The Nobel prize in physics 2024

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was announced on 8th October 2024. I’m writing about it after the event because I wanted to wait for some reaction. If you haven’t already, check out the press release. The prize wasn’t awarded to people who worked on the James Webb Space Telescope. It was awarded to John J Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”. The press release goes on to say “they trained artificial neural networks using physics”. It also says “John Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data”. Then it says “Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures”. Does that sound like physics to you?

Image from the Nobel committee’s Popular science background: They used physics to find patterns in information (pdf)

Take a look at the Nobel “popular physics” description for some background. There’s a section on associative memory, which is about pattern recognition. It talks about how you might mentally sift through a list of words to recollect a rare word such as the “rake” of a sloping floor in a cinema. It says this activity “is reminiscent of the associative memory that the physicist John Hopfield discovered in 1982. The Hopfield network can store patterns and has a method for recreating them. When the network is given an incomplete or slightly distorted pattern, the method can find the stored pattern that is most similar”. There’s also a section which refers to “statistical physics”, and says this: “Some states are more probable than others; this depends on the amount of available energy, which is described in an equation by the nineteenth-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann”. It also says “Hinton’s network utilised that equation, and the method was published in 1985 under the striking name of the Boltzmann machine”. That’s the Boltzmann machine, not the bullshit Boltzmann brain which allegedly pops into existence in interstellar space. Anyway, see for example the Brittanica article on Boltzmann, which refers to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.

The 2024 Nobel prize in physics was awarded for work that was not physics

Note that Hopfield’s work dates from 1982, and Hinton’s work dates from 1985. Something else to note is that Hinton shared the 2018 Turing Award. The Turing award is sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of Computing”, which is a big red flag. They didn’t train artificial networks using physics. It’s popular science not popular physics. It’s statistical mechanics not statistical physics. Their work was in computing, not physics. Despite the Nobel committee trying to insert the word physics left right and centre, the 2024 Nobel prize in physics was awarded for work that was not physics. It was software. Programming. Computing. It was IT work that was done over forty years ago. It wasn’t machine learning because nobody used that phrase back then. It was just pattern recognition.

Machine learning is like outsourcing your business intelligence and your decision making to a computer

I’m unhappy about this. All the more so because I’m an IT guy. I have a degree in Computer Science. I know about machine learning, and I do not like it. Machine learning is like outsourcing your business intelligence and your decision making to a computer. It’s the sort of thing sold to starry-eyed suckers by some smooth-talking TED guy with a headset and an iPad. The sort of guy who talks the trendy talk and paints a rosy future, but ends up fucking up and fucking off. I have similar negative views on AI. There’s been a whole catalogue of AI fails, such as McDonald’s drive-thru ordering that gave customers 260 chicken nuggets plus bacon on their ice cream. Or the Amazon AI recruitment tool that discriminated against women. Or the General Motors bot that sold a Chevy Tahoe for a dollar. Not to mention Google Photos, which called black people gorillas. The list goes on. My heart sinks when I have to use a chatbot. Have you ever tried getting any sense out of an AI system? You really notice the deficiencies when you talk about a precise subject of expertise, such as physics. Then you can spot the waffle, and the regurgitated text of no value. Or absolutely stupid pictures. That’s because the lights are out and there’s nobody home:

Google Gemini Nazi image See Google apologises for ‘woke’ AI tool on Tech Central

I’ve maybe mentioned it before, but like the lady scientist on the plane at the end of Twelve Monkeys, I’m in insurance. Take a look at an article called The impact of AI on insurance risk. It’s by the Direct Line Group. Sounds great doesn’t it? Now take a look at another article called Direct Line sees return to profit fall short and motor customers quit. They’ve lost nearly half a million customers in a year. Here’s yet another article, dated 11^th November 2024: Troubled Direct Line to axe 550 jobs as its boss embarks on a £100m cost-saving programme. They’ll probably end up getting taken over by Aviva. They’ll probably no longer exist. Their Chief Information Officer (CIO) is a guy called Ash Jokhoo. He was hired in 2021, and his greatest preoccupation is “using the latest technologies to serve customers more efficiently”. I don’t know whether he promoted AI at Direct Line, or whether he’s got a headset and an iPad. But I do know that he’s leaving Direct Line at the end of the year.

Let’s put an AI in charge of all our nuclear missiles and automated factories. What could possibly go wrong?

Talking of leaving, Geoffrey Hinton left Google so he could speak freely about the existential risk posed to humanity by AI. I share his sentiments. In fact my opinion of AI has been less than favourable ever since I watched The Terminator in 1984. Hey, let’s put an AI in charge of all our nuclear missiles and automated factories. What could possibly go wrong? People might scoff at the dangers, but one thing I’ve come to appreciate is just how irrational, illogical, and foolish people can be. Especially people who consider themselves to be well-educated and of above-average intelligence. People who occupy positions of power in business, education, and politics. What would happen if somebody created a genuine bona-fide artificial intelligence that had massive servers to process its machinations? The road to hell is paved with good intentions, so I imagine those machinations would feature a directive to save the planet. A directive which resulted in a souped up Thanos solution. So I suspect things wouldn’t work out too well for people:

Screenshot from the Terminator 2 opening scene, see YouTube

Hence if I occupied a position of power, I would ban all AI work tomorrow. Not only that, but if I thought somebody was doing AI work in secret, I would send in a SWAT team. We would be talking jail time. I certainly would not encourage it via a Nobel prize. Especially when that Nobel prize was supposed to be for physics as opposed to forty year old pattern recognition.

