Scaling Science: Toward a Chain Reaction of Discovery

원문 초록

Scientific discovery advances when evidence from different investigations is brought into contact. Yet paper-centric communication leaves experimental results fragmented, delayed, or unreported, creating a "scientific memory wall" between growing computational capabilities and the evidence accessible to AI systems. Breaking this wall requires a paradigm shift in AI for Science: moving from passively mining questions out of existing datasets to actively generating and recombining experimental data around unresolved scientific questions. In a network of intelligent laboratories, a failed or overlooked experiment in one domain could trigger a hypothesis in another, whose testing generates fresh evidence that stimulates further investigations. To enable these evidence-driven chain reactions, we propose Evolving Scientific Intelligence (ESI), an architectural blueprint that connects shared scientific memory with distributed experimental loops. ESI preserves experimental records -- including negative and anomalous results -- in computable representations, allowing models to recombine evidence across domains into testable hypotheses. Rather than following fixed screening pipelines, the system jointly selects candidates and evaluation methods according to scientific value, reliability, and cost, directing distributed laboratories to produce the exact evidence needed next. Their physical feedback revises both hypotheses and evaluators, while slower meta-control reassesses research objectives and decision criteria to guard against self-reinforcing errors and misguided optimization. We call for an Information Manhattan Project to build this infrastructure for scaling science through experimentally grounded chains of discovery.