Looks Like it is Happening

The post cried “paper tsunami!” after late‑2025/early‑2026 submissions to arXiv, the big public preprint server for scientists, seemed to double—until an update revealed the spike was partly a counting glitch. Using original submission dates, the numbers are up, but the hep‑th (theoretical high‑energy physics) apocalypse isn’t here yet. Still, Sabine Hossenfelder’s gloomy “End of Theory” vibe looms: if AI can crank out average papers faster than grad students, who needs grad students?

Cue comment chaos. One camp shrugs that the field was already drowning in meh: “amazing how terrible a lot of papers are” says sealeck, blaming the pressure to publish. Another camp points to academia’s velvet rope. “Peer review has never really been blind,” warns wmf, predicting gatekeepers—aka PIs (grant‑holding professors)—will block “outsiders,” human or AI. Then comes sixtyj’s kitchen‑table realism—“You can’t put spilled milk back to bottle”—plus a cheeky fix: add a checkbox, “I wrote this personally,” and ban violators. Meanwhile mclau153 strolls in with the perfect meme: “What is happening?” And selridge delivers the nuclear hot take: the system was unsustainable anyway, so the AI shock might be good, forcing a reset.

In short: the counts aren’t apocalypse numbers, but the comments absolutely are, and the mood is “ArXiv meets AI‑xiv” chaos.