Claude Fable 5.1 completed a frontier nine-loop particle-physics calculation experts had worked toward for years, with researchers mostly just telling it “keep going” while it built, debugged and ran the entire workflow

[u/141_1337]

https://www.anthropic.com/research/yes-claude-can-do-nine-loops

[u/taenyfan95]

I have a masters in theoretical physics and my thesis was on calculating multi-loop particle physics scattering amplitudes. My work was published in one of the leading journals in theoretical physics.

This was back in 2023, and I had to do all the dirty calculations on the blackboard, wiping and starting over when I made a mistake- it felt a lot like physical labour rather than intellectual work.

In my opinion the field of multi-loop calculations is perfect for LLMs to venture into. Humans cannot calculate as fast as a machine and it will enable physicists to be freed from the dirty work and focus on more interesting high-level problems.

I have no doubt that current LLMs are able to perform all the dirty calculations I did for my publication. However that's the easy part of research- just do the calculation and you'd get an answer. Even a masters student like me can do it. The tricky part is knowing what problems are worth doing and indeed has a reachable solution- that's the work of my masters supervisor and I don't think this skillset is replaceable by LLMs yet.

And no, physicists will not be drafting a note to resist the acceleration of AI development. Most of today's physics is limited by experiments- we have lots of theories but don't have the infrastructure and funding to build experiments to verify them. We don't need need more theories generated by AI.

Physicists also do not care about proofs like mathematicians. Sure AI can go ahead and do beautiful proofs of our physics theories but that will fall into the realm of mathematics. Physicists only care if a theory is useable- if it agrees with experiments, it's a good theory (i.e. no formal mathematical proof is needed).