From climate change to complex systems
Source: By The Indian Express
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded with one half jointly to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and the other half to Giorgio Parisi.
Dr. Manabe and Dr. Hasselmann won the Prize “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming.”
Syukuro Manabe is a senior Meteorologist at Princeton University, USA, and is known for demonstrating how ozone and carbon dioxide play important roles in maintaining the temperatures of the Earth’s surface.
In the late 1960s, his team developed a circulation model of the atmosphere-ocean-land system and used it to study greenhouse gases and increasing temperature. In 1975, his team published a paper in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, showing “the temperature changes resulting from doubling the present CO2 concentration” The model he used for the study eventually became a tool for the simulation of global warming.
In the 1970s, Klaus Hasselmann and his team created a model that linked together weather and climate. According to nobelprize.org: “His methods have been used to prove that the increased temperature in the atmosphere is due to human emissions of carbon dioxide.” Dr. Hasselmann is currently a Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Germany.
Finding hidden patterns
Giorgio Parisi, a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy was awarded one half of the 2021 Nobel Physics Prize “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.” Dr. Parisi’s research is focussed on complex systems, particle physics, and statistical physics.
This year, he also won the Wolf Prize in Physics “for being one of the most creative and influential theoretical physicists in recent decades.”
The Wolf foundation mentioned that “his work has a large impact on diverse branches of physical sciences, spanning the areas of particle physics, critical phenomena, disordered systems as well as optimisation theory and mathematical physics.”
Dr. Parisi has won several awards for his work on complex systems including the Max Planck Medal in 2011, High Energy and Particle Physics Prize in 2015, Lars Onsager Prize in 2016 and Pomeranchuk Prize in 2018.
“His discoveries are among the most important contributions to the theory of complex systems. They make it possible to understand and describe many different and apparently entirely random complex materials and phenomena, not only in physics but also in other, very different areas, such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning,” notes a release from nobelprize.org.
