Giorgio Parisi, a physicist from Sapienza Università di Roma and current vice-president of Accademia dei Lincei, has been awarded half of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics, with the other half shared between Syukuro Manabe from Princeton University in the USA and Klaus Hasselmann from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.
The award recognizes the three scientists’ “groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems”. As for Parisi, an eclectic physicist whose research work has covered areas such as fundamental particles, condensed matter, statistical physics and disordered materials, the Nobel committee has highlighted his contributions to “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”.
“I was very happy and I was not really expecting it,” Parisi told reporters after the announcement. “I was really very happy. I knew there was some non-negligible possibility.”
The study of complex physical systems has applications ranging from neuroscience to biology and machine learning. But in the press release accompanying the announcement, the Nobel Committee for Physics highlighted one complex system in particular: the Earth’s climate. “The discoveries being recognised this year demonstrate that our knowledge about the climate rests on a solid scientific foundation, based on a rigorous analysis of observations” said Thors Hans Hansson, chair of the Committee. “This year’s Laureates have all contributed to us gaining deeper insight into the properties and evolution of complex physical systems”.
Parisi, who is 73, is the sixth Italian scientist to win the Physics Nobel Prize, after Guglielmo Marconi (1909), Enrico Fermi (1938), Emilio Segré (1959), Carlo Rubbia (1984) and Riccardo Giacconi (2002).
