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Astronomers took centuries to figure it out. But now, a machine-learning algorithm inspired by the brain has worked out that it should place the Sun at the centre of the Solar System, on the basis of how movements of the Sun and Mars appear from Earth. The feat is one the first tests of a technique that researchers hope they can use to discover new laws of physics, and perhaps to reformulate quantum mechanics, by finding patterns in large data sets. The results are due to appear in Physical Review Letters (R. Iten et al. Phys. Rev. Lett.; in the press).