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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
