I studied physics in the 90s and we had an NNs course, where most of the models were inspired by physics (MLPs was just one). NNs have been used since decades for identifying e.g. the trajectories of particles at CERN. I remember Hinton's work with Sejnowski (who probably should also be awarded). I was actually surprised to find out that Hinton was not a physicist by training

Obviously physicists take great interest in models of the brain or models of intelligence. All of physics is modeling , after all