Six STEM Tweets - Nobel Physics Edition

"Foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks" wins the 2024 Nobel prize in Physics

Author

Harshal Chhaya
October 08, 2024

Six STEM Tweets

Six tweets that celebrate engineering and all things STEM.

I scroll so you don’t have to.

Hi friends - here’s a special issue dedicated to today’s announcement of the 2024 Nobel prize in Physics.

There’s always debate and controversy about a prestigious prize but today’s announcement has resulted in the most “what is Physics anyway?” philosophical discussions that I have seen.

I have been fascinated by both sides of the debate.

But I love this explanation by Michael Nielsen.

In a really good essay-level post, he wrote:

:

There is just one nature. I'm delighted when people have and share deep insights into nature, and I don't care so much what we label it. I'm especially delighted by the incredible progress in the past few decades in developing the design sciences. That is: understanding the fundamental principles underlying the incredible systems latent in nature, and which we humans are gradually learning to build. John Hopfield and Geoff Hinton have made enormous contributions to understanding what possibilities lie latent in nature.

It so happens that their work falls largely outside the usual Nobel classification, but I am happy to celebrate them for their remarkable contributions, and physics seems as apt an area as any

I love this framing. Life is cross-curricular. Science is cross-curricular. And now the Nobel Prize is too. Let’s celebrate!

Stay curious!

#1 🤯 

#2 🤯 

#3 🤯 

#4 🤯 

#5 🤯 

Anil Ananthaswamy recently published a book titled “Why Machines Learn - The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI”. Here he talks about the history of the impact of these two researchers that’s featured in his book.

He writes: Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams wrote the 1986 Nature paper on backpropagation that specifically addressed the issue of features learned by neural networks when trained with backprop. The revolution was set in motion.

#6 🤯 

🤣 

Given all the drama today, would you imagine the reaction if this was indeed the case? 😮 

About

This newsletter is my way of sharing interesting science-related news with my curious friends. I enjoy finding science and math connections in our world.

Please share this newsletter with others. Let’s encourage curiosity.

- Harshal (@hschhaya on X/Twitter)

That’s it for this issue.

Hit ‘reply’ to tell me what you think.

And hit ‘forward’ to share with your friends and family.

Let’s all celebrate science and engineering and curiosity.

Best wishes,

Harshal