THISISSUE’S EXPERTS
Q
&
A
ALAMY
JACKSTECHER, DALLAS, TEXAS
WOULD A MODERN COMPUTER BE ABLE
TO DERIVE THE EQUATION E=mc
2
?
Artificialintelligence (AI) algorithms have had some success in learning the laws of
physics. In 2009, researchers at Cornell University fed data from a swinging pendulum to
their AI, and it managed to learn laws such as the conservation of momentum and
Newton’s second law of motion. In 2018, researchers at MIT went further, showing their
‘AI physicist’ a bouncing ball in various simulated worlds, which allowed it to derive the
laws for each simulation. Like a scientist, the algorithm could even combine individual
laws to make unified theories. To discover E=mc^2 , we would need to show an AI object
behaving according to Special Relativity. For example, we could create a simulated world
in which the mass of an object appears to increase with speed. Let an AI loose in this
world and it may well figure out Einstein’s famous equation linking mass and energy. LV
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