AI comes up with bizarre physics experiments, but they work

Summary

If the AI’s insights had been available when LIGO was being built, “we would have had something like 10 or 15% better LIGO sensitivity all along,” he said. In a world of sub-proton precision, 10 to 15% is enormous. “LIGO is this huge thing that thousands of people have been thinking about deeply for 40 years,” said Aephraim Steinberg, an expert on quantum optics at the University of Toronto. “They’ve thought of everything they could have, and anything new [the AI] comes up with is a demonstration that it’s something thousands of people failed to do.” Although AI has not yet led to new discoveries in physics, it’s becoming a powerful tool across the field. Along with helping researchers to design experiments, it can find nontrivial patterns in complex data. For example, AI algorithms have gleaned symmetries of nature from the data collected at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. These symmetries aren’t new — they were key to Einstein’s theories of relativity — but the AI’s finding serves as a proof of principle for what’s to come. Physicists have also used AI to find a new equation for describing the clumping of the universe’s unseen dark matter. “Humans can start learning from these solutions,” Adhikari said. Apart but Together In the classical physics that describes our everyday world, objects have well-defined properties that are independent of attempts to measure those properties: A billiard ball, for example, has a particular position and momentum at any given moment in time. In the quantum world, this isn’t the case. A quantum object is described by a mathematical entity called the quantum state. The best one can do is to use the state to calculate the probability that the object will be, say, at a certain location when you look for it there. What is more, two (or more) quantum objects can share a single quantum state. Take light, which is made of photons. These photons can be generated in pairs that are “entangled,” meaning that the two photons share a s...