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".
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.
Those 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.
So 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
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.
> They already got a Nobel prize, one of the quickest in history.
From some aspects, it was late. Gravitation waves were predicted decades ago. It's almost unfair to predict something but then have engineering take decades to catch up to be able to prove/disprove the theory. This is just commentary on the notion of being right decades before the world is ready for it. Of course, it can go the other way where one is assumed to be right but then isn't (e.g., many components of string theory).
Just because there happens to be economical viability for a field currently doesn't mean that field needs less introspection. Exactly what research contributions the people who are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of GPUs at the next random "research" problem at the top of the queue at Microsoft or Google are making to deserve a Nobel?
Too often there is near zero intuition for why research in AI yields such incredible results. They're mainly black boxes that happen to work extremely well with no explanation and someone at a prestigious institution just happened to be there to stamp their name on top of the publication.
Big difference between research in AI and any non-computational/statistical/luck-based science.
That's an interesting definition of "most physics". I mean, I find high-energy physics as fascinating as the next guy but there are other fields, too, you know, like astrophysics & cosmology, condensed-matter physics, (quantum) optics, environmental physics, biophysics, medical physics, …
The corners of physics I have some contact with (climate/weather modelling and astrophysics) seem pretty dynamic to me. Each generation of CMIP models seems to be significantly better than the previous.
A 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
The 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.
By 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.
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".