I'm equally as confused; huge WTF moment. Seems like a paradigm breakthrough, in that Nobel Prizes can be given for discoveries in tangential fields. Or perhaps it's due to Dr. Hopfields physicist status, that all his discoveries are considered physics related? Or that NNs are considered a part of physics / nature?
It is different for Peace prize , it has always been political and different from day one , it is awarded by Norwegian noble committee which is appointed by the Norwegian parliament.
All other prizes are awarded in Sweden by Swedish academy(for literature) , Royal Swedish Academy for sciences (physics and chemistry) , karolinska institute (physiology) are all professionally established organizations at the time of Nobel’s death with other activities professional organizations do.
Norwegian Nobel committee while in theory independent is just people appointed by the parliament with no need to have professional standing in their field on which they are supposed to award the prize in and it always shows .
Obama’s prize is hardly the first egregious one or even the most outrageous Henry Kissinger got one .
So it kind of matters on the changed standards in swedish technical ones while peace has been disaster for half century or more , with non transparent process selected by ex- MPs
Obama’s and Kissinger’s prizes are both disastrous for entirely different reasons. And I don’t mean anything partisan by that. Kissinger was awarded a peace prize for achieving a cease fire in the Vietnam war … a war in which he’d personally been responsible for some of the worst and most illegal excesses. Obama was awarded the peace prize for literally nothing. It was anticipatory, meant to urge him towards ending American wars in the Middle East (he escalated instead). The Nobel committee gets it wrong looking both forwards and backwards.
It is less about on what reasons made them poor laureates specifically and more important on what is wrong with the process itself
Unless the process of selection of the committee (unqualified, political) and process of selection of the winner(opaque and inconsistent criteria) is fixed we will have poor candidates winning it in the future too
Unlike the economic prize peace was one that Alfred Noble actually wanted himself to be an award given too.
One could also argue peace prize should be the most important of them all. Noble wished to mitigate the military application of his invention, the peace prize should be achieving that most.
The continued poor judgment of the parliament in selecting the committee and the committee in selecting winners devalues the prize for future winners and devalues the good work the Swedish institutions have put in making it the premier award in their fields
When Alfred Nobel wrote his will in 1895, there was no computer science or information theory.
One could argue it's closer to mathematics than physics, but if you'd say to him that someone made sand think like a human he might even put it under the medicine category.
I don't know if this is a travesty that they awarded the prize to work on non-physical systems to jump on a bandwagon or that there was nothing else obvious enough to the board in actual physics to give this to.
If I was the awardee I'd consider declining just out of respect to the field.
The linked document connects their work to physics as follows:
"The Hopfeld network utilises physics
that describes a material’s characteristics due to its
atomic spin – a property that makes each atom a tiny
magnet. The network as a whole is described in a
manner equivalent to the energy in the spin system
found in physics, and is trained by fnding values for
the connections between the nodes so that the saved
images have low energy"
"Hinton used tools from statistical physics, the science
of systems built from many similar components."
100% agreed as I can't think of any one individual since(1) who has done as much for all of science and engineering as he ultimately did; alas, they are not awarded posthumously.
(1) Newton would be a strong contender on a "for all time" basis, but even he would've probably needed to share it with Leibniz, which would have driven him absolutely ~b o n k e r s~, like wet hornet in a hot outhouse mad, LOL.
"This year’s laureates used tools from physics to construct methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning."
Does this mean if I'd use a deep understanding of birds to design way more aerodynamic airplanes, I could get the Nobel prize in physiology/medicine? Don't get me wrong, their work is probably prize worthy, but shouldn't the Nobel prize in physics be awarded for discoveries in the _physical world_?
Hm, they have to fit them into Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, or Peace. I guess physics is the closest they can get without a gross missplacement? (Although you might be able to absue literature for LLMs?)
I think that you can grow mathematics through applied mathematics. It's something that grows the domain where Mathematics is useful, even though the maths themselves where known and somewhat well understood in a more abstract way.
Considering this, it feels odd not to allow a similar thing to happen on physics.
It's definitely not how "they" work. It's not like a committee choosing an achievement across all the fields and then trying to put it into one of the 5 buckets.
We have Turning Award, Fields Award and the other thousands of awards for achievements that can't be categorized as Physics/Biology/Economics/Chemistry.
But, the starting point of Neural Networks in the ML/AI sense, is cybernetics + Rosenblatt's perceptron, research done mathematicians (who became early computer scientists)
That's why I wrote that it was unexpected.I'm not taking position of if this was deserved or undeserved, but this was clearly in the realm of physics and inspired by it.
Accepting wrong arguments in support of positions you have is not good way to live your life. It leads to constipation.
I studied physics in the 90s and we had an NNs course, where most of the models were inspired by physics (MLPs was just one). NNs have been used since decades for identifying e.g. the trajectories of particles at CERN. I remember Hinton's work with Sejnowski (who probably should also be awarded). I was actually surprised to find out that Hinton was not a physicist by training
Obviously physicists take great interest in models of the brain or models of intelligence. All of physics is modeling , after all
Not all modelling is physics, but a rather large part of modeling is. My PhD is in complex systems, and you would be surprised by the range of systems we did study. My work was on a more "traditional" field of high dimension fractal surfaces, but we had a student working on public transit models, another on ecological pattern formation, and so on.
At least the somewhat free interpretation of field boundaries is nothing new. The physicist Rutherford ("All science is either Physics or stamp collecting")[1]
won the Chemistry Nobel Prize.
Influence and consideration of the Zeitgeist is also nothing new. Einstein got his prize for the discovery of the Photoelectric Effect and not Relativity.
[1] I know that some people have interpreted this quote in favor of the other sciences but I think that is far fetched.
I IS a physics problem. Non physicists tend of think that the only areas being studied are high energy and/or cosmology, but modern physics covers a multitude of areas, including complex systems.
Does that mean that computer scientists who do neural network research should be considered physicists? Do physics journals accept submissions on neural networks research under the same justification?
> Does this mean if I'd use a deep understanding of birds to design way more aerodynamic airplanes, I could get the Nobel prize in physiology/medicine?
Yes I think it does. But those planes would have to create one hell of a buzz!
The Society for Birdology now has the pleasure of jointly awarding posthumously Plato and Diogenes with the Distinguished Birdologist Award. Their findings on human anatomy used insights from birdology at critical points. Well done, lads!
I think this is the Royal Academy of Sciences way to admit that Physics as a research subject has ground to a halt. String theory suffocated theoretical high energy physics for nearly half a century with nothing to show for it, and a lot of other areas of fundamental physics are kind of done.
It really has not, though. There is more to physics than high-energy and cosmology, and there is no shortage of deserving contributions of smaller scope. It really is bizarre that deep learning would make it to the top of the list.
Could you give me some examples of areas of fundamental physics that are vital and have done some significant discoveries lately? I genuinely would like to know, because I really can't think of any.
"Vital" is completely subjective but I'd throw stuff around quantum information into the ring. Maybe you'd consider the loop-hole free Bell tests performed in 2015 and awarded the 2022 Nobel prize to count?
I think the prize in 2022 was a nice prize, but it could still be considering just tidying the corners. In the end it just proved that things really work as most of us has thought it worked for decades.
I'm probably not the right person to ask, but off the top of my head: superconductivity of high-pressure hydrides; various quantum stuff like quantum computing, quantum cryptography, quantum photonics, quantum thermodynamics; topological phases; rare decays (double beta, etc.); new discoveries in cosmic rays, etc.
