> a slap in the face to the physics community

The physics community could use a few more slaps in the face, according to many physicists.

The response of the physicists they say should get a slap is, in programming terms, basically shut up and show me the code. It's a fairly one sided debate that we're blessed with seeing in literally every thread anywhere about it

Here's a resounding 'slap' delivered by one physicist to his peers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBIvSGLkwJY

This is like that sidebar you have with someone after you have joined a series of meetings and listened intently and have all these nagging suspicions and you are in denial about people who you think could not possibly be talking this much nonsense because they clearly should know more than you. A few seconds into the sidebar the person tells you that everyone is full of shit, and you find relief in that you were actually understanding everything you were hearing and yes, you were drawing the right conclusions.

I can only think of major achievements in my (narrow) field of study.

What do you think could have reasonably been awarded?

Three off the top of my head:

The measurement of the Hubble constant using delay times between multiple images of lensed supernovae.

The first transit spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere.

The first directly imaged exoplanet.

(They could hand out Nobel Prizes in the field of exoplanets like candy.)

Exoplanet science is not physics, it's chemistry or planetary science. By your logic prizes to teams who send probes to the outer solar system planets could also be given prizes.

Ok, so under what logic does ML become physics?

What's "exoplanet science"? The above are applications of knowledge of physics to astrophysics, as far as I understand it. Certainly they sound more relevant to physics than neural networks.

I would argue that the first measurements of exoplanets' existence is definitely physics. This was a leap in our understanding of the makeup of the universe.

Alfred Nobel's stated standard for a prize is:

"conferred the greatest benefit to humankind"

So while those things are cool and groundbreaking, I'd say they have yet to cross the threshold into "greatest benefit to humankind"

If you define "benefit to humankind" narrowly, and don't view gaining pure knowledge about the workings of the universe as beneficial to humanity, then most physics Nobel Prizes over the last few decades fail the test.

Detecting gravitational radiation from the merger of two black holes was an incredible step forward for our understanding of the universe. It will not practically change your life in any way.

The computation of the cosmic microwave background fluctuations hasn't received a nobel prize yet. It's had a deep impact on how we understand the Universe.

Some people still alive who made important contributions to this are Rees and Sunyaev.

Something for nonequilibrium statistical mechanics

Could you please list say the top 5 Nobel worthy achievements of this backlog

Yeah this is absolutely disgusting tbh, revising my opinion of all previous nobels way down now

It still kind of baffles me that there isn't a Nobel Prize in Mathematics and/or computer science.

The latter makes a bit more sense, computer science wasn't really a thing when Alfred Nobel was around, but mathematics certainly was! It seems like it would be perfectly reasonable to add a category for math, and I think Neural Nets would fit in there considerably better.

The Swedish central bank later added the price in economics (although controversial). So other things can be amended. However, I suspect we won't see any more amendments to the noble price.

A different institution can step up and make a price on its own, though I'm not sure what institution would have that amount of prestige without weaponizing it for commercial purposes.

I prefer a nicer price for mathematics that includes a bit of computer science than a price for computer science. I don't think there is much room for a "society-changing innovation" within CS that isn't either an engineering feat (Linux, Docker, FFmpeg) or an algorithm that could fit under a mathematics price (FFT, Navier Stokes).

If a new prize is added, it would need its own funding. The five original Nobel Prizes are funded by interest from the fortune that Alfred Nobel left behind. The economics prize is funded by the Swedish central bank, and is therefore officially their prize "in memory of Alfred Nobel", not a "Nobel Prize" as such.

> I don't think there is much room for a "society-changing innovation" within CS that isn't either an engineering feat (Linux, Docker, FFmpeg) or an algorithm that could fit under a mathematics price (FFT, Navier Stokes).

I'm not sure I agree with that. There's plenty of theoretical computer science that isn't really "engineering" and would fall into a pretty different category than stuff like FFT or Navier Stokes.

If you look at something like Concurrency Theory, for example, and work with stuff like Pi Calculus or CSP or Petri Nets, those aren't "engineering feats", but also kind of fall into a different category than the rest of math, or at least pretty different than Navier Stokes. I think you could make a pretty strong argument that CSP has been a pretty big innovation in regards the academic state of the art while not simply being engineering.

Let me add RSA, Elliptic curves, Runge–Kutta, Finite element analysis, and Hamming codes to the list.

I would still consider CSP, Petri Nets, and Pi-Calculus mathematical enough to be wrapped under a mathematics price if they're influential enough. The first true computer scientists were mathematicians, and I still feel that much of the theoretical work in the field is closer to "mathematics useful for computers" than its separate field.

In the spirit of the nobel price, "mathematics with the greatest humanitarian impact" leaves plenty of room for the inclusion of influential pieces from theoretical computer science, especially as those prices within mathematics that do exist already include loads of mathematics that require computers to prove or solve.

> I would still consider CSP, Petri Nets, and Pi-Calculus mathematical enough to be wrapped under a mathematics price if they're influential enough.

I guess, but they certainly feel categorically different than something like Runge-Kutta. They're more about the study of algorithms, which is generally where I've drawn the line of "computer science vs math".

The story is that it is because Alfred Nobel was cheated on by a mathematician (hilarious, but unconfirmed)

http://nobelprizes.com/nobel/why_no_math.html#story

I'm surprised someone hasn't done it similar to the economics award that came later.

the fields medal fills that gap

Yeah, and the Turing Award for CS, and there's probably a bunch more that I'm forgetting.

Still kind of weird that the prestigious award that everyone has heard of doesn't have a mathematics category.

the nobel prize has the best branding and name brand recognition pop culture wise. I'm sure winning all these others means nearly as much to those communities.

I understand the frustration, but a lot of Geoff Hinton's foundational work was based on physics principles. For example https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/1993/file/9e3cfc48eccf8...

Information theory, which is foundational to computing, has some mathematical similarities to statistical mechanics. That doesn't make it physics.

My adviser's PhD dissertation (PhD Physics) has Hopkins as one of her major references. This is grounded in Physics.