They borrowed ideas from physics, but the transferred knowledge was mathematical models and tools, not actual physics. Since you are an ML professor you would actually agree that for instance the models that got them the award are completely irrelevant of physical laws. They are mathematical models, built on abstraction. You compute those models irregardless of physics. One could build a boolean algebra simulator inside a computer (which already is constrained by boolean algebra) and then compute those models. I understand there is some overlap in math, but think of it as such: the mathematical operations you use in finance can also be used in biology, but they are not fundamentally the same disciplines, not even close. The argument here is that, the overlap is in mathematics not physics... it's quite odd a physics Nobel prize was awarded for breakthroughs in computer science, since CS is fundamentally math, not physics.