My point was that physics is a big and active field, stagnation at the smallest and largest scales notwithstanding. Note also that the Nobel committee is not in any way limited to "newsworthy" stuff and has in many cases awarded prizes decades after the fact.
I think this is (very) inaccurate. It feels more like them trying to jump on a "hot topic" bandwagon (machine learning/AI hype is huge).
Physics as a discipline hasn't really stalled at all. Fundamental physics arguably has, because no one really has any idea how to get close to making experimental tests that would distinguish the competing ideas. But even in fundamental physics there are cool developments like the stuff from Jonathan Oppenheim and collaborators in the last couple of years.
That said "physics" != "fundamental physics" and physics of composite systems ranging from correlated electron systems, and condensed matter through to galaxies and cosmology is very far from dead.
I don't know exactly what they hope to gain by jumping on that bandwagon though; neither the physicists nor the computer scientists are going to value this at all. And dare I say, the general populace associated with the two fields isn't going to either - case in point, this hn post.
If there weren't any noble-worthy nominations for physics, maybe skip it? (Although that hasn't happened since 1972 across any field)
I kinda doubt it. The kind of people who end up nominating people for Nobels or even making the decisions on these aren't really struggling for grant funding.
But the system they have succeeded in optimises for people who can sell themselves well enough to get that funding. These people live and breathe selling themselves for funding. Every buzzword, sexy plot, and dynamic presentation has got them here and it's not like they plan to stop.
There's no need to skip it, there's probably a big backlog from previous shortlists :)
But yeah, they could have passed. That would have been cool.
Also, there's a ton of extremely amazing shit in astronomy, or even photolithography, or simulations of physics (though that's basically what the chemistry prize was this year).
I just briefly looked into what Jonathan Oppenheim is working on, and I’d say he’s part of the problem. More speculative work that might or might not be testable in a distant future.
It used to be that there was some experimental result or other phenomena that required explanation which lead to a theoretical model that could be tested. That worked very well.
Now there’s some theoretical considerations that leads to a theoretical model that can’t be tested. It didn’t work for Aristotle and it doesn’t work for string theorists (and similar).
Why doesn't this experimental result count as requiring explanation?
We know (for example) silver atoms have mass, and that massive objects exert gravity (which we understand as warping of space-time according to GR).
We know that we can put silver atoms in quantum superpositions of being in different positions (for example in a sequential Stern-Gerlach type experiment).
We have (essentially) absolutely no theoretical understanding of what is going on to space-time when a thing with mass is in such a superposition. Quantum mechanics does not successfully model gravity, and general relativity contains no superpositions, so the situation is completely beyond our theoretical understanding. This isn't a theoretical consideration, this is something real that you can do in an undergrad physics lab experiment pretty easily.
Now the problem is that the models we have developed so far to deal with this situation turned out to be (wildly) too difficult for us to test. I think it is very far from clear that the Oppenheim & co model falls into this category - imo its completely reasonable for them to be spending theoretical effort working out what is needed to test their model.
Because it's not an experimental result. There are two disparate experimental results, one about superpositions and one about gravity. There's no experimental result about gravity being or not being in superpositions. What will happen to gravity (if there is any) in a double split experiment is pure theoretical speculations.
And I readily admit that it would be interesting to know what would happen. But many decades of more or less convoluted hypotheses has proved to be unfruitful. We need a new way to do fundamental physics, or if possible go back to the old way, because the current one clearly doesn't work.
My sense is that we might have reached the limits of what we can do in high-energy or fundamental physics without accessing energy levels or other extreme states that we currently can't access as they are beyond our capacity to generate.
From what I've read (not a professional physicist) string theory is not testable unless we can either examine a black hole or create particle accelerators the size of the Moon's orbit (at least). Many other proposed theories are similar.
There is some speculation that the hypothetical planet nine -- a 1-5 Earth mass planet predicted in the far outer solar system on the basis of the orbits of comets and Kuiper Belt / TNO objects -- could be a primordial black hole captured by the solar system. A black hole of that mass would be about the size of a marble to a golf ball, but would have 1-5g gravity at the distance of Earth's radius.
If such an object did exist it would be within space probe range, which would mean we could examine a black hole. That might get us un-stuck.
If we can't do something like that, maybe we should instead focus on other areas of physics that we can access and that have immense practical applications: superconductivity, condensed matter physics, plasmas / fusion, etc.
> My sense is that we might have reached the limits of what we can do in high-energy or fundamental physics without accessing energy levels or other extreme states that we currently can't access
How can we know, as past decades theoretical high-energy physics has studied made-up mathematical universes that don't tell much about our real universe. We haven't really given it that much of a try, yet.
Regarding the primordial black hole:
"Konstantin Batygin commented on this, saying while it is possible for Planet Nine to be a primordial black hole, there is currently not enough evidence to make this idea more plausible than any other alternative."
Regarding planet 9 in general:
"Further skepticism about the Planet Nine hypothesis arose in 2020, based on results from the Outer Solar System Origins Survey and the Dark Energy Survey, with the OSSOS documenting over 800 trans-Neptunian objects and the DES discovering 316 new ones.[94] Both surveys adjusted for observational bias and concluded that of the objects observed there was no evidence for clustering.[95] The authors go further to explain that practically all objects' orbits can be explained by physical phenomena rather than a ninth planet as proposed by Brown and Batygin.[96] An author of one of the studies, Samantha Lawler, said the hypothesis of Planet Nine proposed by Brown and Batygin "does not hold up to detailed observations" pointing out the much larger sample size of 800 objects compared to the much smaller 14 and that conclusive studies based on said objects were "premature". She went further to explain the phenomenon of these extreme orbits could be due to gravitational occultation from Neptune when it migrated outwards earlier in the Solar System's history.[97]"
> Physics as a research subject has ground to a halt
Max Planck was told by his professor to not go into Physics because "almost everything is already discovered". Planck said he didn't want to discover anything, just learn the fundamentals.
First, I didn't say that I thought everything already was discovered, but that the fundamental physics community doesn’t discover new things. That is due to how physics research is practiced today and has nothing to do with how much that is left to discover.
Second, even if it obviously wasn't true when Planck was told that almost everything is discovered, it doesn't say anything about the state today.
Upon reading the Hopfield paper back in 1982, I concluded that it's not worth it to pursue a physics career, and more efficient to put the effort into AI research, as at some point the AI will solve all the remaining science problems in a couple of milliseconds. I might have erred by a few decades, but overall seems like we are on track.
Just because those countries could not realistically engage in a war with the US, seeing as they lack the necessary technology. Obviously, if you shoot fish in a barrel you're not starting a war with the fish, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing much to advance peace with the fish.
Tangential to your question but not the premise of this subthread/post - he became president in Feb 2009 and got the award in October.
I don't think he started any new wars, but he inherited some and continued. Anyway, the point here should be the absurdity of a lot of Nobel awards and that stands - especially in his case.
I mean Trump was nominated for the award for fuck's sake! More than 2 or 3 times iirc. So anyway.
The Nobel peace prize is awarded by a different institution than the science ones. And there are hundreds of people that can nominate, doesn't mean that a nomination reflects anything upon the committee that awards the prize.
Each of the Nobel prizes is awarded by a different committee from a different organization. The Nobel Peace prize was established at the same time and in the same way as the Literature, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, and Chemistry prizes (through Alfred Nobel's will). Of course, by its nature, it is the most political of the prizes.
The only Nobel prize that is separate is the Economics one, which was established much later and has no connection to Alfred Nobel (it is paid for by Sweden's central bank instead of the Nobel estate). But even that one is administered by the same Nobel foundation.
