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.
