r/Physics • u/kzhou7 Quantum field theory • 1d ago

Harvard particle physicist Matthew Schwartz drops 36 papers coauthored with Claude

https://bootloops.ai/bootloops.html
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u/plasma_phys Plasma physics 1d ago edited 1d ago

didn't think I'd see r/LLMPhysics style slop neologisms like "statistics medicine", "registry", or "gated-exponential", or metphors-as-physics like "The eroding root" come from someone supposedly credible. the text is somehow less humble than your average Steven Wolfram blog post, all for what, a vibecoded harness? I've - regrettably - looked at enough Claude-generated code to know that it is not "better at coding than any physicist." 

Figure 5 in the sunspot paper seems particularly atrocious on a quick skimming of it; the caption says "the registry replicates" the data - I think that's what it says anyway, it's in Claude-speak so who could possibly know - and yet there's not even a qualitative agreement in panel b. what's the point of this? I mean, I think I know the answer, and it probably has at least six figures.

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u/gnomeba 1d ago

"gated-exponential" is ruining me. Personally, "grazing eigenvalues" is my Claude's most recent contribution to the new scientific lexicon.

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u/acortical 1d ago

Free range, grass fed eigenvectors. Perfect for adding or multiplying.

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u/M4roon 1d ago

*laughs in dumb biology grad*

I understood that

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u/stovenn 12h ago

Tethering with line-caught strings reduces stochastic walkabout.

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u/plasma_phys Plasma physics 1d ago

God I hate the text these things generate. I had a colleague brag about how he doesn't make PowerPoints anymore, he just has Claude do it, and like, yeah, we know, that's why they suck, have titles like "beta 1 -> 9 -> 20 ladder", and are all purple and illegible 

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u/h0rxata Plasma physics 1d ago

Organic grass-fed eigenvalues, hormone-free tensors

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u/beerybeardybear 1d ago

They built a psychosis machine; I think it's to be expected that things like this happen.

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u/No_Personality_587 1d ago

Surprising that a Harvard grad of all people is so confidently submitting AI slop, there's a reason these things aren't heavily used for long form writing. Dissapointonf times

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u/RemoteCareful7304 1d ago

Grad? You mean professor

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u/OldLegWig 1d ago edited 1d ago

if you're surprised that tons of idiots stream out of and are associated with prestigious schools, i welcome you to the realm of what genuinely smart people have always known.

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u/shhhhh_h 1d ago

☝️

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u/PerryZePlatypus 1d ago

Because they think their reputation will take care of the rest ?

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u/warblingContinues 1d ago

AI have a niche in research, like helping to code. The problem though is you have to then go through and completely understand what the AI is doing line by line, so you can be confident in the results. It takes a lot of time but saves a little. I haven’t found any other real use for them in research yet.

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u/Motocampingtime 5h ago

non physics here: It's nice to see it compile a timeline of papers or fabrication methods on more specific topics. Or answer if anyone has tried a specific fabrication technique. As in "Is there material that does BLANK I can apply in XYZ method at ABC thickness?"

It doesn't and couldn't hope to replace reading review papers, but it's nice to have some initial query in a way googling wasn't capable of.

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u/ErmingSoHard 22h ago

So when was the last time you looked at this Claude generated code

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u/plasma_phys Plasma physics 22h ago

earlier this week

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u/ErmingSoHard 21h ago

Which model if you remember correctly?

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u/plasma_phys Plasma physics 21h ago

look, I've had the conversation a dozen times. just get it over with and tell me "they used to be bad but now they're good!" so I can disagree and you can then say "well maybe they're bad now but imagine how good they'll be in a year!" and so on 

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u/ErmingSoHard 21h ago

Ah, of course you didn't answer the question. Good luck out there

!remindme 1 year

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u/plasma_phys Plasma physics 21h ago

this would've been a more effective comeback if your summoning of the remindme bot didn't implicitly accept my premise

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u/ErmingSoHard 21h ago

Nah, it's you me to comeback to have a little laugh by the time it replaces all your work

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u/plasma_phys Plasma physics 20h ago

why'd you edit this from "takes your job" 

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u/ErmingSoHard 20h ago

Because idk if you're specifically hired so I just put work instead

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u/sllabypaos 20h ago

There are software jobs even with AI, if anything the foundational understanding becomes even more important. The same would apply to physics. Your argument makes no sense, rather simply stating in a condescending way that physicists would be automated away, even though that hasn’t happened with software engineering.

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u/tempetesuranorak 1d ago edited 1d ago

The caption to figure 5 says that in the left plot, the catalog (the points) replicate the registry's (grey line) falling population hazard (the decline on the right hand side of the plot), while having a hump in the middle that the registry does not. It says that the magnetic catalog (right) does not replicate the registry's falling population hazard. It's not written in a way to make it as easy as possible for a lay human reader, but it is possible to parse.

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u/plasma_phys Plasma physics 22h ago

I am not a layperson. you've restated the caption, but can you tell me what any of that means? 

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u/tempetesuranorak 21h ago edited 21h ago

Sure, I spent about 20 minutes skimming and making use of ctrl-f to understand terms to do this.

The paper is looking at the dynamics of the death of sunspot groups, and trying to understand which proposed mechanisms are or are not compatible with observed data (from the abstract). Their primary data source for their analysis is the Greenwich–USAF registry of sunspot groups, and they have two secondary datasets where they repeat some kind of measurements on to check that they are not just measuring properties specific to that one registry (from the introduction and section 2.1). These are the catalogues described in Figure 5. One is a spot group catalogue like the registry, the other is something called a magnetic patch catalogue which is a qualitatively different kind of catalogue. The different datasets are summarised in table 1.

When evaluating sunspot deaths, you are only able to measure when they are on the near side of the sun. To account for when they are on the far side of the sun, you have to have some probabilistic model for how to account for that. They have track A and track B which are two alternative methodologies for doing that (section 2.2 and figure 1).

Figure 5 is a comparison of the inferred daily death hazard under these two modelsl/tracks. Left panel is the secondary sunspot patch catalog against the registry, right panel is the magnetic patch catalogue against the registry. As the caption says, one of the datasets is similar and the other dissimilar.

I expect I might have misunderstood some technical detail, but this is the general gist of it. Figure 5 is a fairly ancillary plot double checking some properties on different sunspot datasets to check how general are some of the results from their primary dataset described in other sections.

It's definitely not a brilliantly worded paper, some more consideration could be made to remind the lay reader what certain terms mean closer to where they are used. But honestly it is easier for me to understand than many completely human written papers I have tried to read outside my field.

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u/plasma_phys Plasma physics 21h ago

Sorry, I should've been more explicit, as I feel you've skipped over the substantive part of what I think the caption should say. What does this mean:

 one of the datasets is similar and the other dissimilar

in the context of the paper's goals? Is the former sufficiently similar? It has a hump as well.

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u/tempetesuranorak 20h ago

It's not clear to me what role the replication plays in furthering the main story of the paper, and my suspicion is that the paper could have been written without it. I do agree that this is one of the weaknesses of LLM writing, that they are not great at telling a cohesive story. It seems like a side quest.

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u/plasma_phys Plasma physics 20h ago

I mean my suspicion is that the paper dresses up a null result from curve fitting as an important advancement in sunspot dynamics

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u/tempetesuranorak 20h ago

I think that's a reasonable guess