Interesting that they chose work on neural networks. Are they making a play to convert the Physics to the "& also computer science" Nobel? Physics has been in a bit of a rut
Sabine Hossenfelder says particle physics is completely done. The researchers are just using accelerators to get new "particles" that exist for milliseconds. She also says a "Grand Unified Theory" isn't possible.
That leaves astrophysics, but the unknown stuff is just extremely remote in time and space.
The Nobel in chemistry comes across--to my unscientific mind anyway--as similarly abstruse and not very consequential.
No offense to Sabine (and I am not a physicist) perhaps a "grand Unified Theory" is not possible, but surely it is possible that some new model could explain the large and small phenomena is a common way? Maybe not. Perhaps even the success of mathematical models is an illusion, not reflective of any underlying reality? Maybe it's like neural networks, just coincidentally really good at coming up with the right answer. Or maybe someone could prove the GUT is impossible and that would be a Nobel Prize topic.
I have a friend from college who was a physics major, who proposed to me that there was no end to particles being combinations of smaller particles and if we keep looking we will keep finding. If particles really are just waves in fields that kind of makes sense to me, but as I am not in particle physics I'll just assume that notion would be easy to eviscerate by a particle physicist.
Sabine Hossenfelder thinks that unifying quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of relativity is a real problem that physicists should work on, but she thinks that GUT is something that doesn't necessarily need to exist, so there's no reason to work on it, and that physicists are just looking for something like that because of ideas of beauty and symmetry, which leads them away. All of this is just Sabine Hossenfelder's opinion, and there are many physicists who disagree with her about GUT and her take on particle physics.
Whether mathematics is real or invented and to what extent it is one or the other is an interesting philosophical discussion, but we know for sure that mathematics is extremely useful. Even advances in pure mathematics that were thought to have no practical application at the time they were made can end up finding practical applications in the future, this has happened many times.
As for open problems in physics, they do exist, there is a Wikipedia page about open problems in physics, anyone who wants to look into it can go there. There are open problems about the physics of the Sun, about cosmology, about the foundations of quantum mechanics, about fluid dynamics about condensed matter, and so on.
Regarding the applications of Nobel Prize-winning work in Chemistry, this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarding scientists for designing new proteins and predicting protein structure. Perhaps some people have heard of AlphaFold? The Nobel Prize is awarding some of its creators. What are the possible applications of the ability to design and predict proteins? Obviously medicine and new materials. The 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to the creators of quantum dots. Applications of quantum dots include things like LEDs, television screens, and medical imaging.
Oh yeah, the protein folding problem was huge. That will be spinning billions of dollars in cool new things over the next few decades. Oddly enough, when I studied the problem back in the 80s they told us we actually could calculate the solutions directly using quantum chemistry, except there was not (and perhaps would never be) enough computing power to do it. So instead they solved it decades later by showing the known structures to AI and having it "learn" how to deduce new ones. Amazing but also kind of suggestive that your models that give you solutions don't actually have to have anything to say about what is going on under the covers.
The awards to T.S. Elliot, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway were well founded but the Committee has ignored all other strong American fiction writers since with the few western males receiving one being leftists like Gunter Grass, Camus and Sartre or people no one had ever heard of then or since. Those to Issy Singer, V.S. Naipaul & Solzhenitsyn were deserved. Bob Dylan is a good entertainer but giving him the Literature prize was silly and unnecessary.
So, Hard Science. Sounds like someone may object to the adjective. Soft Science sounds so much nicer, don't you think? More comfy and accepting of any body type, etc. The reality is that hard Science is actual reality-based mathematics/actual physics/actual chemical investigation and rationalization. It's an ongoing process, never static (the' Science is settled' is Anathema).
Soft science isn't any of that, it's become a tool in the hands of the 'Hearts and Minds' crowd. So you can see why Barack Hussein Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for, well, just being elected President. It's the whole 'Heats and Minds' crowd winning, so they celebrate. Makes sense. I think.
Science is an ongoing process, and new and better knowledge can always emerge in the future, but that doesn't mean that you can never form or claim stable knowledge about reality in the present, that would be absurd, and the Nobel Science Prizes would not even exist if that were the case. It is completely rational to use the available evidence to form an understanding of something in the present, and if the evidence changes, then you can change your understanding in the future. So, for example, climate change is supported by overwhelming evidence, and you can verify that climate scientists have a consensus on the matter. It is possible that in the future new evidence will emerge that will overturn such a consensus, but until such a thing happens, it makes sense to use the current consensus and the current overwhelming evidence to form your understanding of the matter.
