In plain words: The system invents plain concepts, builds laws from them, and widens them to cover more cases, learning from messy data from many experiments with no physics built in. Unlike fitting a formula to one experiment, it rediscovers Newton's second law, energy conservation, and gravity.
Abstract · AI-Newton: A Concept-Driven Physical Law Discovery System without Prior Physical Knowledge
While current AI-driven methods excel at deriving empirical models from individual experiments, a significant challenge remains in uncovering the common fundamental physics that underlie these models -- a task at which human physicists are adept. To bridge this gap, we introduce AI-Newton, a novel framework for concept-driven scientific discovery. Our system autonomously derives general physical laws directly from raw, multi-experiment data, operating without supervision or prior physical knowledge. Its core innovations are twofold: (1) proposing interpretable physical concepts to construct laws, and (2) progressively generalizing these laws to broader domains. Applied to a large, noisy dataset of mechanics experiments, AI-Newton successfully rediscovers foundational and universal laws, such as Newton's second law, the conservation of energy, and the universal gravitation. This work represents a significant advance toward autonomous, human-like scientific discovery.
You-Le Fang, Dong-Shan Jian, Xiang Li, Yan-Qing Ma
arXiv:2504.01538 · cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.SC, hep-ph, physics.class-ph · submitted Apr 2, 2025 · updated Dec 11, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · 6 pages, 3 figures