[ExI] Weird new way to do physics

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Fri Nov 4 09:04:02 UTC 2011


On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 2:45 AM, The Avantguardian wrote:
> Whilest pondering the uselessness of dimensionless Planck units, I hit upon an idea that makes them far less
> cumbersome to work with. In the process, I realized that my technique should make physics accessible to
> computers in a way they never were before. Yes, computers have been used to do physics calculations
> before but what I am trying to do is get my humble PC to discover novel laws of nature. In other words, as
> I write this, my computer is running a brute-force search algorithm in Python to discover novel mathematical
> relationships between length, time, mass, charge, and temperature i.e. the fundamental dimensions of physics
> within certain boundaries. So using my technique, computers can be used not just to model physics but to
> perform abstract dimensional analysis as well. I will let you all know what my algorithm comes up with.
>
>


Sounds like
<http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/11/48443-deep-data-dives-discover-natural-laws/fulltext>
Quote:
The Lipson/Schmidt work features two key advancements. The first is
their look for invariants, or "conservations," rather than for
predictive models. "All laws of nature are essentially laws of
conservation and symmetry," says Lipson, a professor of mechanical
engineering. "So looking for invariants is fundamental."

Given crude initial conditions and some indication of what variables
to consider, the genetic program churned through a large number of
possible equations, keeping and building on the most promising ones at
each iteration and eliminating the others. The project's second key
advance was finding a way to identify the large number of trivial
equations that, while true and invariant, are coincidental and not
directly related to the behavior of the system being studied.

Lipson and Schmidt found that trivial equations could be weeded out by
looking at ratios of rates of change in the variables under
consideration. The program was written to favor those equations that
were able to use these ratios to predict connections between variables
over time. "This was one of the biggest challenges we were able to
overcome," Lipson says. "There are infinite trivial equations and just
a few interesting ones."

Like human scientists, the software favors equations with the fewest
terms. "We want to find the simplest equation powerful enough to
predict the dynamics of the system," Schmidt says.
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BillK




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