Emergence of Brains

As with many creative human activities, physics resists definition. Physics, as the saying goes, is what physicists do. But we can recognize major themes. One theme is the reductionist search for the building blocks of matter. In another direction is the exploration of the origins and history of the universe writ large. At intermediate scales, we explore the emergence of macroscopic behaviors that are more than the sum of their parts. An important lesson of the late 20th century is that these seemingly distinct themes are intertwined, so that theoretical physics today is more unified while at the same time reaching ambitiously across an even broader range of topics. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded jointly to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, celebrates the discovery of new classes of emergent phenomena, inspired by the function of brains and minds.