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Lee Smolin explores the problem of understanding the universe from the perspective of being inside the universe, as well as the need for physicists to know philosophy.
… This was great for the explosion of applications of quantum mechanics from the 1940s into the 1970s, through the establishment of the Standard Model, condensed matter physics and so forth. But then fundamental physics got stuck, and part of the reason we got stuck is we reached a set of problems on which you can’t make progress with this pragmatic, anti-foundational culture. I should make clear that those fields where you can assume we know the relevant laws, like condensed matter and astrophysics, continue to thrive. But if your goal is to discover new, deeper laws, you need to mix with philosophers again. And it has been happening much more. … Link: https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201905/backpage.cfm
… Although the researchers themselves may not know the underlying rules, "the AI has learned the language of how proteins are designed," and it can encode it to create variations of existing versions, or completely new protein designs, Buehler says. Given that there are "trillions and trillions" of potential combinations, he says, when it comes to creating new proteins "you wouldn't be able to do it from scratch, but that's what the AI can do."
By using such a system, he says training the AI system with a set of data for a particular class of proteins might take a few days, but it can then produce a design for a new variant within microseconds. "No other method comes close," he says. "The shortcoming is the model doesn't tell us what's really going on inside. We just know it works." This way of encoding structure into music does reflect a deeper reality. "When you look at a molecule in a textbook, it's static," Buehler says. "But it's not static at all. It's moving and vibrating. Every bit of matter is a set of vibrations. And we can use this concept as a way of describing matter." The method does not yet allow for any kind of directed modifications—any changes in properties such as mechanical strength, elasticity, or chemical reactivity will be essentially random. "You still need to do the experiment," he says. When a new protein variant is produced, "there's no way to predict what it will do." ... |
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