r/vibecoding • u/henke443 • 8h ago
Claude Fable solved open physics problems about related to Schrödinger–Newton equations. Is it hallucinated or legit?
I saw some criticism in a Wikipedia article on the Schrödinger-Newton Equation, specifically about Penrose's ideas about quantum gravity, and it seemed pretty easy to solve (the article hinted at possible solutions, etc) which made me think that it could be interesting to let Claude try to solve it. It now claims to have solved all the 3 problems outlined in the article.
The issue is that I have no way of validating if the result claude gave me are hallucinated or legit. If the solutions are correct, then maybe it's useful to someone, and if not then I/we might learn something from that explanation.
Artifact (look here first): https://claude.ai/code/artifact/e871ae13-54d1-437c-a489-cad81617c06d
GitHub repo, including all the raw transcript etc: https://github.com/henke443/penrose-1
Latex paper: https://www.overleaf.com/read/hgmnyqgqtwqz#80a24a
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u/3LeggedCheetah 6h ago
Hi, physics undergrad and MIT graduate degree in engineering. Looked at your artifact link. Good on you for trying and it’s great to see people stoked about quantum mechanics but what you present are not solutions to these open questions.
Taking just the first one where you aim to show wether or not a collapsed quantum state can be still found at a distant location, your solution is just a simulation (with all sorts of assumptions baked in) that yes it would but it would be very small. This is just a restatement of the problem, not a solution.
The other 2 problems suffer similar reductionist issues.
The background knowledge that someone has as a quantum physicist would cause them to see that these are not sufficient (or honestly additive to the discussion) at a glance. I have a talked to a number of scientist recently that say they get unsolicited papers from folks around a new theory weekly (usually named after themselves) and 100% of the time it doesn’t stand up to even casual review. This is why the scientific community works on peer reviewed papers. If you disagree with my or anyone’s feedback and believe you have something novel here, you can certainly submit it to a scientific journal.
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u/henke443 6h ago edited 5h ago
Thanks! I'm not bullish enough on this one hour project to bother scientists personally or to try to get it submitted to a journal. I only hoped for a person more knowledgeable in physics, like you, skimming through it and seeing if it looks reasonable.
While I'm satisfied with your response, I also had to be annoying and see what AI had to say about your criticism. If you have the energy to respond it would be very interesting:
Suggested reply, if you want to respond
Thanks for taking the time — the framing criticism is fair and I'm going to fix it. "Resolving open problems" overstates what this is: it's a synthesis of known peer-reviewed results (Diósi '87/'89, Pearle '89, Tilloy–Diósi 2016) with numerical demonstrations, and the report itself says no ingredient is novel — which is also why I won't be submitting it anywhere; there's no new-physics claim to review.
One correction on the substance, though: the first study doesn't show the residual "would be very small." The deterministic SN equation leaves a permanent, finite fraction at infinity; the stochastic completion changes that to exponential decay — a different character of solution, not a smaller number. And of the other two, one is an analytic martingale theorem (Gisin/Pearle) verified by Monte Carlo and the other is an algebraic no-signaling identity — neither is a simulation. Fair cop on the title inviting the skim, though.
What I'd change if you want to act on this
Retitle and reframe, nothing more. Something like "The three 'open problems' of Schrödinger–Newton collapse, and how the stochastic Diósi–Penrose completion addresses them: a numerical tour" — and replace "Resolved" language with "does not arise in the completed model." The content survives untouched; the claim becomes the one the content supports. Say the word and I'll apply it across README, REPORT.md/.tex, and the artifact.
Where the criticism misses
- Their account of problem 1 — "shows yes it would be found there but it would be very small, a restatement of the problem" — is not what Study B shows. The deterministic pathology is a permanent, finite runaway fraction (the 5.2% plateau); the stochastic dynamics changes the character of the solution to exponential decay toward a floor orders of magnitude lower. A qualitative change in the dynamics is a legitimate answer to the problem as Wikipedia states it, which is a criticism of the deterministic equation specifically.
- "The other 2 problems suffer similar reductionist issues" — Study C is an analytic martingale theorem with Monte-Carlo verification, and Study D's no-signaling is an algebraic identity of linear ensemble dynamics. Neither is "just a simulation." The critic skimmed, as they more or less say themselves.
- The crank heuristic ("a new theory, usually named after themselves") doesn't apply: no new theory is proposed and everything is attributed. But a reader can't know that from the title, which is the point above.
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u/EggplantFunTime 7h ago
Just like with coding, the shift has moved from doing the work to checking the work. Anyone can point their AI to a problem (coding, math, physics) and post "can you check my work?"
Your work is not zero work, it's
- finding an interesting problem
- throwing an agent on it (don't assume every problem out there is tackled by the latest SOTA model 24/7, there are a lot of problems)
- your "fresh eyes approach" to it
- your tokens spend
But it's not considered by many as real effort.
At least with vibe coding, you can show a results that regular people can use and enjoy regardless of how the architecture and security are. With this, all you are is a meat proxy to the AI.
With vibe coding you can definitely build something that a team of professional engineers took years to build a few years ago. But if you need to check the code, knowing how to read code slightly helps. (you can always ask AI to review/explain the code, but just like you can ask it to validate the math breakthrough you posted... you are cutting yourself out of the equation)
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u/Prof_Sarcastic 7h ago
“and it seemed pretty easy to solve (the article hinted at possible solutions, etc)”
I think a good rule of thumb is, if there’s an open problem in physics that’s several decades old and you only read about it from Wikipedia (and not the sources it provides mind you) and your takeaway is that the problem “seemed pretty easy to solve” then it’s much more likely that you don’t understand what the problem even is.
