On 9 Nov 2010, the New York Times ran an interesting online feature “What’s Next in Science?”. This series of article includes predictions from a number of scientists in different fields as to what they believe will be the most significant developments of the next few years. One of these articles is by Steven Strogatz of Cornell University, who has contributed semi-popular articles in the Times before.
In this piece, he starts out with the statement
We’re going to see scientific results that are correct, that are predictive, but are without explanation. We may be able to do science without insight, and we may have to learn to live without it. Science will still progress, but computers will tell us things that are true, and we won’t understand them.
Such a statement might seem provocative to some, but is certainly not controversial to those of us engaged in computational and experimental mathematics. In this arena, computer programs have discovered literally thousands of new mathematical facts, many of them quite remarkable, and only subsequently established by formal proof (and some remain unproven to this day). For additional details, see our main website Experimental math site.
In his Times article, Strogatz mentions a tool known as “Eureqa”, which has been used to discover new principles in other fields. For instance, simply by observing the motion of a pendulum, it can deduce Newton’s laws of physics. Hod Lipson of Cornell is using to to search for hidden patterns in the networks of proteins that break down food in cells.
Additional information about the Eureqa tool are available at Eureqa.
Strogatz’s article is available at Strogatz article.