Obama intervened in the Libyan civil war. The outcome was disastrous for Libya (13 years of chaos and counting, the entrance of ISIS into Libya, the re-emergence of slavery in Libya, to name a few consequences). Obama blatantly violated the War Powers Act, which requires the President to seek Congressional approval for any war waged abroad after 60 days. The act was passed on the tail end of the Vietnam War, to prevent a repeat of things like Nixon invading Cambodia in secret. The US Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, but that power is absolutely meaningless if the President can just wage war wherever he chooses without a declaration.
Obama specifically won the Nobel Peace Prize for talking about his "vision of a world free from nuclear weapons" as a candidate. As President, he initiated a massive program to upgrade the US' nuclear arsenal. It made a complete mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize, though Kissinger also won the Nobel Peace Prize, so it's not as if the prize has any credibility anyways.
The outcome was positive for Libya, as it experienced only a fraction of human suffering compared to Syria where the United States did not intervene against the regime.
Either way Libya operation was spearheaded by France with Obama joining only reluctantly later.
The US intervened in both civil wars, though in Syria its involvement early on was much more through funding and arming of various armed groups - notably Sunni fundamentalist groups. How you can say that the outcome was positive for Libya is beyond me. The country was utterly destroyed. It went from being the one of the most developed countries in Africa to a war-torn country with competing warlords and open slave markets.
Human death toll in Libya and Syria differ by almost 60x. Half a million Syrians could have lived, the refugee crisis and the rise of far right in the West could be avoided had Assad been droned in 2013. Putin would also not have dared the 2014 annexation either.
The US had hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground in Iraq for over a decade. More than half a million Iraqis died. There was intense violence between different religious groups and political factions. But you come here and say that everything would have magically gotten better with more US involvement in Syria.
A direct American intervention in Syria probably would have made things even worse. Droning Assad, as you suggest, probably would have led to an even greater amount of chaos (besides being totally illegal). It's bad enough as it is that the US funded Sunni extremists in Syria.
Notice how I specifically talked about Syria and Libya. I (along with a lot of other people) opposed Iraq war as well and it took you to pull it here for lack of consistent argument.
Don't see the point arguing with you further. Some day both Putin and Assad are going to be dead and I hope they suffer in their last minutes. I will be cheering while you will be mourning your tyrants.
You argued that the US intervening more heavily in Syria would have prevented all of the human suffering. I'm pointing out to you that the US' other interventions in the Middle East show that the opposite is likely the case.
Just imagine the chaos in Syria if the Sunni extremist groups that the US supported had won. How would the various religious minorities, like the Shiites, Alawites and Christians, have fared? What's the chance that the Sunni extremists would have carried out genocide against religious minorities? It's one thing to say that Assad is a tyrant, but another to say that everything would be better if the US toppled him.
In Iraq, supporters of a US invasion made the exact same argument. "Saddam is a tyrant? Why don't you want to get rid of him?" The US toppled him, and half a million people died as a result.
Your analysis - everything will be better if the US topples tyrants (and realistically, empowers people who might be even worse) - is very simplistic, and has a terrible track record in the real world.
Can you explain why starting a war (still ongoing), killing >10k people, and converting Africa's best functioning and richest country into one of the world's worst functioning places is positive outcome? I don't understand this.
The Syrian Civil war was clearly (in parts) engineered by the west. Here is some evidence.
That's the second withdrawal from a second presence, requested by the Iraqi government after the rise of ISIL.
> The United States completed its prior withdrawal of troops in December 2011, concluding the Iraq War.[9] In June 2014, the United States formed Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) and re-intervened at the request of the Iraqi government due to the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
> On 9 December 2017, Iraq declared victory against ISIL, concluding the 2013–2017 War in Iraq and commencing the latest ISIL insurgency in Iraq.
Perhaps those troops should have been withdrawn for the second time in early 2018. Alas, it took place after messier circumstances.
> On 31 December 2019 through 1 January 2020, the United States Embassy in Baghdad was attacked in response to the airstrikes.[6] On 3 January 2020, the United States conducted an airstrike that killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani and Kata'ib Hezbollah commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.[6] Iraq protested that the airstrike violated their sovereignty.[13]
>
> In March 2020, the U.S.-led coalition, Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF–OIR), began transferring control over a number of military installations back to Iraqi security forces, citing developments in the multi-year mission against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Or perhaps the second withdrawal has never actually completed.
> In February 2021, NATO announced it would expand its mission to train Iraqi forces in their fight against ISIL,[14] partially reversing the U.S.-led troop withdrawals. In April 2021, U.S. Central Command stated that there were no plans for a total withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, citing continued threats posed by the ISIL insurgency and Iran-backed militias.[3]
I mean Trump was nominated for the award for fuck's sake
Being nominated only means that one of thousands of people allowed to nominated candidates wrote your name on a piece of paper and mailed it in. There is at least one right wing Swedish politician who's been sending in Trumps name every year for a while now.
The Nobel peace prize committee is not really responsible for nominating candidates[1], only for selecting a winner from the list of nominated candidates.
[1] Although I believe they are allowed to suggest names.
In addition to the other replies, he is the only US president in modern history to explicitly authorize the assassination of a US citizen without a trial, and create a legal doctrine allowing future presidents to do so; and he was the major escalator of the use of drone strikes in war (the practice started with Bush, but it expanded many fold under Obama).
> […] [Obama] is the only US president in modern history to explicitly authorize the assassination of a US citizen without a trial
Just one of the many things Obama did that upsets me so much. The precedent he set with that is criminal.
Of course I’m against terrorism, but our government MUST NOT have the right to classify Americans as terrorists and just execute them without a trial—via drone strikes!
Most Americans likely don’t even know about what happened to the al-Awlaki’s, which is unfortunate.
This is such a tired reply. The peace prize is not part of the same group as the other awards, and a significant difference in the peace award is that intent is awarded not results.
The dude who invented the MAD doctrine did not get the award despite nuke deterrance doctrice being related to the least amount of wars in any century since WW2.
But his platform of deescalation and his plans for american foregin diplomacy were rewarded. He ultimately failed to reach those goals (specially with the escalation on Afghanistan and the emergence of groups like ISIS), but tbh the Iran agreement and the Pacific trade agreement, killed and buried by the next administration, would have created a massive buffer and solution for the 2 hotspots we currently experience around the middle east (where terrorism is largely sponsored by Iran) and the Taiwan takeover by the CCP (would also be partially neutralised by the Pacific trade talks).
He was naive, in the way the world was naive to the ability to sacrifice prosperity that some leaders are capable of. He underestimated how dumb and suicidal putin could be, he underestimated how much China would be willing to sacrifice in terms of potential, he underestimated how much violence was latent and capable in the middle east. but his nobel peace prize was due to his campaign running on nuclear proliferation treaties and closer relationships with the muslim world which had been entirely antagonistic since Bush
Well its the only one selected by Norway instead of Sweden, its also the only one selected on intent and not achievements. So its not the same in important ways
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The award shouldn't have been given for intentions, before he even did anything. We should not reward promises, but action. Even a long term member of the committee expressed regret in them giving it to Obama.
> Even a long term member of the committee expressed regret in them giving it to Obama.
That is nothing compared to past controversies.
People left the assembly and resigned when it was awarded to Kissinger and Arafat in the past. regret is way milder than calling the receipient a terrorist in the floor of the award ceremony
> The dude who invented the MAD doctrine did not get the award
No, he didn't win the award, because MAD doctrine (aside from it being immoral) doesn't actually work in the real world.
