181–190 of 876 posts
What an odd rationale. Please do not devalue the Physics Nobel Prize to the status of the Nobel Peace Prize. This is overtly driven by expediency or business interests and ignores all societal problems. Be happy that you get your billions for CERN and keep a low profile.
I've always sided with Feynman on this, and this proves him right: wtf do these people think they are appointing themselves fit to hand out trinkets and baubles on behalf of global scientific achievement? It brings the award into disrepute, or at least in a Feynman way, exposes the inherent disreputability of awards themselves: who are they to award such a prize on behalf of physics? Awards committees: self-serving s…
Altough of course you're right, let's play devil's advocate an imagine a world without Nobel prices. Laypeople needs a simple way to know who's who in advanced research fields, without Nobel prices (or any other commitee) we don't get to have that. If people gets to ignore (more) such topics, it's likely politicians, and universities react accordingly, and funnel funds to other enterprises. All these prices (I'd say…
What need of a layperson does knowing "who's who" in advanced research fields fill?
Here's another good question related to that: Who is qualified to simplify that so that the need is filled?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But, the starting point of Neural Networks in the ML/AI sense, is cybernetics + Rosenblatt's perceptron, research done mathematicians (who became early computer scientists)
This is price in physics. Not price in Neural Networks. Starting point of Hopfield's and Hintons work in recurrent networks was physics analogy. Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC346238/
This is embarrassing. I would say Hopfield networks aren't even very revolutionary in neuroscience, but they're so old I can't tell. In terms of AI... they've been irrelevant for thirty years. I guess you could argue a transformer is a generalized Hopfield network, but of course that's a post-hoc understanding. None of this has anything to do with physics. So what if an energy function lets you approximate the number…
I've always sided with Feynman on this, and this proves him right: wtf do these people think they are appointing themselves fit to hand out trinkets and baubles on behalf of global scientific achievement? It brings the award into disrepute, or at least in a Feynman way, exposes the inherent disreputability of awards themselves: who are they to award such a prize on behalf of physics? Awards committees: self-serving s…
"This year’s laureates used tools from physics to construct methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning." Does this mean if I'd use a deep understanding of birds to design way more aerodynamic airplanes, I could get the Nobel prize in physiology/medicine? Don't get me wrong, their work is probably prize worthy, but shouldn't the Nobel prize in physics be awarded for discoveries in the…
For what it's worth, the "Advanced information" PDF does a somewhat better job of trying to explain the rationale than the linked press release: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/09/advanced-physicsp...
Interesting. LeCun, Bengio, Schmidhuber and Hochreiter are (amongst others) also mentioned in this article.
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There's a long backlog of major achievements in physics that haven't gotten a Nobel Prize in Physics . Giving the prize to something that has essentially nothing to do with physics is just a slap in the face to the physics community.
I can only think of major achievements in my (narrow) field of study. What do you think could have reasonably been awarded?
The measurement of the Hubble constant using delay times between multiple images of lensed supernovae.
The first transit spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere.
The first directly imaged exoplanet.
(They could hand out Nobel Prizes in the field of exoplanets like candy.)