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Alternative Physics: What if We Don’t Have the Right Parameters?
Parameters like length, mass, time, temperature, and electric current are fundamental variables in physics. What if physicists like Newton and Einstein lived in a parallel universe and defined a different set of variables that describe the world? Parameters in physics are inventions of humans that attempt to describe the world that we see around us. There may be alternative ways to describe the same physical phenomenon.
Hod Lipson, director and robotics engineer at Columbia University, said that “I always wondered if we ever met an intelligent alien race, would they have discovered the same physics laws as we have, or might they describe the universe differently? Perhaps some phenomena seem enigmatically complex because we are trying to understand them using the wrong set of variables.”
Researchers at Columbia University used Artificial Intelligence to observe the movement of a system of objects and from the image to derive parameters related to the underlying physics of the motion in the system. The AI used was not given the notion of any ideas used in standard physics: no idea about standard measurements or equations for calculating relationships. Sometimes AI in experiments was able to identify parameters that might normally be used in physics to describe the phenomenon, but there were many instances where parameters were identified by the AI as fundamental for describing the motion of the scene but which did not correspond to standard parameters used in physics.
Qiang Du, professor of Mathematics at Columbia, said that “variables describing temperature and pressure needed to be identified before laws of thermodynamics could be formalized, and so on for every corner of the scientific world. The variables are a precursor to any theory. What other laws are we missing simply because we don’t have the variables?”
