Stop Taking the Nobel Prize Seriously

The Distinction between Sciences is Outdated

So the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics went to researchers who helped usher in…AI neural networks. Hmm.

Physics doing everything it can to still appear relevant.

The distinction between sciences should be considered outdated. The days of assigning dedicated focus to arbitrarily demarcated levels of abstraction in phenomena no longer makes sense.

Science should be building, discovering and discussing properties, at all “scales” and in all things. The tools and methods should be agnostic to “discipline” or “field” of study. We got away with these fictitious separations in the past because our erroneous reductionism made them “valid.”

In reality, the highly specialized methods, languages, and frameworks that have been tailored to specialization cause us to not realize just how interconnected nature is. We get institutional fragmentation, distinct departments and dedicated journals that emphasize the isolated aspects of nature; a nature that does not operate off isolated things…ever.

Taking the Nobel Prize seriously, today, is like getting excited about someone’s departmental career hacking abilities. Fake credit assignment to made up “areas” of science.

We will see more and more nonsensical awards like this, because we are running into the reality that nature was never meant to be explained in disconnected detail.