Nobel Prize 2021: Physics

Abstract

On October 5, 2021 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics. The award recipients were Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University, USA, and Giorgio Parisi of Sapienza University of Rome, Italy.

Hasselmann and Manabe each received one-quarter of the prize for “the physical modelling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”. Parisi received the other half of the Nobel prize for “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales” [1]. Although at first-glance it may seem that the two fields are not directly related, both areas involve the study of complex chaotic systems which are notoriously difficult to study over long time periods. Manabe and Hasselmann’s work studied complex systems on the larger scale, and Parisi’s work on the small scale, but can be applied to larger scales.