He studied a type of material called " spin glass" , in which, for example, iron atoms are mixed at random into a matrix of copper atoms.

他研究了一种名为“自旋玻璃”的材料，例如，在这种材料中，铁原子被随机混合到铜原子内部。

The iron atoms each behave as tiny magnets but, whereas in a normal lump of magnetised metal their north-south poles all point in the same direction, in a spin glass they do not.

每个铁原子的行为都像微小的磁铁，但在正常的磁化金属块中，它们的南北极都指向相同的方向，而在自旋玻璃中却不是这样。

Dr Hopfield was responsible for what has become known as the Hopfield network—a type of artificial neural network that behaves like a physical structure called a spin glass, which gave the academy a tenuous reason to call the field " physics" .

霍普菲尔德博士负责的研究项目后来被称为霍普菲尔德网络， 这是一种人工神经网络， 其行为类似于一种名为自旋玻璃的物理结构，这让科学院有理由将该领域称为“物理学” 。