It's an idealized model based on game theory, which doesn't deal with pesky complexities such as irrationality, salami tactics, short-range CBMs, anti-missile defenses, tactical nukes and so on. (That's why many of these things used to be banned by treaties, to continue to pretend that MAD is actually required for peace. In reality many nations do not have nukes and live in peace.)
It does work, you just need credible trigger thresholds for the salami tactics, treat tactical nukes as strategic, and have enough nukes to punch through ABM.
> In reality many nations do not have nukes and live in peace.
not many of them are superpowers, or strategic interests of superpowers. See Taiwan, a country that until recently felt safe and at peace and is no longer unthreatened.
Most studies show that MAD allows for strategic peace for large superpowers and more regional wars for smaller countries. Ultimately it still decreases overall violence under all empirical studies on the subject.
The point I was making though was that the achivements of MAD are not measured when giving the award. However Israel and Palestine sitting down to talk in the 90s was, despite the talks ultimately going nowhere and being worse off now than before the Nobel Peace award
He received it before any of that. And Libya does actually cancel every point you mention by the way. Because it's actually not hard to have presidents not start wars at all- both presidents since Obama did just that.
And if the real Nobel prize doesn't want the confusion around its name to happen... it should do something about it?
which is why he got it based on his plans and not his actions
> and Libya does actually cancel every point you mention by the way.
it really doesnt. Lets begin with the main reasons, he was awarded the award for nuclear profileration agreements and a new american policy in the middle east. Lybia is not a nuclear power and its in north africa not the middle east.
secondly the military intervention of Lybia came at the behest of a UN security council resolution that put NATO in charge of securing the no fly zone to prevent Gadafi to bomb his own citizens after he had shot protestors during the arab spring. The NATO mission was led by France. The USA involvement ended the day the UN security council ended the mission despite the new Lybian goverment wanting them to remain. It is not Obama's fault that half the arab world exploded in protests in 2011, or that the UN voted to intervene, or that the French led mission was a bit of a clusterfuck. So no, Lybia does not affect any point I mentioned, or any of the reasons for the comittee to vote for him years earlier.
> it's actually not hard to have presidents not start wars at all- both presidents since Obama did just that.
Trump started a war, Iran just didnt follow through. Killing Soleimani is casus belli and Iran had every right to retaliate against america. The fact they didn't does not somehow exonarate Trump from his actions. That was way more belligerent than any action taken under Obama's 8 years.
Biden did not start any wars but 100% would have intervened if ISIS had begun under his presidency, the same way Obama did. Obama did not start any war against any country, he just had missions in countries america was already in, like Afghanistan, or contributed in international efforts like the Syrian civil war, or lybia intervention after Gadaffi's Un resolution.
His reputation as war mongering is artificial and designed by the same people who told Trump that if you dont test for Covid you get less cases. America started reporting less the drone strikes they carried, but carried them more often under Trump for example. Its the same sleight of hand that people use to say Sweden is worse off because they have more rape cases. They simply report them more often. Obama was more open than further admins on their interventions, that does not make it happen more or less often.
> it should do something about it?
They did not award it to Gandhi and gave it to Kissinger. The fact people still care about that award is bonkers
The amount of people who act like Obama is a war monger without understanding the situation he found himself in is shockingly high, especially on a website like this with its supposedly "educated" people.
Losing the TPP (Minus the IP parts)/Asia Pivot and the focus away from Nuclear Non Proliferation are terrifying. Obama is directly the reason why Myanmar had its democracy for as long as it did, and most people in South East Asia have not found anyone nearly as inspirational as him from America since 2016 and likely won't for awhile longer.
Obama was awesome, and his legacy has been unfairly malingered. He was not the "warmonger" president that revisionists like to portray him as.
> The amount of people who act like Obama is a war monger
Its deliberate. Conservative PACs designed that legacy and pushed it hard. Trump quickly stopped reporting drone strikes, so that way he could pretend Obama was a big bad shooting at everyone. Not reporting != not happening.
> Losing the TPP (Minus the IP parts)
I actually see the point to the IP parts. Its a complicated mess, but China has abused it in the past so being able to sue goverments has its uses. For example when Lenovo was accused of IP theft to HP computers, the CCP bought stock in lenovo and made it impossible to take them to trial. Those kind of abuses are an issue when you try and promote fair competition due to high RD costs.
Obviously the can of worms it opens is huge and an issue in itself, but I see the point in why it was added to the TPP agreement and can't imagine how hard it was to put that in, before Trump came and broke the whole thing.
> Obama was awesome
Dealing with the worst recession in a century, passing the largest US healthcare change in history, preventing the arab spring from exploding everywhere, stopping ISIS, swift to the pacific etc. The amount of achievements its hard to point out when after that came a circus clown who would salute north korean generals.
"This year’s laureates used tools from physics to construct methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning."
Does this mean if I'd use a deep understanding of birds to design way more aerodynamic airplanes, I could get the Nobel prize in physiology/medicine? Don't get me wrong, their work is probably prize worthy, but shouldn't the Nobel prize in physics be awarded for discoveries in the _physical world_?
> Don't get me wrong, their work is probably prize worthy
I would strongly disagree with you there. It's the exact same idea as the least squares approximation or conjugate gradient method: create an energy function from a quadratic and minimize it.
Physics is not stuck in string theory as physics is not just high energy theoretical particle physics. There's also more going on in high energy theoretical particle physics than just "string theory".
Much of the experimental action in recent decades has been in low energy theoretical particle physics. Down near absolute zero, where quantum effects dominate and many of the stranger predictions of quantum mechanics can be observed directly. The Nobel Prizes in physics for 1996, 1997, 1998, 2001, and 2003 were all based on experimental work down near absolute zero.
"theoretical physics" is such a big and ambiguous concept that physicists tend not to use the word in discussions. Thereotical work often involves a lot of numerical simulation on super computers these days which are kind of their own "experiments". And it is usually more productive to just mention the specific field, e.g. astronomy, condensed matter, AMO etc, and you can be sure there is always a lot of discoveries in each area.
Former high energy theorist here: things are not looking so good for high energy physics (both theoretical and experimental) which loosely speaking accounted for maybe 1/3-1/2 of Nobel Prizes in the 20th century. That’s part of the reason I got out. I’m inclined to say astrophysics and cosmology, another pillar of the fundamental understanding of the universe, isn’t doing that well either, probably in the okayish but not as exciting as it used to be territory. I’m not qualified to talk about other fields.
I think saying they're not looking good might be a bit of an exaggeration. Technological developments in both high energy physics and astrophysics stuff are in-between generations of technology right now, which is why things are a bit slower than usual.
With astrophysics, we're probably going to need the more sensitive gravitational wave detectors that are in development to become operational for new big breakthroughs. With high energy physics, many particle colliders and synchrotron light sources seem to be undergoing major upgrades these days. While particle colliders tend to get the spotlight in the public eye and are in a weird spot regarding the expected research outcomes, light sources are still doing pretty well afaik.
This Nobel I think is mainly because AI has overwhelmingly dominated the public's perception of scientific/technological progress this year.
> With high energy physics, many particle colliders and synchrotron light sources seem to be undergoing major upgrades these days.
AFAIK synchrotron light sources are tools for materials science and other applied fields, not high energy physics. Did I miss something?
