DOI: 10.1126/science.1165893. Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data

Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data

10.1126/science.1165893

Crossref journal-article

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Science (221)

Abstract

For centuries, scientists have attempted to identify and document analytical laws that underlie physical phenomena in nature. Despite the prevalence of computing power, the process of finding natural laws and their corresponding equations has resisted automation. A key challenge to finding analytic relations automatically is defining algorithmically what makes a correlation in observed data important and insightful. We propose a principle for the identification of nontriviality. We demonstrated this approach by automatically searching motion-tracking data captured from various physical systems, ranging from simple harmonic oscillators to chaotic double-pendula. Without any prior knowledge about physics, kinematics, or geometry, the algorithm discovered Hamiltonians, Lagrangians, and other laws of geometric and momentum conservation. The discovery rate accelerated as laws found for simpler systems were used to bootstrap explanations for more complex systems, gradually uncovering the “alphabet” used to describe those systems.

Bibliography

Schmidt, M., & Lipson, H. (2009). Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data. Science, 324(5923), 81â85.

Authors 2

Michael Schmidt (first)
Hod Lipson (additional)

References 25 Referenced 1,976

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This research was supported in part by Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program in nonlinear systems a U.S. NSF graduate research fellowship and NSF Creative-IT grant 0757478 and CAREER grant 0547376. We thank M. Kurman for editorial consultation and substantive editing of the manuscript.

Dates

Type	When
Created	16 years, 4 months ago (April 2, 2009, 5:36 p.m.)
Deposited	1 year, 7 months ago (Jan. 10, 2024, 4:37 a.m.)
Indexed	1 day, 9 hours ago (Aug. 23, 2025, 9:37 p.m.)
Issued	16 years, 4 months ago (April 3, 2009)
Published	16 years, 4 months ago (April 3, 2009)
Published Print	16 years, 4 months ago (April 3, 2009)

Funders 0

None

BibTeX

@article{Schmidt_2009, title={Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data}, volume={324}, ISSN={1095-9203}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1165893}, DOI={10.1126/science.1165893}, number={5923}, journal={Science}, publisher={American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)}, author={Schmidt, Michael and Lipson, Hod}, year={2009}, month=apr, pages={81–85} }

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