The Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to scientists Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi, for groundbreaking work in predicting climate change and for the understanding of complex physical systems.
Manabe, 90, and Hasselmann, 89, were jointly honored for “the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming,” according to the press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Italian physicist Parisi, 73, claimed the other half of the award, for “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”
The trio were announced as winners at a news conference Tuesday in Stockholm, Sweden.
Manabe’s work in the 1960s “laid the foundation for the development of current climate models,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement, while Hasselmann “created a model that links together weather and climate” a decade later.
Parisi’s discoveries “make it possible to understand and describe many different and apparently entirely random complex materials and phenomena.” This is not only true for physics but also for other areas, such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning, the academy added.
