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Physicist says Claude Opus 5.5 redid a year of PhD quantum-gravity math in 10 hours — and caught a sign error
First seen on X 8 hours ago@EmreOnurKahya ♥ 5644 views
Turkish physicist Emre Onur Kahya says Claude Opus 5.5 re-derived the quantum gravity calculation from his PhD thesis, work that took him a year and roughly 500 pages of hand calculations, in 10 hours.
"Opus 5.5 did it in 10 hours, including the article and GitHub repo. And it even found the errors," Kahya wrote on X on Oct 18. "Luckily, the result didn't change." The post passed 600 likes.
According to his repo, Claude worked through a published one-loop quantum gravity calculation step by step: 18 tasks, 183 pages of derivations and 38 reproducible checks. It found a sign error and a missing term; the physical conclusion survived.
Kahya said recent AI wins in physics were problems "an expert in the field could solve in 2-3 days," while this was quantum field theory in curved spacetime. "It will no longer be enough to just have technical skills," he wrote, adding that theory will need "Oppenheimer-style people" who think conceptually and put AI's technical skills to work.
“A physicist's confession: I spent a year of my life and ~500 pages of hand calculations for quantum gravity in my PhD thesis, but Opus 5.5 did it in 10 hours, including…”