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton share the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics

Like I said, I’m unhappy about that. All the more so because some people in the science media are not. See Hamish Johnston’s Physics World article entitled John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton share the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics. Physics World is an Institute of Physics (IOP) magazine. Johnston’s article expresses no surprise that the Nobel prize for physics went to forty year old pattern recognition. Au contraire, he gives a link to another article which says IOP Publishing “publishes many papers in this field and has recently launched the Machine Learning series”. This is said to be “dedicated to the application and development of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) for the sciences”. Oh yeah? How about asking that AI to tell you how gravity works or what charge is or what energy is? It isn’t going to happen is it? Because like another of the science media’s diversion activities, namely quantum computing, it isn’t worth a hill of beans. These people know that there are problems in fundamental physics. However they also know that solving these problems, or even acknowledging them, would rock the boat with journals and institutions that have dug themselves into a hole. If they printed an article saying the electron is a wave in a closed path, like Schrödinger said, Joe Public will work out that charge is topological, which means color charge is bunk. And that electron mass is a measure of resistance to change-in-motion for that wave in a closed path, which means the Higgs mechanism is bunk. Hence they censor the good physics, and peddle bad physics instead.

Nobel Prize: Mimicking Human Intelligence with Neural Networks

Talking of which, I took a look at Quanta Magazine, but couldn’t find an article on the 2024 Nobel prize for physics. Maybe it will turn up. Or maybe they just decided to keep quiet. The APS physics magazine covered it. The article is called Nobel Prize: Mimicking Human Intelligence with Neural Networks, and it was written by Michael Schirber. Again there is no surprise that the Nobel prize for physics went to forty year old pattern recognition. Instead I got the impression that APS physics were quite happy with the situation:

Image from APS physics, caption: The 2024 physics Nobel laureates developed the earliest forms
of artficial intelligence (AI) by modeling neurons in the brain. This image was generated by AI.

Ditto for PhysOrg. Their article was Nobel Prize in physics spotlights key breakthroughs in AI revolution – making machines that learn. It originally featured in The Conversation, and was written by Ambuj Tewari, a professor of statistics at the University of Michigan. He sounded as if he was paddling hard to try to justify the work as worthy of a physics Nobel prize, but for me it just didn’t wash. I didn’t like his final sentence either: “By awarding the Nobel Prize in physics to Hopfield and Hinton, the prize committee has signaled its hope in humanity’s potential to use these advances to promote human well-being and to build a sustainable world”. A sustainable world?

They don’t like to mention overpopulation

Sigh. A sustainable world. Climate change is yet another diversion activity for the science media. But like everybody else who bangs on about climate change, they don’t like to mention overpopulation. In 1960 the population of Africa was circa 300 million, now it’s 1500 million, and there’s a whole lot of sub-Saharan slash and burn going on. In similar vein the population of Pakistan has risen from circa 50 million in 1960 to circa 250 million today, and they have a serious pollution problem. So does India, and lots of other countries. All that third world pollution isn’t doing the atmosphere any good. But outlets like Physics World don’t talk about it much:

Screenshot from Physics World

The UK government doesn’t talk about it much either. Just as they don’t talk about the palm oil plantations that are destroying the world’s jungles. They now cover 30 million hectares, which is 115,000 square miles. They don’t want to talk about the contrails either. You know, the contrails that you can see criss-crossing the sky at 39,000ft on a clear still day, adding up to a billion tones of high-altitude aviation emissions a year. Instead they’ll try to tell you that sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is made out of used cooking oil. They’ll also tell you that you can’t have a gas boiler or a petrol car, but it’s all fine and dandy for an incinerator on Portland to burn two hundred thousand tons of plastic every year. On top of that, they’ll fine you for using your wood-burning stove, but they don’t have a problem with the clear-felling of primal forests to provide Drax B with 6.5 million tonnes of wood pellets per annum.

