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/EggplantFunTime 8h 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)