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My perspective as a PhD in theoretical physics, who's been doing deep learning in the last 4 years: 1. The prize itself makes zero sense as a prize in _physics
by mishaevtikhiev 2y ago
My perspective as a PhD in theoretical physics, who's been doing deep learning in the last 4 years:
1. The prize itself makes zero sense as a prize in _physics_. Even the official announcement by the Nobel Prize Committee, taken at a face value, reads as a huge stretch in trying to link neural networks to physics. When one starts asking questions about the real impact on physics and whether the most important works of Hinton and Hopfield were really informed by physics (which is a dubious link to the Nobel prize anyway), the argument stops holding water at all.
2. Some of the comments mention that giving prize for works in AI may make sense, because physics is currently stalled. This is wrong for several reasons:
2.1. While one can argue that string theory (which is, anyway, only a part of high-energy theoretical physics) is having its "AI winter" moment, there are many other areas of physics which develop really fast and bring exciting results.
2.2. The Nobel Prize is often awarded with quite some delay, so there are many very impactful works from 80s which haven't been awarded with a Nobel prize (atomic force microscopy is a nice example).
2.3. It is wrong to look at the recent results in some sub-field and say "okay, there was nothing of value in this field". For example, even if one completely discards string theory as bogus, there were many important results in theoretical physics such as creation of conformal field theory, which was never recognized with a Nobel Prize (which is OK if Nobel Prize is given to other important physical works, but is quite strange in the light of today's announcement).
To finish on a lighter mood, I'll quote a joke from my friend, who stayed in physics: "Apparently the committee has looked at all the physicists who left academia and decided that anything they do is fair game. We should maybe expect they will give a prize for crypto or high-frequency trading some time later".
- fooker 2y ago> because physics is currently stalled. Even if it's not completely true, maybe some introspection is required? I understand developing new theories is important and rewarding, but most physics for the last three decades seems to fall within two buckets. (1) Smash particles and analyze the data. (2) Mathematical models that are not falsifiable. We can be pretty sure that the next 'new physics' discovery that gives us better chips, rocket propulsion, etc etc is going to get a nobel prize pretty quickly similar to mRNA.
- bunderbunder 2y agoThose two buckets only contain the work in physics that have a sustained presence in popular media. But take gravitational wave astronomy as a counterexample. It doesn't make it into the news much, but I'm pretty sure the entire field is less than ten years old.
- fooker 2y agoYes, good example. They already got a Nobel prize, one of the quickest in history. This is the kind of physics we might need more of.
- bunderbunder 2y agoSo then you could argue that that's what the folks who are smashing particles and building new models are trying to get to. Smashing particles helps test existing theories and hypotheses. We do it with particle accelerators because that's one of the ways of getting to the uncharted territory, which is where you need to be if you want to push the boundaries. And maybe remember that the sexy stuff that makes it into the news isn't the whole of the thing. The LHC is also, for example, doing practical climate science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_experiment And building new mathematical models is part of figuring out how to make sense of observations that don't quite fit the current models. That is a messy process, and I think that our retrospective perspective on what that process is like might be colored by survivor bias. We remember Einstein and his theory of special relativity. We mostly don't remember the preceding few decades' worth of other attempts by other physicists to resolve conflicts between existing non-unified theories (in this case Newton's and Maxwell's models) or making sense of things like the Michelson-Morley experiment. I don't really know that history myself, but I would not at all be surprised if many of those efforts were also having trouble figuring out how to produce testable hypotheses. And also, big picture, I think that it's important for any lover of science to remember to celebrate the entire enterprise, not just its headline successes. Expecting consistent results is tacitly expecting scientists to have some way of knowing ahead of time which avenues of inquiry will be most fruitful. If we had access to an oracle that could tell us that, we wouldn't actually need science anymore.
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoWdym physicics is stalled? I was told we just need to build larger collider's.
- bmitc 2y agoBy the same people who guaranteed they'd see certain things at the existing energy levels but now all of the sudden need higher energy levels after they didn't find what they were looking for.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fat_cantor 2y agoA Hopfield network is a lot more like physics than biology, but agreed that the conformal field theorists should have been recognized before Hopfield and/or Hinton. Jim Simons would have been deserving too, IMHO, far more for his work at RenTec than for Chern-Simons theory
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y agoThe Hopfield paper was published in a Biophysics section of Proc. NatL Acad. Sci., and was followed by a flood of spin-glass papers in Phys Review A and similar. So there is some connection to physics.