Can machine learning learn new physics?

Can machine learning learn new physics – or do we have to put it in by hand? A workshop organised by Ilya Nemenman (Emory University), and featuring a number of experts in the field, aimed to find out more. There has been a rapid increase in research using machine learning to elucidate experimental data from a range of physical systems, from quantum to biological, from statistical to social. However, can these methods discover fundamentally new physics? Is it unrealistic to expect machine learning systems to be able to infer new physics without specifically adapting them to find what we are looking for?