Cornell Chronicle: Computer derives natural laws: "If Isaac Newton had had access to a supercomputer, he'd have had it watch apples fall and let it figure out what that meant. But the computer would have needed to run an algorithm developed by Cornell researchers that can derive natural laws from observed data."
"The researchers have taught a computer to find regularities in the natural world that represent natural laws -- without any prior scientific knowledge on the part of the computer. They have tested their method, or algorithm, on simple mechanical systems and believe it could be applied to more complex systems ranging from biology to cosmology and be useful in analyzing the mountains of data generated by modern experiments that use electronic data collection.
Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon did this a long time ago with a program called Bacon (as in Sir Francis, not as in pig backs), which derived scientific laws from raw data. The link is Simon giving a talk on Bacon. The CACM article on by Pat Langley and Herbert A. Simon was in 1995 some time. The computer program Bacon did things like deriving Kepler's third law of planetary motion and (as also done by this new program) the spring law F = kx.
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