Nobel Prize in Physics 2021

 

Nobel Prize in Physics 2021

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 was split in half, with one half going to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann "for the physical modelling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability, and satisfactorily foretelling global warming," and the other half going to Giorgio Parisi "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales."

Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University, USA, Klaus Hasselmann of Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany and Giorgio Parisi and Sapienza of University of Rome, Italy.

 This year's Nobel Prize in Physics is shared by three Laureates for their research into chaotic and seemingly random occurrences. Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann set the groundwork for our understanding of the Earth's climate and its impact on humans. Giorgio Parisi is honored for his groundbreaking advances to disorganized materials and random processes theory.

Complex systems are hard to comprehend since they are characterized by unpredictability and chaos. This year's Prize honors novel approaches to defining and forecasting their long-term behavior. The Earth's climate is a complicated system that is critical to humanity. Increased quantities of atmospheric carbon dioxide contribute to higher temperatures at the Earth's surface, according to Syukuro Manabe. He was the first to investigate the interplay between radiation balance and vertical air mass movement in the 1960s, and he spearheaded the creation of physical models of the Earth's climate. His work set the groundwork for the current generation of climate models.

Klaus Hasselmann constructed a model that relates climate and weather ten years later, solving the question of how climate models can be trustworthy given the fact that weather is unpredictable and turbulent. He also devised ways for recognizing precise indications, or fingerprints, that both natural and human-caused climate change leave behind. His methods have been used to demonstrate that the rising temperature in the atmosphere is caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.

Giorgio Parisi identified hidden patterns in chaotic complex materials in the early 1980s. His contributions to the theory of complex systems are among the most significant. They enable us to comprehend and characterize a wide range of seemingly random materials and occurrences, not just in physics but also in fields as diverse as mathematics, biology, neurobiology, and algorithms.

"This year's results show that our understanding of the climate is built on a strong scientific foundation, based on a comprehensive study of observations." “All of this year's Nobel Laureates have helped us learn more about the nature and development of complex physical systems,” says Thors Hans Hansson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.