The behavior of any physical system is governed by its underlying dynamical
equations. Much of physics is concerned with discovering these dynamical
equations and understanding their consequences. In this work, we show that,
remarkably, identifying the underlying dynamical equation from any amount of
experimental data, however precise, is a provably computationally hard problem
(it is NP-hard), both for classical and quantum mechanical systems. As a
by-product of this work, we give complexity-theoretic answers to both the
quantum and classical embedding problems, two long-standing open problems in
mathematics (the classical problem, in particular, dating back over 70 years).Comment: For mathematical details, see arXiv:0908.2128[math-ph]. v2: final
version, accepted in Phys. Rev. Let