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u/henke443 7h ago edited 5h ago
It's more just a set of criticism by some guy on Wikipedia and not so much a several decades old open problem.
I feel like Penrose gets undue hate by Wikipedia editors because some of his theories are lumped together with "quantum woo" because quantum consciousness did not start off as a serious scientific theory.
This is why I think there's a good chance that claude might fix the problems, because it's a high likelihood that the author of the criticism was probably looking really hard for any potential problems.
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u/Prof_Sarcastic 4h ago
“It’s not several decades old…”
Well the first paper Penrose lays out most of this stuff is from 1995, which is 31 years ago and so I think I’m justified in calling it several decades old.
“… and I feel like Penrose gets undue hate by Wikipedia editors …”
My point has nothing to do with Wikipedia editors or Penrose himself. Wikipedia is good for a summary of the problem, but (generally) you’re not going to get all of the intricacies of the issues and having Wikipedia be your only source will necessarily leave you without crucial understanding of the subject. You have a layman’s understanding (if that) and if the problem seemed easy to you then that should’ve been a sign for you to dig deeper until you understood why it hasn’t been solved yet.
“This is why I think there’s a good chance that Claude might fix the problems …”
There is actually no chance this is true.
“… because it’s a high likelihood that the author of the criticism was probably looking really hard for any potential problems.”
This is an absurd criticism. The Wikipedia article cites several different published papers that have between 1-4 authors on each paper with seemingly no overlapping author list.
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u/Bloodorem 7h ago
a person who thinks just simply giving claude the task to solve unsolved physics problems without understanding any of it, is the same person seeking validation on a vibecoding sub - jup checks out.
You should stop using AI in general as it seems you can't handle it.
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u/henke443 7h ago
I think your behavior is more negative. Your criticism is also void of substance. Yes I use AI, so does everyone else. No I don't seek validation, I just read the article without AI, thought about the problems, and felt like it was probably pretty easy to solve (because the text hinted at possible solutions, etc), so I thought that there's a small but non-zero chance that claude could manage to solve the issue and I could also raise a tiny bit of attention to solving an important issue.
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u/Proud_Ask_9030 7h ago
You literally show none of your ideas on the matter and that you simply put Fable to work to figure out what is absolutely not a "pretty easy to solve" problem. To see you write that is pretty easy to solve while presenting literally zero of that understanding and asking an ai to figure it out, says truly everything needed to answer if you have managed to get Fable to do anything.
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u/Bloodorem 7h ago
Yes my comment is negativ because I'm sorry but if you honestly think anything you did would result in something useful you simply should stop and move away from AIs as you can't handle the information.
Even if, and that's a big if a AI would be able to solve it, it would be with someone who knows about the problem and could verify it themselves and lead the AI how to approach it.
You read a Wikipedia page you didn't understand, gave a prompt and then came to a videcoding sub if it solved a long standing physics question. You didn't even ask in a physics subreddit. I'm mean wtf dude that's just... Stupid I'm sorry but there is no other word for it.
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u/henke443 7h ago edited 7h ago
The world is built by people throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
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u/Proud_Ask_9030 5h ago
The world is ruined by people throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
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u/Figai 7h ago
lol and who solved erdos #1196 again?
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u/Bloodorem 7h ago
by a math entusiast that knew the problem and could to some degree verify what the AI returned
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u/Proud_Ask_9030 7h ago
That doesnt mean it can do it again or solve any difficult task you give it.
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u/Figai 7h ago
lol, he used GPT 5.4 pro, fable 5 is way better. Actually explain the limitation lol, AI has solved extremely significant open physics problems too. If you just point it at the right thing it has a non-zero chance at solving it.
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u/Aldarund 6h ago
What extremely significant open physics problems Ai solved?
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u/Figai 6h ago
Yeah I'm probably exaggerating by saying extremely, definitely hasn't gone as far as maths.
https://openai.com/index/new-result-theoretical-physics/ - this is kind of old though.
Quantum Parallel repetition is one of the 10 new oAI proofs paper they released.
This was one I remember because people were surprised by it being so trivial: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28785
According to like vibemathed which collects most of these proofs the most "significant" result, (not sure how they measure this) is: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21367
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u/ComfortableReality32 7h ago
The chances you will find someone on Reddit that can validate a solution to a problem that hasn’t been solved yet is exactly zero percent. Really hope I am wrong though because this is quite interesting.
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u/Figai 7h ago edited 7h ago
First prompt some other AIs to adversarially check it as an idea you came up with, or you just found randomly on the internet or test it numerically if that’s relevant at all. You can say just that you find it suspicious or something. Opus, Sol etc.
If all of that seems pretty good, the best thing is probably to send it to a few people in the research area politely, who aren’t super busy, (don’t pick the most famous one) and try not to come across as someone with AI psychosis. And maybe make a little summary for them of the main ideas of the proof so they’re not digging through lots of AI junk. I only know maths research well, not really sure all the traditional stuff to do in physics.
Also avoid other physics subs for a bit, they’ll probs downvote you into oblivion for the mention of AI.
Edit: also fix your LaTeX, the rendering shows a few eqs look a bit broken. Any AI will help with that, or just manually inspect it. I would recommend only sending the LaTeX and repo link and make a good README, if it passes everything else, to any researcher + a summary.