I thought it was sort of an email to me about the Nobel Prize to somebody

American physicist John Joseph Hopfield has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024, along with British-Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton. When the Nobel Committee called, John Joseph Hopfield was checking his email. His wife, Mary Waltham, was sitting nearby. They were in a cottage in the village of Selborne, England. Receiving the call from the Nobel Committee left John Hopfield utterly astonished. Until he read the fourth email, he truly could not comprehend that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize this time. In a brief conversation with Adam Smith from the Nobel Committee, John Hopfield tackled several significant questions, such as how the mind works, how we should focus on major issues, what to do about our fears regarding machine learning and artificial intelligence, and he emphasized the interconnection of knowledge systems. According to him, in today’s world, it is not enough to be skilled in just one area; the integration of science and technology is crucial, along with sociology and psychology. The written version of his brief phone conversation with Adam Smith is published here for the readers of Views Bangladesh. The interview has been taken from the Nobel Prize Committee's website.

John Hopfield: Hello?
Adam Smith: Oh, hello. Is this John Hopfield?

John Hopfield: This is John Hopfield speaking. Yes.
Adam Smith: Oh, hello, my name is Adam Smith. I’m calling from the website of the Nobel Prize. And Mary very kindly set up this time to talk to you. Is that okay?

John Hopfield: Yeah, yeah.
Adam Smith: Are you on speaker phone?

John Hopfield: How is this at your end?
Adam Smith: That’s absolutely perfect. That’s great. Thank you very much indeed. First of all, congratulations on the award of the Nobel Prize.

John Hopfield: Oh, thank you. Thank you.
Adam Smith: Mary tells me, you find yourself in Hampshire today.

John Hopfield: That’s right.
Adam Smith: It’s quite a good place to hear the news of the Nobel Prize because you’re slightly hidden.

John Hopfield: We’re off on our own, as it were, in a tiny town of less than a thousand people.
Adam Smith: It gives you some solitude on such a busy day.

John Hopfield: I don’t think there’s another physicist in the town of the Selborne, so that things slowly leak out over the news. But there’s no marching in the street here.
Adam Smith: How did you actually learn the news that you’d been awarded the Nobel Prize?

John Hopfield: I had been out doing things with my wife, flu shot, a cup of coffee somewhere, came back here and there was this enormous list of emails on my computer, which I did not expect at all. And reading into the first two or three of them, you realized there must be a Nobel Prize there. And it was just astounding. My first reaction was they’ve announced the Nobel Prize because he described it without actually managing to connect me and the Nobel Prize in the same sentence. And so I thought it was sort of an email to me about the Nobel Prize to somebody. And it wasn’t until I got down to about the third one that I realized, no, it was to me, that the leading ones on top were just ticklers. I didn’t sink in until I got down to about the fourth email.
Adam Smith: I like the idea of those teasers. The prize is given for enabling machine learning and artificial neural networks. But I think I’m right in saying that you didn’t embark on this work in order to create the tools, but rather to understand how mind arises from the wiring in the brain.

John Hopfield: That’s right. I, my motivation was really coming from seeing that something does work, the brain, and understanding more about how the brain works would be necessary to understand thought consciousness or what have you. And that it somehow was related to collective phenomena in networks. And I slowly wove my way from an interest in how the brain functioned to a question of how could hardware or software, or whatever you want to call it, wet wear, produce such a thing. And the centre of gravity of my knowledge and understanding moved slowly from much more physics oriented to the neurobiological one. And somewhere along the line, this connection between AI, networks, neural networks and physics developed.
Adam Smith: You’ve looked at a number of different questions in biology over the years using the lens of physics. I wondered what, what tempts you, what makes a good problem for you as a physicist?

John Hopfield: Yeah. In a good physics problem, you have a system which is well defined and where you can understand something about how collectively it may work in a way which is more robust than the individual little bits and pieces. You don’t leap into a problem overall saying, I want to understand how mind works. You have to build up from the bottom. If you were doing weather, you would say, well, I want to understand what storms are without going back to interacting air nitrogen molecules. You have to have the right level of question. And it isn’t obvious what the level of question should be. And you get your hands rather dirty in trying to work on several things which don’t pan out.

Adam Smith: Yes. I suppose there’s a long history of physicists turning their attention to the brain, to consciousness. People like Francis Crick or Don Glaser, and it is all about getting the level of the question right, isn’t it?

John Hopfield: Well, I’d read some of the things that Don Glazer wrote, for example, and they’re imaginative physics, they’re not quite such good biology. There was a consensus that said you had to be able to reach out from physics and get to some of these things you’d like to, but then you have to know enough about the biology that the whole thing makes sense. And you really have to present things in such a way that a community develops. I didn’t realize that at the time, but certainly one of the important things of what I did had to do with enabling people who came from physics, or who came from biology, become a community, working on not just one little problem or piece, but somehow collectively working together toward trying to get an understanding.
Adam Smith: Yes. It catalyzed the community and the Hopfield network was a huge advance for people that they could latch onto and develop. Let me ask you one other thing that your co-laureate, Geoffrey Hinton, is very vocal in speaking about his fears about machine learning and its potential. Do you share his worries?

John Hopfield: Yeah, I share his worries. You always worry when things look very, very powerful and you don’t understand why they are, which is to say you don’t understand how to control them, or if control is an issue, or what their potential is. If you don’t really understand and can’t explain how they work without saying, if you go deeply enough in the mathematics they’ll work. That’s not a satisfactory answer. I would like to have more understanding of how the microscopic physics gives rise to the interesting properties of the larger system.
Adam Smith: Do you hope that this Nobel Prize will send some message? It’s the first prize in artificial intelligence, if you like.

John Hopfield: I think that the prize is recognizing, in part, the fact that understanding the deep problems of things like mind is not going to come forth in some simple way like Newtonian physics. It really requires much more understanding of the relationship between structure and properties, and structure dynamics and properties. And that’s a mixture of some corners of physics, some corners of chemistry, some corners of biology, coming together to understand and create an area of study.
Adam Smith: Thank you. Very nicely put. Let me just finish by commenting that I realize you are hearing this news in Selborne, which was the subject of Gilbert White’s, The Natural History of Selborne.

John Hopfield: Oh, you’ve discovered Gilbert White! Good for you.
Adam Smith: But it’s nice for Selborne that it gets to have a Nobel Prize announced in its midst, given that it has such a deep, ancient association with natural science.

John Hopfield: Well, Gilbert White was an astute observer.
Adam Smith: Yes. It’s been an enormous pleasure speaking to you. Thank you very, very much. And let me again add our congratulations on today’s news.

John Hopfield: Well, thank you. And I know it’s not simple to try to interview me when I’m still somewhat in shock.
Adam Smith: Very understandable. It’s been fascinating, and I look forward to a longer conversation when all the dust settles in the future. Thank you.

John Hopfield: Right, bye, bye.
Adam Smith: Bye, bye.