I am also puzzled by the "many particle colliders". There is currently only one capable of operating at the high energy frontier. It's getting a luminosity upgrade [1] which will increase the number of events, but those will still be the 14 TeV proton-proton collisions it's been producing for years. There is some hope that collecting more statistics will reveal something currently hidden in the background noise, but I wouldn't bet on it.
>AFAIK synchrotron light sources are tools for materials science and other applied fields, not high energy physics. Did I miss something?
When you put it like that, yeah, I was kinda being stupid. During my stint doing research at a synchrotron light source I was constantly told to focus on thinking like a physicist (rather than as a computer engineer) and most of the work of everyone who wasn't a beamline scientist was primarily physics focused, which is what led me to think that way. But you're right in that it might not make much sense for me to say that makes them high energy physics research tools first.
>I am also puzzled by the "many particle colliders". There is currently only one capable of operating at the high energy frontier. It's getting a luminosity upgrade [1] which will increase the number of events, but those will still be the 14 TeV proton-proton collisions it's been producing for years. There is some hope that collecting more statistics will reveal something currently hidden in the background noise, but I wouldn't bet on it.
The RHIC is also in the process of being upgraded to the EIC. But overall, yes, that's why I said they were in a 'weird' spot. I too am not convinced that the upgrades will offer Nobel-tier breakthroughs.
As a layman, the visualization of black holes, the superstructure above and below the Milky Way, JWST’s distant galaxy discoveries, gravitational wave detectors as mentioned, and some of the Kuiper Belt observations all seem to be interesting and exciting.
What are you considering "high energy physics"? "1/3-1/2 of Nobel Prizes in the 20th century" is a significant overestimation unless you are including topics not traditionally included in high energy physics. For example, there were many Nobel prizes in nuclear physics, which shares various parallels with high energy physics in terms of historical origins, experimental techniques, and theoretical foundations. But nuclear physics is in a very exciting era of experimental and theoretical developments, so your "not looking so good" description does not apply.
Much of nuclear physics was effectively “high energy physics” (or more appropriately named elementary particle physics) back in the day. They ceased to be elementary or high energy at some point. My very loose categorization is everything on the microscopic path towards the fundamental theories; and there’s another macroscopic path, cosmology.
Agreed on that. My disagreement is with the statement that everything that was once referred to as high energy physics is "not looking so good". Nuclear physics in particular does not feel stuck in the way I've heard some high energy physicists talk about their field.
Please bro just one more collider. Just one more collider bro. I swear bro we're gonna fix physics forever. Just one more collider bro. We could go up or even underground. Please bro just one more collider.
May be I should know better, but is there no Nobel category for computer science or mathematics? This isn't physics, this is absolutely embarrassing. May be all those bitter elder physicists who didn't get a prize can feel a little justified in their derision of the institution.
Computer science has the Turing award and mathematics the Fields medal. Neither is exactly equivalent to the Nobel but they're similar levels of prestige.
The Nobel prize fields and criteria are a bit random, they're essentially just whatever Alfred Nobel wrote in his will.
Within their respective fields, not in general. What makes the Nobel so unique and desirable is that everybody knows what it is and is impressed by it. Mentioning that you've won a Nobel prize will impress people and open doors in virtually any circumstance. Saying you have a Turing award will mostly lead to blank stares from anybody outside the field.
Perhaps not a bad idea in that specific instance, but they're so embarrassed today about getting bought for the economics one that doing something similar again has become effectively out of the question (and on a balance I think that's for the best).
At least CS is a real discipline in the actual spirit of the original prizes, whereas (as the Nobel family has pointed out) the economics prize probably has Alfred Nobel rolling in his grave.
This is embarrassing. I would say Hopfield networks aren't even very revolutionary in neuroscience, but they're so old I can't tell. In terms of AI... they've been irrelevant for thirty years. I guess you could argue a transformer is a generalized Hopfield network, but of course that's a post-hoc understanding. None of this has anything to do with physics.
So what if an energy function lets you approximate the number of macro-states it can capture? Should every mathematics paper with Lagrange multipliers be put up for nomination? Every poll that uses the law of large numbers, and thus, entropy? Surely the computer scientists building the internet need to be included as well, since their work is based in information theory.
Or maybe, hear me out, we reserve the Nobel Prize in physics for advances in the physical sciences, understanding physical reality or how to bend it to our will.
Had they wanted a good ML relevant physics Nobel, the committee had decades to award a prize to Marshall and Arianna Rosenbluth for the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. Would have been self-evidently important and relevant to both physics and ML. Too late now -- Arianna died in 2020.
There were some predictions that Peter Shor could win this year for quantum computation. I'd say his work is a lot closer to physics than Hinton's or Hopfield's.
The goal here is to attribute a very important area in contemporary technology to physicists. This prize advances physics in terms of giving it higher importance in the minds of lay people and journalists.
“These artificial neural networks have been used to advance research across physics topics as diverse as particle physics, materials science, and astrophysics,” Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said at a press conference this morning.
The landmark Deep Belief Networks (stacked RBMs) paper in Science was in 2006 [1]. DBNs were completely obsolete quite quickly, but don't deny the immense influence of this line of research. It has over 23k citations, and was my introduction to deep learning, for one. And cited by the Nobel committee.
You're completely incorrect to say RBMs were of theoretical interest only. They have had plenty of practical use in computer vision/image modelling up to at least a few years ago (I haven't followed them since). Remember the first generative models of human faces?
Edit: Wow, Hinton is still pushing forward the state of the art on RBMs for image modelling, and I am impressed with how much they've improved in the last ~5 years. Nowhere near diffusion models, sure, but "reasonably good". [2]
[1] G.E. Hinton and R. Salakhutdinov, 2006, Science. "Reducing the Dimensionality of Data with Neural Networks"
Honestly, I am stunned by today's Nobel committee announcement. Hinton's Boltzmann machine is a clever construct that nobody, repeat nobody, in the AI and ML is using anymore in actual practice.
875 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 405 ms ] threadI get the importance of AI development, but Physics?
Nobel prize jumping on the bandwagon, just like they did for mRNA after covid. At least that was related to medicine.
The first 2 paragraphs of the linked pdf read like a joke. Like it’s a parody announcement.
Of course the price is really for MLP backpropagation (or how it found applications) but I guess it's not physics enough.
Hopfield networks never really found use either, but they are sort of related to Ising models and NNs, so I guess it's physics then.
But I agree, this feels like a stretch.
All other prizes are awarded in Sweden by Swedish academy(for literature) , Royal Swedish Academy for sciences (physics and chemistry) , karolinska institute (physiology) are all professionally established organizations at the time of Nobel’s death with other activities professional organizations do.
Norwegian Nobel committee while in theory independent is just people appointed by the parliament with no need to have professional standing in their field on which they are supposed to award the prize in and it always shows .
Obama’s prize is hardly the first egregious one or even the most outrageous Henry Kissinger got one .
So it kind of matters on the changed standards in swedish technical ones while peace has been disaster for half century or more , with non transparent process selected by ex- MPs
Unless the process of selection of the committee (unqualified, political) and process of selection of the winner(opaque and inconsistent criteria) is fixed we will have poor candidates winning it in the future too
Unlike the economic prize peace was one that Alfred Noble actually wanted himself to be an award given too.
One could also argue peace prize should be the most important of them all. Noble wished to mitigate the military application of his invention, the peace prize should be achieving that most.
The continued poor judgment of the parliament in selecting the committee and the committee in selecting winners devalues the prize for future winners and devalues the good work the Swedish institutions have put in making it the premier award in their fields
Nor did Jack Kilby's invention of the IC, but they still gave it to him.