When people argue over who the greatest geniuses of science were, they inevitably come to either Einstein or Newton. I argue that people think so because those two worked on fundamentally simple systems. All their work and insight can be reduced to a bunch of simple equations, and the equations work almost flawlessly to predict how real world systems will behave (and we know also where the models break down and how).
There can be no Einstein of biology. There cannot be a simple math equation to tell you what will happen to a given person if you knock out fifty percent of the copies of gene X. In the even softer sciences, like economics, you cannot write a simple equation to tell you what the Dow Jones will be tomorrow.
So the hard sciences are more rigorous because they are easier.
I'd say the truth about woke in tech is obscured by the right's pro female bias. MIT was shown to penalize male applicants 2:1 and Noone cared, instead the right cheared victory over an MIT press release. Similarly all the right's video pundits are adopting radical feminist masculinity studies rhetoric lifted right from the APA in 2016 with minor rebranding. Woke will inevitably win because the opposition is so dumb.
I agree that the demographics of recent Nobel winners are strong evidence that the Nobel committee is just doing its usual job, undisturbed by crazy fads, but obviously you can’t assume that women and non-white scientists who win a Nobel are DEI, that would be very irrational. The 2023 Nobel Prizes winners included two white women and one Tunisian man, and there is no good reason to think that they didn’t deserve their prizes. Also, in the future, you would expect to see more women and non-white winners, especially given how many elite Indian and East Asian scientists work at top universities in the US, plus you have the fact that countries like South Korea, China and India haven’t won many Nobels yet.
The reason the Nobel Prize probably won’t go woke is fear of the competition becoming more prestigious. I remember reading an interview with someone on the Nobel committee, where they were asked about diversity, and the answer was basically that they can’t award the Nobel Prize to someone who hasn’t done distinctive and important work, because otherwise the prize loses its cultural value. It turns out that if you put important cultural institutions in the hands of people whose priority is to maintain the prestige of those cultural institutions, you gain some protection. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, art museums and many other institutions in the West ended up in the hands of people who cared more about looking woke.
Right. There are a lot of rich guys who have started prizes in recent decades, many with bigger cash payouts than the Nobels. The Nobels have the world's best brand name, but even they can waste it if they go woke.
The NYT is still at the top of its field. Yes, they devote space to woke nonsense, but they also have great reporting and almost no one does that better on their scale without having equal or worse problems. The issue is competition. NYT's competition tends to be other liberal media outlets that also do great work but also have space for woke nonsense, and then you have conservative media that is so bad it doesn't even qualify as serious competition.
I guess it's just easier to create a good science prize, assuming you have the money, because for those prizes you just need to get together a bunch of elite scientists and have them vote on who to award each year.
"The 2023 Nobel Prizes winners included two white women and one Tunisian man, and there is no good reason to think that they didn’t deserve their prizes. "
The two women discovered CRISPR, the DNA editing technology, a historic development in molecular biology with enormous implications. See Walter Isaacson's biography of Jennifer A. Doudna, "The Code Breaker," which gives due credit to Emmanuelle Charpentier as well.
Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The two women I mentioned were awarded in 2023, they are Anne L’Huillier, who was one of three scientists to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, and Katalin Karikó, who was one of two scientists to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Log-rolling and politics are endemic in the award of all such prizes. That's what's known as "a good reason". The presumption is rebuttable, but you haven't.
One of the chemistry winners, Hassabis, is half Cypriot/half Chinese.
There's a credible accusation from a prominent AI researcher that Hopfield and Hinton shouldn't have been awarded due to plagiarism and incorrect attribution:
Nice tie-in to Milton, a once illustrious name if a bit nerdish of late.
Looks to be a fearsome hurricane, though.
There is no tie-in to "Milton".
Young white men need to prepare for careers where there are still objective standards and bullshit walks.
Interesting that they chose work on neural networks. Are they making a play to convert the Physics to the "& also computer science" Nobel? Physics has been in a bit of a rut
I mean, what else is there to discover in physics?
unify quantum and relativity or eliminate one or both of them with a better model?
LOL if you say so
Sabine Hossenfelder says particle physics is completely done. The researchers are just using accelerators to get new "particles" that exist for milliseconds. She also says a "Grand Unified Theory" isn't possible.
That leaves astrophysics, but the unknown stuff is just extremely remote in time and space.
The Nobel in chemistry comes across--to my unscientific mind anyway--as similarly abstruse and not very consequential.
