Not that prizes are the be-all and end-all, but this has become an annual tradition. Who are your speculative laureates this year for physics and chemistry? As I did last year and for several years before, I will put forward my usual thought that the physics prize could be Aharonov and Berry for geometric phases in physics (even though Pancharatnam is intellectually in there and died in 1969). This is a long shot, as always. Given that attosecond experiments were last year, and AMO/quantum info foundations were in 2022, and climate + spin glasses/complexity were 2021, it seems like astro is "due".
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Prof. Charlie Lieber for his contributions to nanowire technology.
John Hopfield for neural networks. Long overdue but now that deep learning and AI have taken off so explosively I think it’s about time it was recognized.
Hopfield is a really interesting one that I hadn't thought of (I'm proud to say he is my academic grandfather). He's 91 now, so it has to happen soon --- it could even be an odds-on favorite. My other guess would have been Peter Shor along with someone -- probably David Deutsch -- for starting the field of quantum computation. So much excellent science has done in the name of this idea. And of course I'd love to see Leinaas and Myrheim for anyons (particularly given the recent anyon experiments). Lieber I think might be too tarred by his felony convictions. While perhaps they threw the book at him too hard, it certainly sounded like he was stretching the boundaries of good practice.
No climate change solution. No peace in the Middle East. No cancer cure. No one discovers S.I. Units & Power Grid Clean Air Antenna Array or Gravity is the cosine of Light as Ampere is the cosine of Voltage
TlvVS = Watt or
e= mcc = Joule of life = TlvVSs by NIST
Thank you Steve for your comment. I think the Nobel would be a great way to redeem Lieber in response to overzealous prosecution but you are probably right unfortunately.
"Overzealous prosecution"? He was literally carrying bags of ~$100K cash from China to the US and lied to the feds. You can't pretend that you are innocent with that. The courts also found him guilty. We are already on the verge of electing a convicted felon as president in the US, I don't think we need to have a physics Nobel go the same route (although the history of the Nobel shows that may not matter).
Doug, since you're at Rice, have you heard the rumor regarding the Rice Paris symposium on total synthesis taking place the first week of October is because they have some insider knowledge on the chemistry prize? Depending on how you view catalysis, synthetic organic chemistry may be due.
Anon@4:26, I'm sure my chem colleagues would be elated if that worked out and have their fingers crossed, but as far as I know, no one here has any inside knowledge. It's been a while since the chem Nobel went to total organic synthesis. Corey was in 1990, IIRC.
PS - Rice is developing a number of collaborations w/ Paris-area institutions in recent years and has access to a really nice conference space. That's the main reason the workshop is in Paris.
Astro is in an odd position at this point. Maybe a Nobel for the WMAP and Planck teams (50/50) and their insights into the universe via the cosmic microwave background. These were team efforts but one could award the two PIs.
The issue for me is that the most stunning result from those missions was the confirmation of inflation’s predictions of flatness and nearly scale-invariant primordial anisotropies. But (1) that would mean giving a Nobel to the theorists first (Guth, Linde, Steinhardt); and (2) People have the idea that we need to measure primordial B-mode polarization (which may be impossible) to “prove” inflation. I honestly don’t know where that comes from.
People have also mentioned IceCube which would be very gratifying of course but I personally doubt it.
You were right!
Hahahaha!!!! I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day. :)
You get full credit!
Hinton was interesting. I think this is the first time (that I remember) where a Physics Nobel has gone to a non-physicist? Nice to see.
Shuji Nakamura (blue LED) was an engineer by training
Great job, PPP! I do want to write something up about this, but I'm very busy right now. May take me a bit. In the meantime, I do think that the Nobel popular write-up is pretty good.
Ah indeed. Fair enough.
The first computer scientist though that’s for sure!
There have been quite a few cases actually, Simon van der Mere who was awarded the prize with Carlo Rubbia in particle physics in 1984 was an engineer.
Am I the only one that finds giving a prize in *physics* for something that is only tangentially related to physics kind ridiculous? Neural networks are important and interesting work that deserves to be recognized, etc., but I am having difficulty understanding how they could possibly be considered physics. Most neural network practitioners (including possibly one of the laureates...) probably can't even write down Maxwell's equations, and for good reason: physics is entirely irrelevant to understanding neural networks. That the first neural networks appeared in some physics application is an accident of history; there are many ways one can motivate such structures... One of the laureates was already recognized by a Turing award, which is a much more natural prize for this type of work. I am completely underwhelmed by the connection to physics that they attempt to draw in the official Nobel Prize Scientific Background. Their conclusion says it all: "With their breakthroughs, that stand on the foundations of physical science, they have showed a completely new way for us to use computers to aid and to guide us to tackle many of the challenges our society face." Remove the "stand on the foundations of physical science" nonsense, and you get where the prize belongs.
