Would love to read any of the scientific papers that McCarthy supposedly edited diligently, should anyone happen to know of some. Very curious to see what they read like.

Not exactly a scientific paper, but he wrote this essay about language: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/

Here’s an economics article at least: https://hbr.org/1996/07/increasing-returns-and-the-new-world...

And here’s a short article about his contribution to that article: https://andrewbatson.com/2016/12/13/cormac-mccarthys-contrib...

Cormac McCarthy was deeply interested in physics and mathematics and was a trustee at the Santa Fe Institute, which has a heritage connected with Los Alamos National Laboratory. I don't know a lot about this side of him, only reading about it after reading his last two novels which do show a mastery of physics that really seemed to mirror his master of bridles and guns and culture in the old west. I don't remember reading that he had actually published any of this himself but he was spoken of as intensely curious about physics.