No offense to Sabine (and I am not a physicist) perhaps a "grand Unified Theory" is not possible, but surely it is possible that some new model could explain the large and small phenomena is a common way? Maybe not. Perhaps even the success of mathematical models is an illusion, not reflective of any underlying reality? Maybe it's like neural networks, just coincidentally really good at coming up with the right answer. Or maybe someone could prove the GUT is impossible and that would be a Nobel Prize topic.
I have a friend from college who was a physics major, who proposed to me that there was no end to particles being combinations of smaller particles and if we keep looking we will keep finding. If particles really are just waves in fields that kind of makes sense to me, but as I am not in particle physics I'll just assume that notion would be easy to eviscerate by a particle physicist.
Sabine Hossenfelder thinks that unifying quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of relativity is a real problem that physicists should work on, but she thinks that GUT is something that doesn't necessarily need to exist, so there's no reason to work on it, and that physicists are just looking for something like that because of ideas of beauty and symmetry, which leads them away. All of this is just Sabine Hossenfelder's opinion, and there are many physicists who disagree with her about GUT and her take on particle physics.
Whether mathematics is real or invented and to what extent it is one or the other is an interesting philosophical discussion, but we know for sure that mathematics is extremely useful. Even advances in pure mathematics that were thought to have no practical application at the time they were made can end up finding practical applications in the future, this has happened many times.
As for open problems in physics, they do exist, there is a Wikipedia page about open problems in physics, anyone who wants to look into it can go there. There are open problems about the physics of the Sun, about cosmology, about the foundations of quantum mechanics, about fluid dynamics about condensed matter, and so on.
Regarding the applications of Nobel Prize-winning work in Chemistry, this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarding scientists for designing new proteins and predicting protein structure. Perhaps some people have heard of AlphaFold? The Nobel Prize is awarding some of its creators. What are the possible applications of the ability to design and predict proteins? Obviously medicine and new materials. The 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to the creators of quantum dots. Applications of quantum dots include things like LEDs, television screens, and medical imaging.
Oh yeah, the protein folding problem was huge. That will be spinning billions of dollars in cool new things over the next few decades. Oddly enough, when I studied the problem back in the 80s they told us we actually could calculate the solutions directly using quantum chemistry, except there was not (and perhaps would never be) enough computing power to do it. So instead they solved it decades later by showing the known structures to AI and having it "learn" how to deduce new ones. Amazing but also kind of suggestive that your models that give you solutions don't actually have to have anything to say about what is going on under the covers.
You should check out the Nobel prize for literature.
The awards to T.S. Elliot, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway were well founded but the Committee has ignored all other strong American fiction writers since with the few western males receiving one being leftists like Gunter Grass, Camus and Sartre or people no one had ever heard of then or since. Those to Issy Singer, V.S. Naipaul & Solzhenitsyn were deserved. Bob Dylan is a good entertainer but giving him the Literature prize was silly and unnecessary.
Disagree about Dylan, the poet of my generation. Can you think of a better?
If by "my generation" you mean baby boomers, you betcha.
Dana Gioia.
A real poet, not a song lyricist.
I just looked up the list--quite a host of forgettable writers over the past 10-15 years.
So, Hard Science. Sounds like someone may object to the adjective. Soft Science sounds so much nicer, don't you think? More comfy and accepting of any body type, etc. The reality is that hard Science is actual reality-based mathematics/actual physics/actual chemical investigation and rationalization. It's an ongoing process, never static (the' Science is settled' is Anathema).
Soft science isn't any of that, it's become a tool in the hands of the 'Hearts and Minds' crowd. So you can see why Barack Hussein Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for, well, just being elected President. It's the whole 'Heats and Minds' crowd winning, so they celebrate. Makes sense. I think.
Science is an ongoing process, and new and better knowledge can always emerge in the future, but that doesn't mean that you can never form or claim stable knowledge about reality in the present, that would be absurd, and the Nobel Science Prizes would not even exist if that were the case. It is completely rational to use the available evidence to form an understanding of something in the present, and if the evidence changes, then you can change your understanding in the future. So, for example, climate change is supported by overwhelming evidence, and you can verify that climate scientists have a consensus on the matter. It is possible that in the future new evidence will emerge that will overturn such a consensus, but until such a thing happens, it makes sense to use the current consensus and the current overwhelming evidence to form your understanding of the matter.
It can get silly: intersectional feminism and chemistry.
