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The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 was awarded on the 5th of October to three scientists “for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems”.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 was awarded on the 5th of October to three scientists “for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems”. One half of the prize was jointly awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to Syukuro Manabe (Princeton University, USA) and Klaus Hasselmann (Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany) “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming” and the other half to Giorgio Parisi (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy) “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”.

In the 1960s, Syukuro Manabe quantified the relationship between the concentration of greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere and the increase in temperature of the Earth’s surface. His pioneering work laid the foundations of our current climate models, allowing scientists to predict the speed and severity of climate change. A decade later, Klaus Hasselmann assessed the stability of such models under the changeable and chaotic behaviour of the weather, and in addition, classified the human impact on global warming. In the early 1980s, the theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi (known in the particle physics community for his important work on the theory of strong interactions) elucidated several patterns of complex systems that seem at first glance to be random and chaotic, such as the magnetic properties of a spin glass.

The pivotal work of these scientists has enabled cutting-edge research into exotic materials, machine learning, neuroscience, and even starling flight formations. This year's Nobel prize has therefore established that the modelling of complex systems, such as the climate, is based on solid physical grounds, and so are its consequences, such as global warming.

https://www.nobelprize.org/