Questioning the Experimental Protocol in Two Nobel Prizes
A recent IEEE Conference Publication argues that the experimental protocols used to support some Nobel Prizes, specifically the 2024 Physics and Chemistry prizes, may have been flawed due to issues like p-hacking (post-selection), which involves hiding unfavorable data and exaggerating results. The paper points to a lack of discussion about avoiding local minima in nonlinear problems, a necessary step for scientific validity, in the questioned works. While some see this as a criticism of specific prize-winning research, others have argued that the prizes were awarded for the development of (trivial?) AI algorithms and that AI’s (meaningless?) impact on physics is a valid reason for the award.