Noether Physics MCP server

NOETHER

<!-- mcp-name: io.github.Ranshiv/noether-physics -->

A physics research assistant that shows its work.

Explains physics concepts with everyday analogies, dimension-checked equations, worked examples it recomputes, and simulations it actually runs. Answers questions from real arXiv papers with every sentence anchored to a verbatim span. Audits your own draft's bibliography for references that don't exist.

pip install noether-physics
noether explain decoherence

On 0.1.0 or 0.1.1? Upgrade. Those releases confirm fabricated references — the

specific failure this tool exists to prevent. See CHANGELOG.md.

Read this before you trust it

This is a research-integrity tool, so its limits matter more than its features.

The verification gate checks that a quote is real. It does not check that the quote supports the claim. A claim can contradict its own citation and still pass. Demonstrated during development: a claim asserting "the experiment detected a nonzero neutron EDM at five sigma" was accepted while citing a passage reporting dn = 0.0 ± 1.1 × 10⁻²⁶ e·cm — a null result. The quote was genuine, so the gate let it through. Closing that gap needs entailment checking, which needs a language model, and keeping the model outside the verifier is what makes the other guarantees meaningful. So every answer this tool emits ends by saying so, and you should read the quotes.**

The reference resolver is now measured in both directions. It resolves 86.5% of real references and was fooled by 0 of 8 deliberately fabricated ones. That second number did not exist until a labelled benchmark was built for it — and the first run of that benchmark caught the resolver confirming 80% of fabrications, some at 0.95 confidence. Three defects were found and fixed. Eight fabrications is still a small sample: 0% means "fooled by none of eight", not "cannot be fooled".

It is small. 58 papers in the test corpus, 8 concepts in the explanation library, quantum coverage limited to two-level systems and one cavity mode. No PDF fallback, so roughly 9% of quant-ph papers (measured: 5 of 55) cannot be ingested at all.

docs/DEFERRED.md is the full account — every gap, with the measurement behind it. It is the honest document; this README is the summary.

Why it exists

2026 audits found a 17% phantom-citation rate in AI-assisted survey papers — references resolving to no digital object — and roughly 146,900 AI-generated fake citations across 2.5M papers in 2025. arXiv now bans authors who submit hallucinated references.

Physics has a structural advantage nobody exploits: arXiv distributes the actual LaTeX source. Equations arrive with their \labels, citations with their \cite keys, sections with their real structure — read, not guessed. Tools in other fields OCR PDFs because their domains have no source. Physics does.

What it does

Explains. Curated prose, not generated — then machine-checked. Every equation is parsed and dimension-checked; every worked example is recomputed and compared against its stored answer, so a typo in the library fails CI rather than teaching you a wrong number.

noether explain decoherence          # analogy, maths, worked example, live simulation
noether concepts                     # what the library covers

Simulates. Six models — pendulum, damped/driven oscillator, projectile with drag (SciPy); Rabi, decoherence, Jaynes-Cummings (QuTiP). Every run halves the step size and reports the drift, and where a closed form exists the numerics are compared against it automatically.

noether simulate rabi --params "detuning=6.28" --bloch
noether models

Checks equations. Undeclared symbols return unknown, never a guess — h is Planck's constant or a height, T a period or a temperature. unknown is not a pass.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.