The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 This year’s laureates used tools from physics to construct methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning. John Hopfield created a structure that can store and reconstruct information. Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can independently discover properties in data and which has become important for…

With numerous new technologies it became possible to look rapidly at many stars and analyse the results on site. Optical fibres could carry the starlight without distorting it and better digital image sensors, increased the machine’s light sensitivity. More powerful computers allowed scientists to develop custom-made software for digital image and data processing.

LIGO is no ordinary telescope for detecting light and other electromagnetic radiation from space. It is an instrument for listening to space’s gravitational waves; even if gravitational waves are tremors in spacetime itself, and not sound waves, their frequency is equivalent to those we can hear with our human ears.

In 1964, independently of each other, Peter Higgs and François Englert put forward a theory that rescued the Standard Model from collapse. Almost half a century later, they were both in the audience at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, outside Geneva, when the discovery of a Higgs particle that finally confirmed the theory was announced to the world.