‘Listening to scientists bicker is instructive’: physics Nobel-winner on solving problems between fields
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John Hopfield started his career in physics and moved to study problems in chemistry and biology. Credit: Denise Applewhite, Princeton University
John Hopfield, one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, is a true polymath. His career started with probing the physics of solid states during the field’s heyday in the 1950s before moving to the chemistry of haemoglobin in the late 1960s, and studying DNA synthesis in the decade that followed.
In 1982, he devised a brain-like network in which neurons — which he modelled as interacting particles — formed a kind of memory. The ‘Hopfield network’, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, is now widely seen as a building-block of machine learning, which underpins modern artificial intelligence (AI). Hopfield shared the award with AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in Canada.
Now 91 years old, Hopfield, an emeritus professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, spoke to Nature about whether his prizewinning work was really physics and why we should worry about AI.
