AI-Newton: A Concept-Driven Physical Law Discovery System without Prior Physical Knowledge
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.01538,
title = {AI-Newton: A Concept-Driven Physical Law Discovery System without Prior Physical Knowledge},
author = {You-Le Fang and Dong-Shan Jian and Xiang Li and Yan-Qing Ma},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.01538},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
6 pages, 3 figures