Papers › Discovering physical concepts with neural networks

Discovering physical concepts with neural networks

26 Jul 2018arXiv:1807.10300archive 2025-07-28

Raban Iten, Tony Metger, Henrik Wilming, Lidia del Rio, Renato Renner

Despite the success of neural networks at solving concrete physics problems, their use as a general-purpose tool for scientific discovery is still in its infancy. Here, we approach this problem by modelling a neural network architecture after the human physical reasoning process, which has similarities to representation learning. This allows us to make progress towards the long-term goal of machine-assisted scientific discovery from experimental data without making prior assumptions about the system. We apply this method to toy examples and show that the network finds the physically relevant parameters, exploits conservation laws to make predictions, and can help to gain conceptual insights, e.g. Copernicus' conclusion that the solar system is heliocentric.

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