You could probably argue the same for the invention of the transistor...
One could argue it's closer to mathematics than physics, but if you'd say to him that someone made sand think like a human he might even put it under the medicine category.
> They trained artificial neural networks using physics
Here's from Nobel Prize official website: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/press-release...
If I was the awardee I'd consider declining just out of respect to the field.
"The Hopfeld network utilises physics that describes a material’s characteristics due to its atomic spin – a property that makes each atom a tiny magnet. The network as a whole is described in a manner equivalent to the energy in the spin system found in physics, and is trained by fnding values for the connections between the nodes so that the saved images have low energy"
"Hinton used tools from statistical physics, the science of systems built from many similar components."
Given the line of reasoning this has now opened up Alan Turing should be awarded one posthumously in every field.
(1) Newton would be a strong contender on a "for all time" basis, but even he would've probably needed to share it with Leibniz, which would have driven him absolutely ~b o n k e r s~, like wet hornet in a hot outhouse mad, LOL.
For Physics?
Does this mean if I'd use a deep understanding of birds to design way more aerodynamic airplanes, I could get the Nobel prize in physiology/medicine? Don't get me wrong, their work is probably prize worthy, but shouldn't the Nobel prize in physics be awarded for discoveries in the _physical world_?
Physics and chemistry are just applications of mathematics.
Considering this, it feels odd not to allow a similar thing to happen on physics.
We have Turning Award, Fields Award and the other thousands of awards for achievements that can't be categorized as Physics/Biology/Economics/Chemistry.
Only one similar named price in the name and memory of Alfred Nobel, which some how, is allowed to be part of the Nobel prize celebration.
I guess my opinion is in minority, but i don't like that another prize hijacks the Nobel prize.
Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC346238/
Accepting wrong arguments in support of positions you have is not good way to live your life. It leads to constipation.
Obviously physicists take great interest in models of the brain or models of intelligence. All of physics is modeling , after all
Influence and consideration of the Zeitgeist is also nothing new. Einstein got his prize for the discovery of the Photoelectric Effect and not Relativity.
[1] I know that some people have interpreted this quote in favor of the other sciences but I think that is far fetched.
Yes I think it does. But those planes would have to create one hell of a buzz!
The Society for Birdology now has the pleasure of jointly awarding posthumously Plato and Diogenes with the Distinguished Birdologist Award. Their findings on human anatomy used insights from birdology at critical points. Well done, lads!
My point was that physics is a big and active field, stagnation at the smallest and largest scales notwithstanding. Note also that the Nobel committee is not in any way limited to "newsworthy" stuff and has in many cases awarded prizes decades after the fact.
Physics as a discipline hasn't really stalled at all. Fundamental physics arguably has, because no one really has any idea how to get close to making experimental tests that would distinguish the competing ideas. But even in fundamental physics there are cool developments like the stuff from Jonathan Oppenheim and collaborators in the last couple of years.
That said "physics" != "fundamental physics" and physics of composite systems ranging from correlated electron systems, and condensed matter through to galaxies and cosmology is very far from dead.
I don't know exactly what they hope to gain by jumping on that bandwagon though; neither the physicists nor the computer scientists are going to value this at all. And dare I say, the general populace associated with the two fields isn't going to either - case in point, this hn post.
If there weren't any noble-worthy nominations for physics, maybe skip it? (Although that hasn't happened since 1972 across any field)
But yeah, they could have passed. That would have been cool.
Also, there's a ton of extremely amazing shit in astronomy, or even photolithography, or simulations of physics (though that's basically what the chemistry prize was this year).
Another guess is maybe they're trying to divert some of the insane attention in CS/AI to physics to get more people to join that field.
But still really bizarre decision,
AI/ANN/CS != Physics
Now there’s some theoretical considerations that leads to a theoretical model that can’t be tested. It didn’t work for Aristotle and it doesn’t work for string theorists (and similar).
We know (for example) silver atoms have mass, and that massive objects exert gravity (which we understand as warping of space-time according to GR).
We know that we can put silver atoms in quantum superpositions of being in different positions (for example in a sequential Stern-Gerlach type experiment).
We have (essentially) absolutely no theoretical understanding of what is going on to space-time when a thing with mass is in such a superposition. Quantum mechanics does not successfully model gravity, and general relativity contains no superpositions, so the situation is completely beyond our theoretical understanding. This isn't a theoretical consideration, this is something real that you can do in an undergrad physics lab experiment pretty easily.
Now the problem is that the models we have developed so far to deal with this situation turned out to be (wildly) too difficult for us to test. I think it is very far from clear that the Oppenheim & co model falls into this category - imo its completely reasonable for them to be spending theoretical effort working out what is needed to test their model.
And I readily admit that it would be interesting to know what would happen. But many decades of more or less convoluted hypotheses has proved to be unfruitful. We need a new way to do fundamental physics, or if possible go back to the old way, because the current one clearly doesn't work.
From what I've read (not a professional physicist) string theory is not testable unless we can either examine a black hole or create particle accelerators the size of the Moon's orbit (at least). Many other proposed theories are similar.
There is some speculation that the hypothetical planet nine -- a 1-5 Earth mass planet predicted in the far outer solar system on the basis of the orbits of comets and Kuiper Belt / TNO objects -- could be a primordial black hole captured by the solar system. A black hole of that mass would be about the size of a marble to a golf ball, but would have 1-5g gravity at the distance of Earth's radius.
If such an object did exist it would be within space probe range, which would mean we could examine a black hole. That might get us un-stuck.
If we can't do something like that, maybe we should instead focus on other areas of physics that we can access and that have immense practical applications: superconductivity, condensed matter physics, plasmas / fusion, etc.
How can we know, as past decades theoretical high-energy physics has studied made-up mathematical universes that don't tell much about our real universe. We haven't really given it that much of a try, yet.
Personally, I'm not very optimistic.
Regarding the primordial black hole: "Konstantin Batygin commented on this, saying while it is possible for Planet Nine to be a primordial black hole, there is currently not enough evidence to make this idea more plausible than any other alternative."
Regarding planet 9 in general: "Further skepticism about the Planet Nine hypothesis arose in 2020, based on results from the Outer Solar System Origins Survey and the Dark Energy Survey, with the OSSOS documenting over 800 trans-Neptunian objects and the DES discovering 316 new ones.[94] Both surveys adjusted for observational bias and concluded that of the objects observed there was no evidence for clustering.[95] The authors go further to explain that practically all objects' orbits can be explained by physical phenomena rather than a ninth planet as proposed by Brown and Batygin.[96] An author of one of the studies, Samantha Lawler, said the hypothesis of Planet Nine proposed by Brown and Batygin "does not hold up to detailed observations" pointing out the much larger sample size of 800 objects compared to the much smaller 14 and that conclusive studies based on said objects were "premature". She went further to explain the phenomenon of these extreme orbits could be due to gravitational occultation from Neptune when it migrated outwards earlier in the Solar System's history.[97]"
Max Planck was told by his professor to not go into Physics because "almost everything is already discovered". Planck said he didn't want to discover anything, just learn the fundamentals.
Second, even if it obviously wasn't true when Planck was told that almost everything is discovered, it doesn't say anything about the state today.
I see no reasons to expect steady progress. Nobody knows how long it would take to prove Riemann hypothesis, for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-pol-obama-at-war/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zmIUm1E4OcI
so you can arguably add ukraine crisis to that list
A bit different from "started a war".
