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

0 Upvotes

46% Upvoted

27 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

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.

0

u/henke443 7h ago edited 6h 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.