In plain words: It splits the forces on an object into an energy-conserving part and a leftover part, so the leftover appears only when energy conservation breaks. On a damped double pendulum it spotted the missing friction and forecast motion better than prior approaches.
Abstract
Energy conservation is a basic physics principle, the breakdown of which often implies new physics. This paper presents a method for data-driven "new physics" discovery. Specifically, given a trajectory governed by unknown forces, our Neural New-Physics Detector (NNPhD) aims to detect new physics by decomposing the force field into conservative and non-conservative components, which are represented by a Lagrangian Neural Network (LNN) and a universal approximator network (UAN), respectively, trained to minimize the force recovery error plus a constant $λ$ times the magnitude of the predicted non-conservative force. We show that a phase transition occurs at $λ$=1, universally for arbitrary forces. We demonstrate that NNPhD successfully discovers new physics in toy numerical experiments, rediscovering friction (1493) from a damped double pendulum, Neptune from Uranus' orbit (1846) and gravitational waves (2017) from an inspiraling orbit. We also show how NNPhD coupled with an integrator outperforms previous methods for predicting the future of a damped double pendulum.
Ziming Liu, Bohan Wang, Qi Meng, Wei Chen, Max Tegmark, Tie-Yan Liu
arXiv:2106.00026 · cs.LG, astro-ph.IM, gr-qc, physics.comp-ph · submitted May 31, 2021 · updated Jun 2, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · 17 pages, 7 figs, 2 tables; typo correction