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The goal of academic research is to create understanding, not papers. If we outsource all research to LLMs, then we are only producing the latter.

Matter in neutron stars is compressed together by the enormous gravity. Once set free on your floor, this material would no longer be held together and will start expanding at close to the speed of light. The resulting explosion will probably obliterate the entire continent. A crude way to estimate it is to take into account the fact that the gravitational binding energy of matter at the surface of a neutron star is about 10% of the rest mass energy of the material, so once that material is removed it will liberate as much energy (If I got the numbers right, you get an explosion energy of 0.1 m c^2 ~ 10^13 megatons).

I think this is, at least in part, specific to the US/Western tradition. US physics curriculum is built to get people up to speed with quantum physics ASAP, because this is the core of most physics research in US physics departments. If you look at Landau-Lifshitz's Theoretical Physics curriculum, you will find plenty of classical physics: from fluid dynamics, to elasticity, and plasma physics. For example, Landau-Lifshitz Vol. 6 is an excellent introduction to Navier-Stokes equations and their applications.

RAS used to have all articles available to everyone for free after 1 year (immediately if one wanted to pay for open access). I thought this was a reasonable compromise. The new policy will damage early career researchers and groups at less established institutions that will not be able to publish their own research. I have published a number of papers on MNRAS, but now I will move to other journals. In principle, I can charge the publication costs to my NSF grant, in practice that means I would not be able to send my students to conferences, because research support funding is very stretched (no more than few thousand dollars per year per student). This would damage their career prospects. Theory grants are already very small and adding several thousand dollars extra to the budget can make the difference between the grant being awarded or rejected (it should not be, but this is how it works). Moreover, even at R1 institutions, a lot of theory research is actually not funded by federal grants.

Journals were created to support the scientific community and provide a platform for scientists to discuss. Charging exorbitant publication fees damages the very mission of these journals.

This is interesting, but all of the links I tried were broken or led to broken pages. Unfortunately, with the widespread use of LMSs a lot of useful material is now behind University firewalls.

Most of the federal grants I am aware of have duration of 3+ year (the typical duration of a PhD after having completed the course work).

I would also recommend "The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time" by Hawking and Ellis. It uses some advanced mathematics and some prior knowledge of GR, at least at the level of Schutz or Carroll, is needed, but it is a wonderful book to learn about the global structure of spacetimes with black holes, singularity theorems and so on.

For what it means, I know some of the people on that list and I can say that they are real scientists.

It is in the first page, but the link points to the FAQ instead.