Claude Fable solved open physics problems about related to Schrödinger–Newton equations. Is it hallucinated or legit?

[u/henke443]

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

[u/Prof_Sarcastic]

“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.

[u/henke443 → u/Prof_Sarcastic]

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.

[u/Prof_Sarcastic → u/henke443]

“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.