The Physics News is no New Physics

Physicists must be annoyed that the Nobel Physics prize was for computer science, with no application to Physics.

Here is a defense:

All this sounds nice for computer science, or for building language translators or self-driving cars, but is it Physics? I’d argue the answer is “yes.” These ideas of network properties, stability, and transitions didn’t spring up de novo, but emerged via classic problems in statistical mechanics, one of the fundamental, core areas of physics. Hopfield’s model was, in fact, a “spin glass” model, originally developed to describe magnetic materials and phase transitions.

They were inspired by biological models of the brain also, but today's neural nets are really designed to do what can be made efficient on consumer gaming chips, and do not have much to do with either physics or biology.

I wonder why these guys even take the calls from Sweden. They insisted on interviewing Hinton in a California hotel room at 2am, and keeping him up all morning. He would still get the money if he had slept in.

It is debatable whether these guys did much that was novel. Ignoring that point, look at all the work that Physicists brag out that did not win. There were surely nominations for cosmic inflation, ER=EPR, dark matter, string theory, quantum gravity, holographic principle, supersymmetry, quantum computing, many-worlds. The Swedes have a pretty good record of resisting fads like these.

Is Physics dead? The last big advanced was the discovery of the Higgs boson about 10 years ago, confirming a theory from 50 years before that. There isn't much new and interesting coming out of Physics anymore. Not Big Physics, anyway. I guess there is still lots of good work being done in material science.

Happy Columbus Day. The discovery of the New World to Europeans in 1492 was one of the most important events in all of human history. I cannot think of any other single event that changed the world so much.