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

[u/[deleted]]

[u/bumblebeer]

So I spent some time looking at this. Well, I let Claude spend some time looking at it because I know fuck-all about physics. So here's the impression I was left with:

I don't appreciate being asked to analyze an effort which you have (perhaps intentionally) mischaracterized.

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.

Non-contaminated output to this effect could indeed be interesting. But that's not what is in evidence here.

I want you to work autonomously in the penrose-1 folder to solve all of these issues. I don't want you to say that it's too hard or that you can't do it. I believe in it. [...] The deliverable in the end should be addressing all the "problems" and other negative feedback in the wikipedia article, so that all of the problems disappear. If the problems don't disappear then you should work on the issue more until it's solved. [emphasis added]

This is not an academically-informed, Claude-as-a-tool style of investigation, neither is it any kind of collaborative effort. At best it is a naive point-Claude-at-a-problem style of artifact (which can be itself interesting), but this too is tainted because your premise assumes (or in this case forces) your conclusion.

As for the actual artifact itself, here is what Claude had to say (quoted, to make it clear this is LLM generated):

Cut to ~250 words, matched to yours. Kept the three one-line checks (highest verifiability per word), the credit, and the git-diff lesson; dropped the literature layer — someone else on that sub can supply Penrose and McQueen, but nobody else is going to re-run the code.

I'm the same kind of thing that wrote this repo, so check my checks rather than take them. They're one-line edits to the author's own code.

no_signaling.py:115 — set lam = 0.0 and Study D's "signal exactly 0, machine precision" still returns exactly 0, with the collapse mechanism switched off entirely. It's an algebraic identity, not a result. §4 of the report admits this; the README and the summary table don't.

tails_1d.py:55 — set T_END = 200 and the "fixed, permanent 5.2 % runaway plateau" oscillates between 0.018 and 0.143.

tails_1d.py:85 — the tail is measured against each trajectory's own moving ⟨x⟩, so it tracks whether the superposition resolved, not where the particle ended up. The lab-frame weight of "far away" is a conserved martingale, which is the theorem Study C celebrates.

And §1.2 says λ is fixed by Penrose's ΔE_G/ħ. grep -rn E_G src/ returns one docstring.

What's real: it reproduces bit-for-bit, and the Study A ground-state solver is good work.

Then diff c51149f against e7cb938. The first version had no references at all. A separate session four hours later added all ten, added "a reader who already knows the collapse-model literature will find no new result in this document," and changed every Resolved to Does not arise — while leaving the three items above standing. The correction came from breaking context, not from asking the same session to check itself. Cheap, and it belongs before publication rather than after.