A story in Wired caught my eye today–at Cornell University, a computer has discovered a law of physics on its own. Without any prior knowledge of physics or geometry, the machine was able to extrapolate the laws of motion by analyzing a pendulum’s swings.
Contributor Brandon Keim writes: “The research is being heralded as a potential breakthrough for science in the Petabyte Age, where computers try to find regularities in massive datasets that are too big and complex for the human mind.” (Italics mine.)
As explored in more detail in Wired last summer, the rise of the so-called “petabyte age” has meant that science can move forward at a far more rapid pace than in the past. This is true for many areas, including medicine (genomics), physics, and geology, to name a few. Of course, the flip side of this, which is often ignored or forgotten, is the storage demands this kind of intensive data usage can create.
As I discussed in another post, our ability to successfully navigate the petabyte era could mean the difference between life and death, particularly if we’re talking about medical research. If a computer can figure out the laws of physics, who knows what progress is possible? We’d better have the infrastructure to see it through.
Image from Wired article.
