801–810 of 876 posts
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I agree. I don't see how this is physics in any accepted sense of the word.
When Alfred Nobel wrote his will in 1895, there was no computer science or information theory. One could argue it's closer to mathematics than physics, but if you'd say to him that someone made sand think like a human he might even put it under the medicine category.
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I don't think Geoff Hinton is in the running for a Fields medal[1] any more, unless they did what they did for Andrew Wiles and give him a "quantized" Fields medal. [1] You have to be under 40. https://www.fields.utoronto.ca/aboutus/jcfields/fields_medal...
Hinton was never in the running for a Fields medal since he never made a single contribution to the field of mathematics. His work is about empirical discoveries in CS.
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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.
why? this should be questioned
Also, it's a price based on a will from over 100 years ago, managed by a private institution. The institution can be as arbitrary as it wants. They don't need to answer to anyone.
Uhm, no. This has negatively and retroactively impacted my appreciation of the award. If I were in academic CS I would have blatantly rejected it. This is ridiculous.
Like, let's survey what our PhD students plan to do next in their careers. Oh wow, 62% say they are going into... AI? Well damn, why don't we just give the Nobel Prize for that, if it's such a hot field in physics right now?
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How about a "Nobel Memorial Prize in Computer Sciences" similar to the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...
Perhaps not a bad idea in that specific instance, but they're so embarrassed today about getting bought for the economics one that doing something similar again has become effectively out of the question (and on a balance I think that's for the best).
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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…
interesting - source(s) on Planet 9 black hole theory?
Personally, I'm not very optimistic.
Regarding the primordial black hole: "Konstantin Batygin commented on this, saying while it is possible for Planet Nine to be a primordial black hole, there is currently not enough evidence to make this idea more plausible than any other alternative."
Regarding planet 9 in general: "Further skepticism about the Planet Nine hypothesis arose in 2020, based on results from the Outer Solar System Origins Survey and the Dark Energy Survey, with the OSSOS documenting over 800 trans-Neptunian objects and the DES discovering 316 new ones.[94] Both surveys adjusted for observational bias and concluded that of the objects observed there was no evidence for clustering.[95] The authors go further to explain that practically all objects' orbits can be explained by physical phenomena rather than a ninth planet as proposed by Brown and Batygin.[96] An author of one of the studies, Samantha Lawler, said the hypothesis of Planet Nine proposed by Brown and Batygin "does not hold up to detailed observations" pointing out the much larger sample size of 800 objects compared to the much smaller 14 and that conclusive studies based on said objects were "premature". She went further to explain the phenomenon of these extreme orbits could be due to gravitational occultation from Neptune when it migrated outwards earlier in the Solar System's history.[97]"
A profound moment where physics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence intersect.