Harvard particle physicist Matthew Schwartz drops 36 papers authored with Claude

phoghed

A very high number of Redditors think they know more/better than a Harvard professor and dismiss him out of hand. May someone grant us all a measure of their confidence.

LadyCailin

Can you just not use Reddit at all anymore without the app?

program_whiz

Is this actually good? Seems like they created a new tool that allows LLM to do a lot of numerical analysis. The papers seem somewhat legit? https://bootloops.ai/papers.html I suppose if this framework allows physics and other sciences to rapidly progress (e.g. publish more findings), that is good? It destroys a certain model we had, that science should be arduous and require a genius many years of work to uncover something, but if these papers truly add knowledge via this new tool, then this is for the good. Not sure implications for researchers, but from the public perspective, now we have 36 new papers that increase our knowledge. But maybe an expert can weigh in, the papers might be slop?

bananaflag

If AI is so good at research then maybe instead of people researching comparatively easy problems which only get you a publication, they will research problems that matter. (I'm not dismissing here problems just because they are "easy" or "not practical", I am sure that there are a ton of worthwile ones among those, I am dismissing just those which are artificial and only researched out of publication incentives.)

lp4v4n

I once read the criticism that science is already moving too fast and that wrong results get published and accepted as true because nobody reaps any laurels for verifying or reproducing results, even if that's an indispensable part of the scientific method. Now in the age of AI this problem will be heavily accentuated. Who's going to review the quality and validity of dozens and dozens of papers being generated by a researcher who used to publish sporadically? It's not hard to see science going through a "slop crisis" in the next few years, in the same way that now projects are getting inundated with PRs.

kps

Did he drop them because they were hallucinated, or did he millennial-drop them? I still can't tell.

dataengineer56

"drops" is unclear here - it could mean either "publishes" or "retracts"

frereubu

Reminds me of this - https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/27/258/ - which I think was on HN at some point in the last week. The fact that (according to another comment here) these papers were in areas outside his specialism, and therefore things he doesn't have the domain knowledge to critique, makes me think we're going to see more of this special kind of madness that seems to have some kind of grandiosity at its heart. It really does feel like some people are falling hard for plausibility rather than rigour. Edit: the papers do seem to have other names on them, and he says that all papers "were reviewed by humans for accuracy", but I still think there's a very serious risk of people being gulled into okaying something that's plausible rather than rigorously checking everything. There's enough human-generated slop in science already!

seydor

Anus Mirabilis

glimshe

Well, he sure met his papper publishing quota for the year.

juancn

If the guy knows his shit, Claude acts as a cadre of cheap, fast, undergrads.

irickt

Schwartz explains what he did in an Anthropic post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49933386

ChrisArchitect

More discussion on the related Anthropic post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49933386