Most experimental physics and other natural sciences are strongly driven by their theoretical siblings, i.e. in particle research nothing gets built without a solid theoretical foundation of what you expect to find (or where you expect existing theories to break down), the same is true in other areas, no one is doing an experiment in quantum physics before they have a solid theoretical understanding of the effects they try to see. I think AI can come up with great experiments. And if epxeriments lead to results that are unexpected AI can help with that as well.

So I'm greatly excited what AI will bring about in physics, more so than in math, because in physics it's clear that our fundamental theories are missing a big piece of the picture, and given how easily AI crunches through Millenium prize problems I think it's possible that AI will come up with a viable grand unified theory uniting quantum mechanics and gravitation, or produce new predictions in other areas. There's enough contradictory or unexplained observational data available to make a ton of progress on the theory side I think. Exciting times ahead!

> I wish it were done by different folks, ideally under some kind of public control like NASA research or the NPR model.

This is sort of what OpenAI was supposed to be. I'll never understand how it was legal for them to turn it into a for profit corporation.

The problem with physics and chemistry is that you need simulations and those are often in themselves compute hungry. So the iteration loop will be slower.

>> Keep in mind: natural science is different. It's not always a matter of computation.

Math is like this too. The big problems they've been solving have been identified as interesting only through lots of prior effort.

"Our work is so much harder than their work that AI now does" is a refrain of the AI story. In technical terms you concern can be stated as "AI needs to be much more sample-efficient to not be bottlenecked by the speed of doing experiments." People don't find out all the relevant phenomena present there by holy spirit, after all.

BTW, there's also a problem of asking interesting questions that AIs aren't yet good at.

No one has found any principled walls of AI development yet. And empirical results are quite telling. So, I guess, those problems will not stand for long.

I think problem with natural sciences is that it is not so easy to verify solutions to problems - there are always countless competing explanations for the data which is also often noisy - I find AI to lack the "common sense" when working with data from physical measurements .. it somehow has no touch with reality and doesn't have a feeling of the data like a domain scientist

NS is a question for natural science. Q: can we model these bodies of discrete particles with a continuous approximation? A: if you do, you can get aphysical singularities.

"If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics."

There are lots of startups creating labs that can be managed e2e by agents. That will connect reasoning to the physical world and dramatically speed up the plan, experiment, reflect loop beyond what humans currently do in science R&D.

National Public Radio?

There is this infamous xkcd (https://xkcd.com/435/) going like this: sociology is applied psychology -> physchology is applied biology -> biology is applied chemistry -> chemistry is applied physics -> physics is applied math -> math is way up there looking down on other fields

I would argue the main reason AI labs have been focusing on programming is to unlock industrial scale automation, next logical step is to solve math as it's the key to unlock everything else. Once you hold the key for math, everything downstream fields become a matter of compute

Lol what? Everything is computation.

The natural sciences will soon start breaking too.

I will concede that AI seems likely to not invent a "research program" anytime soon.

It has no taste