OK, some say, machine learning can find statistical regularities in data, but it will never discover anything deep, like Newton’s laws. It arguably hasn’t yet, but I bet it will. Stories of falling apples notwithstanding, deep scientific truths are not low-hanging fruit. Science goes through three phases, which we can call the Brahe, Kepler, and Newton phases. In the Brahe phase, we gather lots of data, like Tycho Brahe patiently recording the positions of the planets night after night, year after year. In the Kepler phase, we fit empirical laws to the data, like Kepler did to the planets’
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