Predicted Nobel for Quantum Computing

Dr. Bee predicts:

Which is why my best bet for this year’s 1:35 Physics Nobel is quantum computing. This is clearly on the bingo card, it’s just a 1:40 matter of time until we check this box. Likely candidates are David Deutsch and Peter Shor.

No, not likely. Not yet, anyway.

Nobel prizes for theoretical advances are only given after experimental confirmation. If someone makes a quantum computer that breaks RSA encryption, then that would be an achievement that the Nobel folks would like to recognize.

IK personally think that they should have given a prize for the Higgs mechanism when it proved so essential to the stunning successes of the Standard Model in the 1970s.

Nope. Nobel does not work that way. Higgs could be confirmed by finding a new particle, and no prize was to be given until that particle is found.

There has been no prize for dark matter, despite dozens of brilliant works describing it. Until someone finds a piece of dark matter in a lab.

3:51 And as my fifth and final guess I have a topic that I think should win 3:56 the Nobel Prize but probably won’t, which is modified Newtonian dynamics. That is because, 4:03 regardless of what you think about the maths, it’s been extremely successful in making predictions. 4:09 It has predicted that the Tully-Fisher relation is valid for all types of galaxies, 4:14 it has predicted the height of the second peak of the CMB, it has predicted that galaxies should 4:20 form as early as the James Webb Telescope has observed. Even if these regularities 4:26 will eventually be explained by something else, modified gravity still predicted them correctly.

Interesting opinion, but those people deny that dark matter is a thing, so I don't think they will win a prize as long as people are looking for dark matter particles.

My fourth bet is a topic that I hope will not win, which is cosmological inflation, 3:15 that’s the idea that the early briefly underwent a phase of 3:19 exponential expansion. Astrophysicists talk about inflation as if it’s settled science, 3:25 but the evidence is sketchier than your friend who always ‘forgets’ his wallet.

It is not settled science, because we do not know what the inflation is. Inflation is not getting a prize.

Alfred Wegener discovered continental drift in 1915, one of the great scientific breakthroughs of all time. He got no prizes or respect, because he could not nail down the mechanism in a way that could be accepted and confirmed by others. Like it or not, that's how it works.

So I say, no prizes for quantum computing, inflation, or dark matter.

Here is a new Bloomberg video: The Race to Harness Quantum Computing's Mind-Bending Power | The Future With Hannah Fry. It says our communications systems will be insecure in 5-7 years. And China may be passing us up. The usual hype.

Update: The Physics prize went to two neural net researchers. Following tradition, they were awoken at 2am this morning.

Dr. Bee reports:

0:00 The 2024 Nobel Prize in physics… did not go to physicists. It went to two computer 0:06 scientists for developing the first neural networks, which became the basis 0:11 of what we now call artificial intelligence. If you still doubt that physics is in crisis, 0:16 the fact that the Nobel Prize in physics goes to computer scientists should make you think. Really, 0:21 I’m just grumpy because all my predictions were wrong. I guess my crystal ball needs 0:26 a software update.

The prize work is decades old, and not the large language models like ChatGPT that have gotten so much excitement. I am tempted to infer that the Nobel committee thought that ChatGPT and other LLMs were the hottest advance in science, so it wanted a prize to recognize that, even if the winners never worked on LLMs.