I don't think he started any new wars, but he inherited some and continued. Anyway, the point here should be the absurdity of a lot of Nobel awards and that stands - especially in his case.
I mean Trump was nominated for the award for fuck's sake! More than 2 or 3 times iirc. So anyway.
The only Nobel prize that is separate is the Economics one, which was established much later and has no connection to Alfred Nobel (it is paid for by Sweden's central bank instead of the Nobel estate). But even that one is administered by the same Nobel foundation.
Obama specifically won the Nobel Peace Prize for talking about his "vision of a world free from nuclear weapons" as a candidate. As President, he initiated a massive program to upgrade the US' nuclear arsenal. It made a complete mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize, though Kissinger also won the Nobel Peace Prize, so it's not as if the prize has any credibility anyways.
Either way Libya operation was spearheaded by France with Obama joining only reluctantly later.
A direct American intervention in Syria probably would have made things even worse. Droning Assad, as you suggest, probably would have led to an even greater amount of chaos (besides being totally illegal). It's bad enough as it is that the US funded Sunni extremists in Syria.
Don't see the point arguing with you further. Some day both Putin and Assad are going to be dead and I hope they suffer in their last minutes. I will be cheering while you will be mourning your tyrants.
Just imagine the chaos in Syria if the Sunni extremist groups that the US supported had won. How would the various religious minorities, like the Shiites, Alawites and Christians, have fared? What's the chance that the Sunni extremists would have carried out genocide against religious minorities? It's one thing to say that Assad is a tyrant, but another to say that everything would be better if the US toppled him.
In Iraq, supporters of a US invasion made the exact same argument. "Saddam is a tyrant? Why don't you want to get rid of him?" The US toppled him, and half a million people died as a result.
Your analysis - everything will be better if the US topples tyrants (and realistically, empowers people who might be even worse) - is very simplistic, and has a terrible track record in the real world.
The Syrian Civil war was clearly (in parts) engineered by the west. Here is some evidence.
- Western government spokesperson in 2003: https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18328
- In 2014, the West officially intervened in the Syrian civil war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_intervention_in_the_Syrian_...
- Western government spokesperson in 2018: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/...
- As of 2024 the West still has at least 1000 military personnel in Syria: https://theconversation.com/us-military-presence-in-syria-ca...
See the sibling comment for human toll perspective.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_United_States_...
> The United States completed its prior withdrawal of troops in December 2011, concluding the Iraq War.[9] In June 2014, the United States formed Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) and re-intervened at the request of the Iraqi government due to the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
> On 9 December 2017, Iraq declared victory against ISIL, concluding the 2013–2017 War in Iraq and commencing the latest ISIL insurgency in Iraq.
Perhaps those troops should have been withdrawn for the second time in early 2018. Alas, it took place after messier circumstances.
> On 31 December 2019 through 1 January 2020, the United States Embassy in Baghdad was attacked in response to the airstrikes.[6] On 3 January 2020, the United States conducted an airstrike that killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani and Kata'ib Hezbollah commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.[6] Iraq protested that the airstrike violated their sovereignty.[13] > > In March 2020, the U.S.-led coalition, Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF–OIR), began transferring control over a number of military installations back to Iraqi security forces, citing developments in the multi-year mission against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Or perhaps the second withdrawal has never actually completed.
> In February 2021, NATO announced it would expand its mission to train Iraqi forces in their fight against ISIL,[14] partially reversing the U.S.-led troop withdrawals. In April 2021, U.S. Central Command stated that there were no plans for a total withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, citing continued threats posed by the ISIL insurgency and Iran-backed militias.[3]
Being nominated only means that one of thousands of people allowed to nominated candidates wrote your name on a piece of paper and mailed it in. There is at least one right wing Swedish politician who's been sending in Trumps name every year for a while now.
The Nobel peace prize committee is not really responsible for nominating candidates[1], only for selecting a winner from the list of nominated candidates.
[1] Although I believe they are allowed to suggest names.
Just one of the many things Obama did that upsets me so much. The precedent he set with that is criminal.
Of course I’m against terrorism, but our government MUST NOT have the right to classify Americans as terrorists and just execute them without a trial—via drone strikes!
Most Americans likely don’t even know about what happened to the al-Awlaki’s, which is unfortunate.
The dude who invented the MAD doctrine did not get the award despite nuke deterrance doctrice being related to the least amount of wars in any century since WW2.
But his platform of deescalation and his plans for american foregin diplomacy were rewarded. He ultimately failed to reach those goals (specially with the escalation on Afghanistan and the emergence of groups like ISIS), but tbh the Iran agreement and the Pacific trade agreement, killed and buried by the next administration, would have created a massive buffer and solution for the 2 hotspots we currently experience around the middle east (where terrorism is largely sponsored by Iran) and the Taiwan takeover by the CCP (would also be partially neutralised by the Pacific trade talks).
He was naive, in the way the world was naive to the ability to sacrifice prosperity that some leaders are capable of. He underestimated how dumb and suicidal putin could be, he underestimated how much China would be willing to sacrifice in terms of potential, he underestimated how much violence was latent and capable in the middle east. but his nobel peace prize was due to his campaign running on nuclear proliferation treaties and closer relationships with the muslim world which had been entirely antagonistic since Bush
It’s called a Nobel prize and it was established by the will of Alfred Nobel. So yes it’s the same
That is nothing compared to past controversies.
People left the assembly and resigned when it was awarded to Kissinger and Arafat in the past. regret is way milder than calling the receipient a terrorist in the floor of the award ceremony
:/
Also, WW2 being so utterly destructive, back to back after an arguably even worse global war, skews the stats a little.
But it triggers ww2 because the treaty is too hard on Germany. And crazy people has its soil prepared for their madness.
No, he didn't win the award, because MAD doctrine (aside from it being immoral) doesn't actually work in the real world.
It's an idealized model based on game theory, which doesn't deal with pesky complexities such as irrationality, salami tactics, short-range CBMs, anti-missile defenses, tactical nukes and so on. (That's why many of these things used to be banned by treaties, to continue to pretend that MAD is actually required for peace. In reality many nations do not have nukes and live in peace.)
not many of them are superpowers, or strategic interests of superpowers. See Taiwan, a country that until recently felt safe and at peace and is no longer unthreatened.
Most studies show that MAD allows for strategic peace for large superpowers and more regional wars for smaller countries. Ultimately it still decreases overall violence under all empirical studies on the subject.
The point I was making though was that the achivements of MAD are not measured when giving the award. However Israel and Palestine sitting down to talk in the 90s was, despite the talks ultimately going nowhere and being worse off now than before the Nobel Peace award
And if the real Nobel prize doesn't want the confusion around its name to happen... it should do something about it?
which is why he got it based on his plans and not his actions
> and Libya does actually cancel every point you mention by the way.
it really doesnt. Lets begin with the main reasons, he was awarded the award for nuclear profileration agreements and a new american policy in the middle east. Lybia is not a nuclear power and its in north africa not the middle east.
secondly the military intervention of Lybia came at the behest of a UN security council resolution that put NATO in charge of securing the no fly zone to prevent Gadafi to bomb his own citizens after he had shot protestors during the arab spring. The NATO mission was led by France. The USA involvement ended the day the UN security council ended the mission despite the new Lybian goverment wanting them to remain. It is not Obama's fault that half the arab world exploded in protests in 2011, or that the UN voted to intervene, or that the French led mission was a bit of a clusterfuck. So no, Lybia does not affect any point I mentioned, or any of the reasons for the comittee to vote for him years earlier.
