771–780 of 876 posts
Was just listening to a live radio interview with Hinton finding him in a small hotel room in California somewhere quite flabbergasted at the news. Interviewer all happy for him etc, but when delving more into what it was for he started to go off on AI concerns etc and the interview didn't last much longer. Acceptance speech might be something.
Just watched the nobel prize live stream, surprised by the topic, looks very engineering to me rather than physics, do algorithms make physics subsidiary?
The physics prize has historically taken the role of both "innovation/engineering" topics and "mathematics". It's more broad than simply physics. The most important factor tends to be the positive impact on society, as that's one of the price's core tenets.
Just watched the nobel prize live stream, surprised by the topic, looks very engineering to me rather than physics, do algorithms make physics subsidiary?
Well in 1912, the physics prize went to a guy who designed a better light for light houses and buoys to prevent shipwrecks! Actually, most early Nobels went to practical things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Dal%C3%A9n
An excellent career retrospective by John Hopfield - https://pni.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf321/files/docu... "As an Academy member I could publish such a paper without any review (this is no longer true, a sad commentary on aspects of science publishing and the promotion of originality)."
National Academy members still get to pick the reviewers (if they choose to go that route rather than regular submisssion), and the review is not blind. The reviews themselves are not public, but the identities of the reviewers are made public once the paper is out. So members can't just say whatever sh*t they want (and you can imagine some do), but still a highly unusual process.
I 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 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.
My sense is that we might have reached the limits of what we can do in high-energy or fundamental physics without accessing energy levels or other extreme states that we currently can't access as they are beyond our capacity to generate. From what I've read (not a professional physicist) string theory is not testable unless we can either examine a black hole or create particle accelerators the size of the Moon's orbi…
It seems physics is natural continuation for those who want understand what's behind the curtains after all. Thanks physicists for providing support for AI scientists. Next phase for joint research is quantum AI where one would need expertise in both physics and ML.
Old news: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23474
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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 s…
> trying to jump on a "hot topic" bandwagon I don't know exactly what they hope to gain by jumping on that bandwagon though; neither the physicists nor the computer scientists are going to value this at all. And dare I say, the general populace associated with the two fields isn't going to either - case in point, this hn post. If there weren't any noble-worthy nominations for physics, maybe skip it? (Although that ha…
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I've never heard that it had to be tied to experimental discoveries. For example, Feynman got the prize for Feynman diagrams, path integrals and QED calculations. None of that directly tied to experimental work. It has definitely been awarded for both theoretical and experimental contributions throughout its history. Many theoretical physicists have received the prize for their conceptual breakthroughs, even without…
Interesting. Those are essentially inventions, not discoveries?