Physics is a point of view about the world

The title of this blog is the closing line of an autobiographical essay written by John Hopfield (pictured above), one of the physics Nobel laureates today: “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

In this essay, he retraces his trajectory across various sub-disciplines of physics and how he eventually used his knowledge of physics to work on a problem in neurobiology that further connects to machine learning.

The title of the essay is provocative(see below) but worth reading to understand how physics has evolved over the years and its profound impact on various disciplines.

Reference: Hopfield, John J. “Whatever Happened to Solid State Physics?” Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics 5, no. Volume 5, 2014 (March 10, 2014): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-conmatphys-031113-133924.

Thanks to Gautam Menon for bringing the essay to my notice.

By the way, Hopfield and Deepak Dhar shared the 2022 Boltzmann medal, and after the award, he gave a wonderful online talk at IMSc, Chennai. Thanks to Arnab Pal of IMSc for bringing this to my notice on X.

Let me end this post quoting Hopfield from the mentioned essay:

What is physics? To me—growing up with a father and mother who were both physicists—physics was not subject matter. The atom, the troposphere, the nucleus, a piece of glass, the washing machine, my bicycle, the phonograph, a magnet—these were all incidentally the subject matter. The central idea was that the world is understandable, that you should be able to take anything apart, understand the relationships between its constituents, do experiments, and on that basis be able to develop a quantitative understanding of its behavior. Physics was a point of view that the world around us is, with effort, ingenuity, and adequate resources, understandable in a predictive and reasonably quantitative fashion. Being a physicist is a dedication to the quest for this kind of understanding.

Let that quest never die!