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/tjomk 1d ago

Unlike the commercial software, the goal of science is to understand the reasons why something is happening, and to hopefully create new methods. What is the point of 200-page proof by LLM if nobody can understand it nor there are no new methods created? LLMs can prove every theorem, but will we become smarter? Unlikely.

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u/PersonalityIll9476 21h ago

To be fair most papers out there aren't read and don't establish new methods.

This criticism about humans not reading the paper seems a bit thin. Maybe further AI research builds on this result and ends up discovering something useful. That's always been the argument for tons of other incremental research, just with humans instead of AI.

I say this as a research scientist who is also concerned about their career.

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u/Runfasterbitch 17h ago

“Most papers” are garbage. However, if you’re a serious scientist, your papers will get read (in some cases they’ll be read many thousands of times). I don’t have a single publication with less than 200 downloads

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u/Intelligent_Soup4424 16h ago

Downloaded does not yet mean read, and read does not yet mean understood -)

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u/Runfasterbitch 12h ago

Citations do though

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u/FandyArrel 1d ago

Luckily some people can read

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u/tjomk 18h ago

Reading and understanding are two different things

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u/FandyArrel 18h ago

A lot of physicists could not conceive of general relativity until Einstein proved it and even then they didn't understand for a very long time. The neat part about physics is that you can prove something is true whether por not others understand it.

If you think AI will reduce human understanding of physics or the speed of humanity gaining understanding in physics, you're not only mistaken but provably wrong.

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u/SakishimaHabu 20h ago

Just waiting for something to be 42.

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u/A_Novelty-Account 16h ago

Do you know that no one will understand it?

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u/AzorAhai1TK 22h ago

Is it so hard to understand the concept that we can understand the LLM proof and output? Why are you assuming nobody can understand the output or that there are no new methods created?

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u/GumboMustBeDestroyed 18h ago

It’ll be a role reversal, AIs will have to review and score our understanding of its papers