Physics Nobel laureates develop tools to gain control of complex systems
bringing to a close speculation about the winner of Nobel Prize in Physics This year, the Nobel Committee decided to award a trio of researchers. One half went to Tsukuro Manebe of Princeton University in the US and Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany, for their work in climate science. Among the long line of researchers who hypothesized the warming of the atmosphere due to the gases in it, Tsukuro Manebe’s modeling, in collaboration with others – and for decades – is a classic work that also showed in the 1960s that the atmosphere Another will pass by. 2.3 °C warming with doubling of carbon dioxide content. Klaus Haselmann identified a way to treat random noise-like variations of weather, devising a method to generate useful “signals” on the scale of climate. What was interesting was how these models could show the impact of human activities on the climate. The second part of the award, awarded to Giorgio Paris from Sapienza University in Rome, Italy, for developing a method to intelligently study complex condensed matter systems called “spin glasses” – an outstanding achievement in both mathematical and physical innovation. The idea of breaking the observed “replication symmetry” in spin glasses, in a coherent manner, which was his contribution, actually led to a method for studying one of the simplest models of a complex system. His work has helped solve problems in mathematics, biology and neuroscience; For example, how memory is stored in a network of nerve cells.
What binds the seemingly disparate works together—climatology work by Tsukuro and Hasselmann on the one hand and theoretical condensed matter physics work by Paris on the other—is that both describe complex physical systems. Physics is often regarded as the science of simple systems, and for this it is mostly celebrated and sometimes condemned. Even rocket science, which inspires awe for its grandeur and accuracy, is mostly the study of so-called simple systems. Complexity arises when the system consists of many, many interacting pieces, each of which moves in an independent way. The deceptively simple-looking problem of draining water from a tap is extremely difficult to understand as it transitions from a simple streamlined flow to a complex turbulent one. This year’s Nobel laureates have handled such complex systems and developed tools to derive meaningful, quantitative results from them. Notable in this is the work of climate scientists, which clarifies where science stands on the issue of global warming and estimates the human fingerprint on climate change. With the COP26 summit approaching, the Nobel Committee’s decision only underscores the need to take this into account.
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