The idea that artificial intelligence would be related to physics, of all things, might seem far-fetched

But I digress. Sticking to the physics, Peter Woit didn’t mention the 2024 Nobel prize in his Not Even Wrong blog. Matt Strassler didn’t mention it in his Of Particular Significance blog. Sean Carroll didn’t mention it in his preposterous universe blog either. However Ethan Siegel covered it in his starts with a bang blog. He said “the idea that artificial intelligence would be related to physics, of all things, might seem far-fetched on the surface”. Agreed. He also said “Why would a computer science breakthrough, you might ask yourself, be awarded the Nobel Prize in physics?” Quite. But then he tried to justify it. He failed. I thought Sabine Hossenfelder was spot on in her Backreaction blog. See her video entitled The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics Did Not Go To Physics – This physicist is very surprised. She was unhappy about it too, and she wasn’t the only one. See the Euronews article Is AI physics or chemistry? Nobel Prize wins spark debate about tech’s role in science. It quotes David Vivancos, CEO of the deep learning and AI organisation MindBigData dot com. He says “I am a big admirer of Hinton and Hopfield and they have created a marvellous discovery. But the thing is, it’s not in the realm of physics unless we think that physics is everything”. Well said. For more, see the Harvard Technology Review article called Machine Learning Stirs Controversy in Nobel Prize in Physics. It was written by Nischal Tamang, and the word plagiarism is mentioned. Also see the Reuters article Google’s Nobel prize winners stir debate over AI research by Martin Coulter. He quotes Noah Giansiracusa saying this: “What he did was phenomenal, but was it physics? I don’t think so. Even if there’s inspiration from physics, they’re not developing a new theory in physics or solving a longstanding problem in physics“. Hear hear.

The work falls into the field of computer science

Alternatively take a look at the Nature article entitled AI comes to the Nobels: double win sparks debate about scientific fields. It’s paywalled, but there’s an open access copy on a web site called Portside. It was written by Davide Castelvecchi, Ewen Callaway, and Diana Kwon. They tell us that “moments after the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences unveiled the winners of this year’s physics Nobel, social media lit up, with several physicists arguing that the science underlying machine learning, celebrated in the awards to Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, was not actually physics”. They quote Imperial College astrophysicist Jonathan Pritchard saying “I’m speechless”, and it’s “hard to see that this is a physics discovery”. They also quote Sabine Hossenfelder saying the work “falls into the field of computer science”. But in addition they quote Matt Strassler being positive about the award. He said this: “Hopfield and Hinton’s research was interdisciplinary, bringing together physics, math, computer science and neuroscience. In that sense, it belongs to all of these fields”. They also quote positive comments from Anil Ananthaswamy, Lenka Zdeborová, and Giorgio Parisi. On balance the article seems to be saying the award was OK. It looks like Nature doubled down on that on 22^nd October 2024 with Was the Nobel prize for physics? Yes – not that it matters:

Screenshot from the IT University of Copenhagen

It was by Michael Szell, Yifang Ma, and Roberta Sinatra, two of whom are in Copenhagen, just across the water from Sweden. Again it’s paywalled but you can find a copy elsewhere. It talks of robust data-driven methods “to contextualize this award using citation data”, and says they have indeed shown that “Hopfield’s 1982 paper on neural networks is indistinguishable from papers published in physics journals”. It also says “we assessed that interdisciplinary papers like Hopfield’s and Hinton’s are ripe for a Nobel Prize”, and that this year’s award “shows that the prize has caught up with reality”. They add that they’re “hopeful that this recognition will expedite the breakup of disciplinary silos”, which is “urgently needed to solve the world’s big challenges like climate change”.

Whatever next? A Nobel peace prize for Hamas?

Oh for fuck’s sake, here we go again. Climate change. The virtue-signalling road-to-hell reverse-Robin racket that takes from the poor and gives to the rich. We now have no natural gas storage in the UK, so we pay spot prices, so our retail prices have quadrupled. Natural gas is now four times as expensive in the UK as it is in the USA. And guess what? The price of electricity is tied to the price of natural gas. Even when it’s generated from renewables. Hence a lot of people can’t afford to heat their homes. I really feel for them, because our natural gas boiler was out of action for three weeks until yesterday. The cold was debilitating. Life was miserable until I put an electric heater in every room. God knows what that’s going to cost. Meanwhile high energy prices are killing UK industry. Steel production will be ending in the UK soon. Don’t believe what they say about electric arc smelting, because the electricity will be too expensive, just as it’s too expensive for aluminium smelting. In addition Vauxhall have just announced the closure of their Luton car plant. I’m with Billy Bob Thornton on this. Net zero is making us poor, and our current and previous governments just don’t care*. Nor does the science media. It censors any criticism of climate change. Not only that, it censors the physics that could make a difference. Hence I’m more than unhappy. Especially since a half share of the 2024 Nobel prize for chemistry was awarded to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, for an AI called AlphaFold2. Not only that, but UNRWA were nominated for the Nobel peace prize, which, apparently, is becoming a sick joke. The winner warned Israel against using nuclear bombs in Gaza. Whatever next? A Nobel peace prize for Hamas? Bah, all the Nobel prizes are becoming a sick joke. Not just the 2013 physics prize for a kludge that contradicts E=mc² and sets bad science in stone. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Alfred Nobel caused far more harm with his prizes than he ever did with his dynamite. So fuck you, Nobel prize committee. Fuck off.

 

* _{Especially since the road-to-hell insanity also extends to open door immigration for third-world freeloaders, a laissez-faire attitude to crime, junkies, and antisemitism, DEI discrimination against white people, and free rein for men in frocks to show their cocks in girls’ changing rooms. But hey, this is a physics website. Let’s keep the politics out of it.}