A Nobel for simplifying complexities

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for work that found order in disorder, helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including our understanding of the global climate crisis.

MAKING SENSE OF ‘COMPLEX SYSTEMS’

All three work on what are known as “complex systems,” of which climate is just one example. The prize goes to two distinct types of physics that are opposite in many ways, but share the goal of making sense of what seems random and chaotic in such a way that it can be predicted.

WHAT DID THE TRIO WORK ON?

Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann’s work is about large-scale global forces that shape our daily lives. In the 1960s, they laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it. They demonstrated how increases in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would raise global surface temperatures Giorgio Parisi’s work centres around subatomic particles and is somewhat esoteric and academic. In the early 1980s, he discovered the ‘hidden rules’ behind seemingly random movements and swirls in gases or liquids, that can be applied to neuroscience, machine learning and starling flight formations

Global warming and Nobel Prizes: An old association

Work on climate changes has been recognised by Nobel prizes before.

2007: Former US vice-president Al Gore and the UN climate panel received the Peace Prize for galvanising international action against global warming 2018: William Nordhaus won one half of the Economics prize for integrating climate change into the Western economic growth model “Sceptics or deniers of scientific facts ... are not so visible anymore and this climate science message has been heard.”

“I think it is very urgent that we take real and very strong decisions [regarding the global climate crisis] and we move at a very strong pace over the matter.” — GIORGIO PARISI