“A new Columbia University AI program observed physical phenomena and uncovered relevant variables—a necessary precursor to any physics theory. But the variables it discovered were unexpected.”
“Energy, Mass, Velocity. These three variables make up Einstein’s iconic equation E=MC2. But how did Albert Einstein know about these concepts in the first place? Before understanding physics you need to identify relevant variables. Not even Einstein could discover relativity without the concepts of energy, mass, and velocity. But can variables like these be discovered automatically? Doing so would greatly accelerate scientific discovery.”
“This is the question that Columbia Engineering researchers posed to a new artificial intelligence program. The AI program was designed to observe physical phenomena through a video camera and then try to search for the minimal set of fundamental variables that fully describe the observed dynamics.”