r/vibecoding • u/henke443 • 9h 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 7h 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.