Historian Benjamin Breen uses Opus 5.5 to tie a Newton alchemical anagram to Samuel Hartlib, and argues AI labs should fund historians

Res Obscura (Benjamin Breen) / Hacker News (139pts, 31 comments)·low signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

Breen reports that Opus 5.5 found parallel anagrams for 'Hungarian vitriol' in Isaac Newton's and Samuel Hartlib's papers, which suggests Newton drew on Hartlib's manuscript. He also reports GPT-6 Astra decrypting a July 1941 German military message and parsing John Dee's Liber Loagaeth. He asks labs to digitize and release manuscripts, give historians free API access, and set up 'millennium problems' for historical scholarship. These are his own claims and no one has independently verified them yet.