I came across this and then this, and couldn’t not comment.
Everyone who knows me knows that I used my computer to automate as much as possible while researching. Almost everyone doing experimental science has used computers to collect data, and control equipment. Almost everyone doing theoretical work has used computers to create their data by writing a simulation. Almost everyone doing any type of science has used computers for data processing and analysis. Drawing conclusions has, thus far, been up to the researchers. These Cornell scientists are trying to change that by developing a computer program that actually derives the fundamental laws… sort of.
The proof of concept they used was to derive Newton’s laws of motion, a process that took early “physicists” hundreds of years to grasp, in a couple of hours, simply by observing a chaotic double pendulum. It doesn’t explicitly give you 
, rather it analyses the data, and returns to the researcher the invariant quantities (such as energy and momentum) in that data. It’s not clear from the articles what the inputs for the simulation were, or how much known physics and math was required by the program to solve this, but it’s still impressive. Afterwards, it is still up to the researcher to determine which quantities correspond to known physical laws, and which ones represent something fundamentally new. The plan is to apply this to complex systems, such as biological ones, to try to find new “laws” governing them. Complex systems are easy to study on a macroscopic scale (give patient X, Y happens), and on a microscopic scale (X reacts with Z to form W), but to measure things in between is notoriously difficult (not only will X react with Z, but also with A, B, C, and D, which in turn can react with E, F, G, H, and I…). Many mathematical and computation tools have been developed for analyzing these systems, and not being a biologist, I don’t know how well knowing the invariant quantities in a process will compare to the current tools, but I can envision it being helpful in certain condensed matter physics problems I have worked on in the past.
If/when the paper appears, and more results of the applications are shown, I’ll try to post an update with the new information.