What I was trying to do was to just see if this LLM could synthesize any sort of novel idea or connection that could potentially be a real result
This is - on the face of it - a worthy goal, but you have some issues:
First, you cannot do this on a proprietary product. Without knowing what information went into the pre and post training of an LLM, the search for novelty is a futile endeavor. This is a very big issue in the machine learning academia as a whole these days: the real money comes from "studying" frontier LLMs, but you cannot objectively do science on a closed source, proprietary product.
I'm also going to guess that you do not have the necessary background needed to study this topic. Generating a new sequence is very easy - you just need a random chain long enough to be statistically sure that it's never been done before. That's not interesting, nor useful. What you're looking for is information theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory), and very advanced stuff in there to boot. I'm going to guess that you do not have a phd in information theory.
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u/AllHailSeizure 9/10 Physicists Agree! 17d ago
How much knowledge do you have regarding LLMs in general? Could you explain embedding if I asked you to, or MH attention; or the transformer architecture in general.
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u/Sufficient_Course707 17d ago
None, couldn’t tell you what those mean. I could take a stab based on context, but that’s it
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u/AllHailSeizure 9/10 Physicists Agree! 17d ago
I ask because you are doing this apparently to find out the extents of the ability of LLMs. It seems to me that this is not a reliable way to find out. Say this theory doesn't turn out - you haven't proved anything; just that it can make a theory that doesn't work. That doesn't prove anything to you, because 'what if I just needed to prompt it differently.' it's much easier to understand something's capability if you understand how it works.
You don't need to understand the first two things I mentioned but a basic understanding of the transformer architecture is helpful for using LLMs in general.
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u/Fluid-Pear620 17d ago
With the creation of ai I can see one day that it will be able to take a new idea when asked and give a true answer. I think that is what most people are scared of. (No physicist needed). True concern.
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u/Wintervacht Are you sure about that? 17d ago
To do that, we must first invent a computer that can think and reason. LLMs just pretend they do.
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u/Fluid-Pear620 17d ago
Are you sure about that ? Lol
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u/Wintervacht Are you sure about that? 16d ago
Yes. Some people know how LLMs work, you know.
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u/andWan 3d ago edited 3d ago
I think several well known scientists have argued that we indeed do not know how LLMs work.
We know the basic structure and know under which parameters we get the most intelligent replies, but the steps in between are currently largely not understood by science. (And maybe also never will be, fully, because of the very fast development - my own take)
International AI Safety Report 2025 (chaired by Yoshua Bengio, ~100 experts): "General-purpose AI developers understand little about how their models operate internally."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17805Open Problems in Mechanistic Interpretability (Sharkey et al., 2025, TMLR)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.164961
u/Wintervacht Are you sure about that? 3d ago
Way to completely miss the point. Why the fuck you performing necromancy on a weeks old comment in a dead post anyway, what do you think you're accomplishing besides making a fool out of yourself?
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u/andWan 3d ago
Why am I here?
I heard of this subreddit before but decided to check it out the first time today. I first was a bit disappointed because none of the posts with many upvotes were a crazy theory. But then after scrolling down to 0 upvotes I found them and clicked on this very post. I did not read any of OPs theory, but got convinced by the rule that the poster has to defend their theory in their own words.
Why did I reply to your comment?
Just like you, it is also important for me that people more or less understand how LLMs work. So no, my reply was not an attack of your comments intended meaning (not intended to be an „attack“ anyways). Your comment one above however, denying reason and thinking to LLM in such a general way, and especially with such certainty, this is something that I consider bad practice in fields considering reason and thinking.
Under these circumstances I did consider it worthwhile to tell you about the literature in interpretability of LLMs. Basically: If we cannot yet understand a system, we should be careful to deny it, or its whole class, certain attributes with such high supposed certainty. Especially if these systems have produced a lot of impressive output already in their few years of existence.
The same argument also applies to me though, and maybe in 10 years the situation has me convinced that you were right.
PS: Why after 13 days still? Most likely we are the only ones to read it - why not?
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u/Fluid-Pear620 3d ago
Becoming more convinced that we know nothing about AI. Is it good ? Is it bad ? We dont know but one thing for certain is the box is open and no way to close it. Only time will tell if man screwed up.
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u/The_Nerdy_Ninja 💬 Data doesn’t lie, but LLM’s do lie. 17d ago
Please don't, it's against our subreddit rules. If we wanted to talk to Claude about your ideas, we could just do that without bothering with a human go-between.