“But… Why are they giving these people the Nobel Prize in Physics?” “Really? This isn’t even Physics!” “Because they would have received a medical degree thanks to neurons.” These were some of the reactions to the Swedish Academy of Sciences’ decision to award the 2024 Nobel Prize to John Hopfield and Georffrey Hinton “for fundamental discoveries and inventions that enable automatic learning with artificial neural networks.”

Everything indicates that the Academy expects this, and from the first paragraph of the explanatory statement it explains that “with artificial neural networks, the boundaries of physics are expanded to accommodate phenomena such as life and computers.”

It didn’t help much. Doubts began ten seconds after the Swedes said they would give the most prestigious prize in contemporary hard science to a cognitive psychologist. What were Nobel Prize winners doing by awarding this? Are they jumping on the current bandwagon to avoid becoming out of date? Have they turned into a popularity contest?

The answer to all these questions is the same: Frankly and no, not from now on.

Inheritance, damn inheritance… One day in 1888 a French newspaper published: “[e]Doctor Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill people faster than ever before, died yesterday. This was not true: the person who died was his brother Ludvig Nobel. But the headline would haunt Alfred for years.

It’s true that he invented dynamite, but the idea of ​​going down in history as a “warlord” or something like that took him out of the game.

Stuck between red carpets and laboratories, the Nobel Prizes have played a pivotal role in contemporary societies’ vision of science, art or human endeavor. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves: The world’s most prestigious awards have been a huge marketing campaign, a personal brand, since their inception.

And that explains a lot. In fact, it explains almost everything. He explains that Nobel started a Peace Prize; but it also explains why the three sciences chosen (medicine, physics and chemistry) were chosen: they were the sciences that generated the most expectations at the beginning of the 20th century.

The only (very minor) problem is that the world has changed a lot since the beginning of the 20th century. At the Nobel Foundation they have known this for years: although this is not the only reason, it is what led to the creation of some prizes (e.g. the Economics Prize) to compete with other different prizes trying to be the “Nobel’s prize”. “discipline of their kind.

But it also pushed the boundaries of other awards.

Like in Rolling Stone. The best example of this is the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Bob Dylan in 2016, but it is not the only award. To take the closest example, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 was awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for CRISPR-Cas9.

While we all felt that this was a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery (like gravitational waves, which won the 2017 Physics Prize), for years there has been doubt about which Nobel Prize this would be: Chemistry or Medicine? In the end it didn’t matter, but the discussion did reveal important things about how formal categories (in a world where knowledge is increasingly specialized and diversified) are not at their best.

What happened? The Nobel Prize has become the greatest scientific and artistic recognition in the world. And he wants to continue this way.

Image | Sol Invicti

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