Vibe physics: The AI grad student

Summary

Science Mar 23, 2026 Can AI do theoretical physics? In this guest post, professor of physics Matthew Schwartz decided to find out by supervising Claude through a real research calculation, start to finish, without ever touching a file himself. His account of what happened is below. - I guided Claude Opus 4.5 through a real theoretical physics calculation, encapsulating the complexity of code and computations behind text prompts. - The result was a technically rigorous, impactful high-energy theoretical physics paper in two weeks instead of the usual year. - Over 110 separate drafts, 36M tokens, and 40+ hours of local CPU compute, Claude proved fast, indefatigable, and eager to please. - Claude is impressively capable, but also sloppy enough that I found domain expertise essential for evaluating its accuracy. - AI is not doing end-to-end science yet. But this project proves that I could create a set of prompts that can get Claude to do frontier science. This wasn’t true three months ago. - This may be the most important paper I’ve ever written—not for the physics, but for the method. There is no going back. I’m Matthew Schwartz, a professor of physics at Harvard and a principal investigator in the NSF Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI). My area of expertise is quantum field theory, which asks what matter is, how particles interact, and why the Universe has the rules it does. One might say I wrote the book on the subject. I’ve been working with modern machine learning tools for over a decade. My first modern ML paper, from 2016, was an early application of deep learning to particle physics. In a Nature Reviews Physics piece in 2022, I compared the timescale of AI and human evolution, arguing that transferring understanding between biological and artificial intelligence would become a fundamental challenge. Since then, I’ve been trying to push AI towards more symbolic work (manipulating mathematical expressions rather than numerical data) and the core questions in theoretical physics. There has been a lot of recent hype about AI scientists doing end-to-end research autonomously. In August 2024, Sakana AI released their AI Scientist, a system designed to automate the entire research lifecycle—from…