blakestacey

I found this description in the PhD thesis of Crystal Bennes:

Despite months of searching online and making requests for a copy of the image from those present at the talk, the image exists in description only. In a 2016 Science magazine article on the likelihood of Barish’s winning the Nobel Prize for physics in 2017 (which he eventually did), journalist Adrian Cho describes the image as ‘a man writing on a woman’s bare back and, next to her, a stage prop in the form of a cartoonish racial caricature’. On Twitter, the photograph has variously been described as featuring ‘blackface and bikini-clad girls’ and ‘a horrible racist/sexist slide featuring blackface’. Although one can easily conjure up a photograph from any of the individual descriptions, it is rather more difficult to imagine a single image which includes all of them.

Yet after spending much time attempting to source the image used by Barish, it occurred to me that, in many respects, the fact that I could not locate the image was almost more interesting than if I were able to find it. While the sexist and racist undertones of the image speak to Barish’s individual inability to comprehend its inappropriateness, the fact that I was unable to obtain a copy of the image through my professional and social networks in the physics community hints perhaps at that community’s tendency to pull together and close ranks in the face of potentially explosive press for one of the field’s leading lights. [...] Eventually, after many months of emails to different people in my physics network, I was able to obtain a copy of the image. The image was provided to me on the sole condition that I did not reveal who I obtained it from.

This reminds me of the time a few years before that when Didier Sornette illustrated his conference-talk slides with mudflap women silhouettes.

Sneers from r/physics! First up, this comment by napqe:

I'm sorry, but this is like awarding the nobel prize for literature to Xerox/HP/Brother for "improvements to printing".

And in the same thread, from GustapheOfficial:

Last year's prize was too relevant, they had to stagger the physics by a year.

We also have this by M1st_:

What's next? Someone gets a Nobel prize for another algorithm that numerically solves differential equations??

Finally, we've the title of this thread, by TheSkells:

Yeah, "physics"

Providing the medium through which, to a rough approximation, all physics is discussed is, proportionally, a vastly greater contribution than any technique that only applies to a fraction of problems.

But the more salient point is that the Nobel Prize is an institution that we should, as a culture, care less about. And all the more so now, since they are getting in on the hype about an industry that is fundamentally anti-scientific.

I don't think that Donald Knuth deserves a physics prize for inventing TeX, even though TeX was a massive contribution to how we communicate physics.

Well, just about every data analysis technique ever invented has been applied in physics somewhere. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on applying a genetic algorithm to electron-atom scattering in particle detectors, a topic which I recall someone had already tried neural networks on.

Also discussed in the Stubsack.

I'm just waiting for him to chime in about music theory.

Image description: tweet from the official Nobel Prize account. Text reads,

Congratulations to our 2024 medicine laureate Victor Ambros ✨

This morning he celebrated the news of his prize with his colleague and wife Rosalind Lee, who was also the first author on the 1993 'Cell' paper cited by the Nobel Committee.

#NobelPrize

Blake reaction description: sighing and muttering, "yep, assholes will asshole"

That sounds about right, yeah.

Getting a head start on that Nobel disease.

They're reeeaallly leaning into the fact that some of the math involved is also used in statistical physics. And, OK, we could have an academic debate about how the boundaries of fields are drawn and the extent to which the divisions between them are cultural conventions. But the more important thing is that the Nobel Prize is a bad institution.

I trained a neural network on all the ways I've said that I hate these people, and it screamed in eldritch spectra before collapsing into silence.