Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rise of deep learning challenges the longstanding scientific ideal of insight - the human capacity to understand phenomena by uncovering underlying mechanisms. In many modern applications, accurate predictions no longer require interpretable models, prompting debate about whether explainability is a realistic or even meaningful goal. From our perspective in physics, we examine this tension through a concrete case study: a physics-informed neural network (PINN) trained on a rarefied gas dynamics problem governed by the Boltzmann equation. Despite the system's clear structure and well-understood governing laws, the trained network's weights resemble Gaussian-distributed random matrices, with no evident trace of the physical principles involved. This suggests that deep learning and traditional simulation may follow distinct cognitive paths to the same outcome - one grounded in mechanistic insight, the other in statistical interpolation. Our findings raise critical questions about the limits of explainable AI and whether interpretability can - or should-remain a universal standard in artificial reasoning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".