
Nobel Prize in Physics 2021, the Italian Giorgio Parisi also among the winners
Today the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics: half of the award goes jointly to US researcher Syukuro Manabe and German Klauss Hasselmann "for the physical modelling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming". The other half of the Nobel Prize in physics is awarded to Giorgio Parisi "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales".
Syukuro Manabe is a meteorologist and climatologist at Princeton University. He demonstrated how the increase in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to the rise in temperatures of the Earth's surface. He laid the foundations for the development of physical models of the climate and was the first to explore the interaction between radiation and the vertical transport of air masses. Klauss Hasselman, of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg, created a model that links weather and climate, explaining why climate models can remain reliable even if the weather is variable and chaotic. His method was used to demonstrate that the increase in temperature is due to our greenhouse gas emissions.
Giorgio Parisi discovered new properties in disordered physical systems, managing to find patterns in phenomena and materials that were previously considered completely dominated by the laws of the chaos. He was able to do this not only in physics, but also in very different fields, such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning.
Born in 1948 in Rome, Giorgio Parisi has already won various prizes, including the Dirac Medal in 1999 and the Boltzmann Medal in 1992. He is professor of theoretical physics at the La Sapienza University of Rome, president of the class of Physical, Mathematical and natural at the Accademia dei Lincei, and researcher at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). Only a few days ago he entered the Clarivate Citation Laureates list, drawn up every year since 1989, which includes the most cited scientists in the world, who have most influenced the reference scientific community.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2021/summary/