I think this is a deserving prize, but I can see how you, and many others, might think this way, and be skeptical of how these awards relates to actual physics. I also agree that the Nobel writeup, while interesting and informative, did not do the best job highlighting the physical significance of the discoveries. I'd like to take a stab at giving a slightly different perspective:
Even if we forget about deep learning and AI, Hopfield’s 1982 paper is a prize-worthy achievement by itself solely from the point of view of condensed matter physics. It is arguably the first demonstration that a stylized, mathematically tractable toy model could yield insight into the sophisticated far-from-equilibrium emergent phenomena that are memory and learning.
Of course, actual nervous systems and related biological information circuits are far more detailed and complicated than the neurons and connections that are in the Hopfield model. In the same way that real structural glasses have many more bells and whistles than the Parisi spin glass. And in the same way that a true ab initio description of an actual superconductor includes considerably more than what is in the low-energy BCS Hamiltonian. But the fact that Hopfield was able to postulate a minimal model that describe some essence of the real thing, even if it is an extremely crude, rough, and qualitative description, was a huge achievement that really highlighted how the physics mindset could yield useful and nontrivial insights even for systems as complex as the brain.
The Hinton part is admittedly a bit more of a stretch. You are correct that strictly speaking, one doesn’t need to know any physics to understand the underlying algorithms. But there is no question that one needs to know the same mathematical tools and methods that originated in statistical mechanics, and which Hopfield used in developing his model. Today, many AI practitioners are of course perfectly happy using the algorithms without knowing anything about the underlying interdisciplinary origins. But the fact remains that, historically, the mathematical methods and techniques, at least for the specific networks in question, were first developed by Hopfield for physically motivated reasons, and then translated to computer science by Hinton. It could just as well have been the other way around, with Hinton first coming up with the algorithms, and Hopfield then finding out that they could be repurposed into something of physical interest. But because Hinton built on Hopfield, and because of the undisputable impact of the resulting technology, I think even physics purists should make an exception for this one.
Also, there is no shortage of deserving physicists who should have gotten this prize.
Do you think Jensen Huang should also have gotten a third of this prize given that he enabled all these algorithms by advancing the state of GPUs. It would be hilarious to see him bowing to the Swedish king while rocking his leather jacket.
The chemistry prize is also AI inspired.
Hi Pizza Perusing Physicist,
I'm the anon that made the "Am I the only one that finds..." comment.
You make some fair points.
I wouldn't be bothered by the prize if it was justified as a biophysics and spin-glass prize whose methods turned out to have far-reaching applications outside, but the current framing really rubs me the wrong way. And judging from discussions with a number of colleagues, I'm not the only one.
A much more reasonable proposal/prize justification was made in
https://eighteenthelephant.com/2024/10/09/the-2024-nobel-prize-in-physics-yes-physics/
but it seems we're stuck with the prize as it is.
I'm still having difficulty understanding what physical problem did Hinton himself address, precisely. Did he even ever publish in a physics journal? I mean, computer science advances clearly find applications in numerical physics eventually...
Simon van de Meer, while an engineer studied applied/technical physics, which is an engineering degree in the Netherlands. What is more notable is that he didn't have a PhD.
Hi Anon,
Thanks for the link to Raghuveer's post - I agree with you 100% that this is a much more tenable justification than what the Nobel committee wrote regarding why Hopfield, at least, deserves the prize (also, glad to see that Raghuveer mentioned kinetic proofreading - while this piece of Hopfield's work is not as well-known generally, it had a comparably significant influence on the field of biological physics, and should have been included with the neural network stuff IMO).
It seems that most people are in agreement that the questionable part of this is why Hinton got half the prize. I think everyone feels the same way you do - Hinton totally deserves a Turing award (and got one), but his getting a Nobel for Physics seems out of place. I guess we will never know for sure what the committee had in mind when they made their decision...
Incidentally I just want to say I find it hilariously ironic seeing so many physicists get so angry about an “outsider” invading our field’s Nobel Prizes, when physicists have invaded the Nobels in Chemistry and even Physio/Medicine for so many years.
There is nothing wrong with "invading" per se - so long as the contribution is to actual Physics. Not when the contribution is to an Universal Function Approximator - aka Neural Networks, that have no fundamental basis in Physics, or any Natural Science for that matter. The problem is specific to Hinton, and not about Hopfield.
Oh I don’t disagree. I think you are right. But I still find the reaction of some of the physicists amusing.
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