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Updated October 5th, 2021 at 18:35 IST

2021 Nobel Prize for Physics: What are the 'Complex Physical Systems' that won?

Two scientists shared the first half of the award for explaining Earth’s climate & how humanity influences it while second half of the prize went to Parisi.

Reported by: Harsh Vardhan
Nobel Prize Physics 2021
Image: Twitter/@NobelPrize | Image:self
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Scientists Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi were awarded with the Nobel Prize for physics, on Tuesday, October 5, for groundbreaking contributions to understanding of complex physical systems. The first two scientists shared the first half of the award for explaining Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it, while the second half of the prize went to Giorgio Parisi for his theories on disordered materials and random processes. 

Syukuro Manabe

Born in 1931 in Shingu, Japan, Manabe is a senior Meteorologist at the USA's Princeton University and completed his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of Tokyo, Japan. Manabe contributed in demonstrating how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth. Moreover, in the 1960s, he was the first person to explore the interaction between radiation balance and the vertical transport of air masses. As per the Nobel committee, it is Manabe's theories and discoveries that helped in making current climate models that assist in detecting weather patterns. 

Klaus Hasselmann

Hasselmann is a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany's Hamburg and shares the one-half of Nobel prize with Manabe "for the physical modeling of the Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming". Hasselman created a model that links together weather and climate, ten years after Manabe's work on climate. His model explained why climate models can be reliable despite the weather being changeable and chaotic and developed methods to identify the effects of natural phenomena and human activities on climate. It is his methods that have proven that global warming is a result of human emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 

Giorgio Parisi

Parisi enjoys the other half of the prize "for the discovery of the interplay of disorders and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales", as per the Nobel committee. Born in Italy's Rome, he is a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome and his contributions are considered the "most important"  to the complex systems theory. His discoveries make many different and apparently entirely random phenomena understandable and their application is not only limited to physics and extends to areas such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning.

Image: Twitter/@NobelPrize

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Published October 5th, 2021 at 18:35 IST

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