2026-10-02 / Signal #2
A Harvard physicist let Claude hunt “Claude-shaped” problems — 36 manuscripts in 18 fields
“He stopped asking Claude to be a physicist. He asked it to find problems that were Claude-shaped. Three months later: 36 manuscripts, 18 fields.”
The Story
Schwartz describes stopping the fight to make Claude do his physics and instead letting it find problems it is actually good at — then following those problems into geology, biology, economics, and linguistics. He says the setup produced 36 manuscripts across 18 fields with 19 coauthors in three months, out of roughly 400 candidate problems, using a coordination toolkit he calls BootLoops.
Why It Matters
Science stops being a person with a specialty and becomes a person supervising a factory of almost-papers. The identity shock is not “AI wrote a physics paper” (already told). It’s a named professor treating fields he does not know as Claude-shaped hunting grounds.
Evidence
Anthropic guest post by Harvard physicist Matthew Schwartz, dated Oct 1. Separate from the earlier “vibe physics” single-paper experiment.
Sources
Daily scan: 2026-10-02