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/10/08/intersectional-feminism-and-chemistry-the-fracas-continues/
When people argue over who the greatest geniuses of science were, they inevitably come to either Einstein or Newton. I argue that people think so because those two worked on fundamentally simple systems. All their work and insight can be reduced to a bunch of simple equations, and the equations work almost flawlessly to predict how real world systems will behave (and we know also where the models break down and how).
There can be no Einstein of biology. There cannot be a simple math equation to tell you what will happen to a given person if you knock out fifty percent of the copies of gene X. In the even softer sciences, like economics, you cannot write a simple equation to tell you what the Dow Jones will be tomorrow.
So the hard sciences are more rigorous because they are easier.
I'd say the truth about woke in tech is obscured by the right's pro female bias. MIT was shown to penalize male applicants 2:1 and Noone cared, instead the right cheared victory over an MIT press release. Similarly all the right's video pundits are adopting radical feminist masculinity studies rhetoric lifted right from the APA in 2016 with minor rebranding. Woke will inevitably win because the opposition is so dumb.
The RIGHT is pro feminist? I thought it was more of a leftist thing.
Speak for yourself.
Woke will win because the future non-white majority Amerikwa has already been born.
I agree that the demographics of recent Nobel winners are strong evidence that the Nobel committee is just doing its usual job, undisturbed by crazy fads, but obviously you can’t assume that women and non-white scientists who win a Nobel are DEI, that would be very irrational. The 2023 Nobel Prizes winners included two white women and one Tunisian man, and there is no good reason to think that they didn’t deserve their prizes. Also, in the future, you would expect to see more women and non-white winners, especially given how many elite Indian and East Asian scientists work at top universities in the US, plus you have the fact that countries like South Korea, China and India haven’t won many Nobels yet.
The reason the Nobel Prize probably won’t go woke is fear of the competition becoming more prestigious. I remember reading an interview with someone on the Nobel committee, where they were asked about diversity, and the answer was basically that they can’t award the Nobel Prize to someone who hasn’t done distinctive and important work, because otherwise the prize loses its cultural value. It turns out that if you put important cultural institutions in the hands of people whose priority is to maintain the prestige of those cultural institutions, you gain some protection. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, art museums and many other institutions in the West ended up in the hands of people who cared more about looking woke.
Right. There are a lot of rich guys who have started prizes in recent decades, many with bigger cash payouts than the Nobels. The Nobels have the world's best brand name, but even they can waste it if they go woke.
You could say the same about NYT.
Or Harvard...or just about any prestigious old institution besides the Nobel prizes
The NYT is still at the top of its field. Yes, they devote space to woke nonsense, but they also have great reporting and almost no one does that better on their scale without having equal or worse problems. The issue is competition. NYT's competition tends to be other liberal media outlets that also do great work but also have space for woke nonsense, and then you have conservative media that is so bad it doesn't even qualify as serious competition.
I guess it's just easier to create a good science prize, assuming you have the money, because for those prizes you just need to get together a bunch of elite scientists and have them vote on who to award each year.
The Nobel Peace Prizes are not so great.
It's those damn Norwegians!
sometimes they are the wishful thinking peace prizes
It said a lot about BO that he accepted his prize just for being elected.
But the physics prize this year has made the committee a laughingstock. That's not the usual job. It certainly doesn't support this idea:
> they can’t award the Nobel Prize to someone who hasn’t done distinctive and important work, because otherwise the prize loses its cultural value.
"The 2023 Nobel Prizes winners included two white women and one Tunisian man, and there is no good reason to think that they didn’t deserve their prizes. "
Actually, there is.
The two women discovered CRISPR, the DNA editing technology, a historic development in molecular biology with enormous implications. See Walter Isaacson's biography of Jennifer A. Doudna, "The Code Breaker," which gives due credit to Emmanuelle Charpentier as well.
Developed CRISPR. A process is developed and not stumbled upon by measurement.
Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The two women I mentioned were awarded in 2023, they are Anne L’Huillier, who was one of three scientists to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, and Katalin Karikó, who was one of two scientists to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Apologies.
And what are these reasons?
Log-rolling and politics are endemic in the award of all such prizes. That's what's known as "a good reason". The presumption is rebuttable, but you haven't.
One of the chemistry winners, Hassabis, is half Cypriot/half Chinese.
There's a credible accusation from a prominent AI researcher that Hopfield and Hinton shouldn't have been awarded due to plagiarism and incorrect attribution:
https://x.com/SchmidhuberAI/status/1844022724328394780
Is this Physics? or it this award just an attempt by the Nobel committee to ride on the AI bandwagon?