See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41775449 (> 40 comments).
Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
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Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#32This must piss Schmidhuber off like nothing else.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#33I think this is the Royal Academy of Sciences way to admit that Physics as a research subject has ground to a halt. String theory suffocated theoretical high energy physics for nearly half a century with nothing to show for it, and a lot of other areas of fundamental physics are kind of done.
It really has not, though. There is more to physics than high-energy and cosmology, and there is no shortage of deserving contributions of smaller scope. It really is bizarre that deep learning would make it to the top of the list.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#34Imagine how Schmidhuber's feeling right now.
haha!
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#35Imagine how Schmidhuber's feeling right now.
Alas, poor Jurgen! I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy…
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#36I wonder if this'll help physics PhDs get industry jobs (I hear Myron Scholes is up for the 2025 prize)
You mean like the ones working on Wall Street?
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#37This must piss Schmidhuber off like nothing else.
To the point of nuclear fusion even.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#38I don't know if this is a travesty that they awarded the prize to work on non-physical systems to jump on a bandwagon or that there was nothing else obvious enough to the board in actual physics to give this to. If I was the awardee I'd consider declining just out of respect to the field.
The linked document connects their work to physics as follows: "The Hopfeld network utilises physics that describes a material’s characteristics due to its atomic spin – a property that makes each atom a tiny magnet. The network as a whole is described in a manner equivalent to the energy in the spin system found in physics, and is trained by fnding values for the connections between the nodes so that the saved image…
Neither of these models were never really influential though beyond some theoretical niches.
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#39Waiting for Sabine's comment: "Told you so, physics is dead"
Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
#40I think this is the Royal Academy of Sciences way to admit that Physics as a research subject has ground to a halt. String theory suffocated theoretical high energy physics for nearly half a century with nothing to show for it, and a lot of other areas of fundamental physics are kind of done.
I think this is (very) inaccurate. It feels more like them trying to jump on a "hot topic" bandwagon (machine learning/AI hype is huge).
Physics as a discipline hasn't really stalled at all. Fundamental physics arguably has, because no one really has any idea how to get close to making experimental tests that would distinguish the competing ideas. But even in fundamental physics there are cool developments like the stuff from Jonathan Oppenheim and collaborators in the last couple of years.
That said "physics" != "fundamental physics" and physics of composite systems ranging from correlated electron systems, and condensed matter through to galaxies and cosmology is very far from dead.