> it's actually not hard to have presidents not start wars at all- both presidents since Obama did just that.
Trump started a war, Iran just didnt follow through. Killing Soleimani is casus belli and Iran had every right to retaliate against america. The fact they didn't does not somehow exonarate Trump from his actions. That was way more belligerent than any action taken under Obama's 8 years.
Biden did not start any wars but 100% would have intervened if ISIS had begun under his presidency, the same way Obama did. Obama did not start any war against any country, he just had missions in countries america was already in, like Afghanistan, or contributed in international efforts like the Syrian civil war, or lybia intervention after Gadaffi's Un resolution.
His reputation as war mongering is artificial and designed by the same people who told Trump that if you dont test for Covid you get less cases. America started reporting less the drone strikes they carried, but carried them more often under Trump for example. Its the same sleight of hand that people use to say Sweden is worse off because they have more rape cases. They simply report them more often. Obama was more open than further admins on their interventions, that does not make it happen more or less often.
> it should do something about it?
They did not award it to Gandhi and gave it to Kissinger. The fact people still care about that award is bonkers
Losing the TPP (Minus the IP parts)/Asia Pivot and the focus away from Nuclear Non Proliferation are terrifying. Obama is directly the reason why Myanmar had its democracy for as long as it did, and most people in South East Asia have not found anyone nearly as inspirational as him from America since 2016 and likely won't for awhile longer.
Obama was awesome, and his legacy has been unfairly malingered. He was not the "warmonger" president that revisionists like to portray him as.
Its deliberate. Conservative PACs designed that legacy and pushed it hard. Trump quickly stopped reporting drone strikes, so that way he could pretend Obama was a big bad shooting at everyone. Not reporting != not happening.
> Losing the TPP (Minus the IP parts)
I actually see the point to the IP parts. Its a complicated mess, but China has abused it in the past so being able to sue goverments has its uses. For example when Lenovo was accused of IP theft to HP computers, the CCP bought stock in lenovo and made it impossible to take them to trial. Those kind of abuses are an issue when you try and promote fair competition due to high RD costs.
Obviously the can of worms it opens is huge and an issue in itself, but I see the point in why it was added to the TPP agreement and can't imagine how hard it was to put that in, before Trump came and broke the whole thing.
> Obama was awesome
Dealing with the worst recession in a century, passing the largest US healthcare change in history, preventing the arab spring from exploding everywhere, stopping ISIS, swift to the pacific etc. The amount of achievements its hard to point out when after that came a circus clown who would salute north korean generals.
If anything it stains the reputation of the Nobel prize to me. How seriously can you take the Nobel committee after this?
Does this mean if I'd use a deep understanding of birds to design way more aerodynamic airplanes, I could get the Nobel prize in physiology/medicine? Don't get me wrong, their work is probably prize worthy, but shouldn't the Nobel prize in physics be awarded for discoveries in the _physical world_?
I would strongly disagree with you there. It's the exact same idea as the least squares approximation or conjugate gradient method: create an energy function from a quadratic and minimize it.
"theoretical physics" is such a big and ambiguous concept that physicists tend not to use the word in discussions. Thereotical work often involves a lot of numerical simulation on super computers these days which are kind of their own "experiments". And it is usually more productive to just mention the specific field, e.g. astronomy, condensed matter, AMO etc, and you can be sure there is always a lot of discoveries in each area.
With astrophysics, we're probably going to need the more sensitive gravitational wave detectors that are in development to become operational for new big breakthroughs. With high energy physics, many particle colliders and synchrotron light sources seem to be undergoing major upgrades these days. While particle colliders tend to get the spotlight in the public eye and are in a weird spot regarding the expected research outcomes, light sources are still doing pretty well afaik.
This Nobel I think is mainly because AI has overwhelmingly dominated the public's perception of scientific/technological progress this year.
AFAIK synchrotron light sources are tools for materials science and other applied fields, not high energy physics. Did I miss something?
I am also puzzled by the "many particle colliders". There is currently only one capable of operating at the high energy frontier. It's getting a luminosity upgrade [1] which will increase the number of events, but those will still be the 14 TeV proton-proton collisions it's been producing for years. There is some hope that collecting more statistics will reveal something currently hidden in the background noise, but I wouldn't bet on it.
[1] https://home.cern/science/accelerators/high-luminosity-lhc
When you put it like that, yeah, I was kinda being stupid. During my stint doing research at a synchrotron light source I was constantly told to focus on thinking like a physicist (rather than as a computer engineer) and most of the work of everyone who wasn't a beamline scientist was primarily physics focused, which is what led me to think that way. But you're right in that it might not make much sense for me to say that makes them high energy physics research tools first.
>I am also puzzled by the "many particle colliders". There is currently only one capable of operating at the high energy frontier. It's getting a luminosity upgrade [1] which will increase the number of events, but those will still be the 14 TeV proton-proton collisions it's been producing for years. There is some hope that collecting more statistics will reveal something currently hidden in the background noise, but I wouldn't bet on it.
The RHIC is also in the process of being upgraded to the EIC. But overall, yes, that's why I said they were in a 'weird' spot. I too am not convinced that the upgrades will offer Nobel-tier breakthroughs.
Oh and the death of string theory!
Edit: Expanded a few times.
This is overtly driven by expediency or business interests and ignores all societal problems.
Be happy that you get your billions for CERN and keep a low profile.
And the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics does not go to physics...
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https://x.com/skdh/status/1843592351736050053
Related reading
https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/24/why-isnt-there-a-...
The Nobel prize fields and criteria are a bit random, they're essentially just whatever Alfred Nobel wrote in his will.
Within their respective fields, not in general. What makes the Nobel so unique and desirable is that everybody knows what it is and is impressed by it. Mentioning that you've won a Nobel prize will impress people and open doors in virtually any circumstance. Saying you have a Turing award will mostly lead to blank stares from anybody outside the field.
So what if an energy function lets you approximate the number of macro-states it can capture? Should every mathematics paper with Lagrange multipliers be put up for nomination? Every poll that uses the law of large numbers, and thus, entropy? Surely the computer scientists building the internet need to be included as well, since their work is based in information theory.
Or maybe, hear me out, we reserve the Nobel Prize in physics for advances in the physical sciences, understanding physical reality or how to bend it to our will.
The prize was awarded for "AI" and the tenous links to physics of some irrelevant models are just an excuse.
But let's not forget that the brain is a physical system and that neural networks are part of the reason we understand the brain as well as we do.
There was a long period where people like Chomsky thought the brain couldn't learn fast enough and that knowledge had to be innate.
We don’t understand much then.
“These artificial neural networks have been used to advance research across physics topics as diverse as particle physics, materials science, and astrophysics,” Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said at a press conference this morning.
It may have been state-of-the-art in 1980s, but now is a bit late.
Very smart people in their time though.
In current times, a global prize to the transformers folks at least make more sense considering the context (despite it not being Physics).
You're completely incorrect to say RBMs were of theoretical interest only. They have had plenty of practical use in computer vision/image modelling up to at least a few years ago (I haven't followed them since). Remember the first generative models of human faces?
Edit: Wow, Hinton is still pushing forward the state of the art on RBMs for image modelling, and I am impressed with how much they've improved in the last ~5 years. Nowhere near diffusion models, sure, but "reasonably good". [2]
[1] G.E. Hinton and R. Salakhutdinov, 2006, Science. "Reducing the Dimensionality of Data with Neural Networks"
[2] "Gaussian-Bernoulli RBMs Without Tears" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.10318
EDIT: add minor clarification.