Live: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi

The Price Nobel Prize physics was awarded this Tuesday to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi “For his innovative contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems.”

The price has been split in half. Firstly, Manabe and Hasselmann they were awarded “for the physical modeling of the Earth’s climate, the quantification of variability and the reliable prediction of global warming”.

At a time, Parisi he won the other half “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic scale to planetary scale”.

The Swedish Academy of Sciences explained that the Manabe, a Japanese meteorologist, demonstrated how increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cause temperatures on the Earth’s surface to rise. In the 1960s, he led the development of physical models of Earth’s climate and was the first to explore the interaction between the radiation balance and the vertical transport of air masses. His work laid the foundations for the development of climate models.

Ten years later HasselmannA German oceanographer and climate modeler, he created a model that links time and climate, answering the question of why climate models can be reliable despite changing and chaotic weather conditions. He also developed methods to identify specific signals, fingerprints, that natural phenomena and human activities imprint on the climate. Their methods have shown that the increase in the temperature of the atmosphere is due to human emissions of carbon dioxide.

In the 1980’s, ParisiAn Italian physicist has discovered hidden patterns in complex messy materials. His discoveries are one of the most important contributions to the theory of complex systems. They make it possible to understand and describe many different and apparently totally random complex materials and phenomena, not only in physics but also in other very different fields, such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning.

This prize is the second of the season after medicine, which on Monday rewarded two specialists in the nervous system and touch, the Americans David Julios and Ardem Patapoutian.

After the 2020 astronomical reconnaissance, experts saw that the Swedish searchlights were moving away from space.

Last year, the award went to Briton Roger Penrose, German Reinhard Genzel and American Andrea Ghez, pioneers in research on “black holes”, the regions of the universe where nothing can escape.

Medicine kicked off the 2021 Nobel Prize season on Monday by honoring two Americans whose work paved the way for the fight against chronic pain.

The Hungarian Katalin Kariko and the American Drew Weissman, pioneers of messenger RNA vaccines, who were among the favorites, will have a second chance on Wednesday with the chemistry prize.

Among the most eagerly awaited by the public, the literature prize will be announced Thursday by the Swedish Academy and the peace prize will be announced Friday in Oslo. When it comes to diversity, will literature reward a non-Westerner for the first time in nearly 10 years?

The one for peace is particularly open this year, and among its favorites are press freedom organizations or the Belarusian opposition Svetlana Tikhanovskaia.

The newly created Saver Prize closes the season on Monday.

All Nobel laureates follow a similar election process: scientists, academics or university professors nominate their candidates and the different Nobel committees set up several screens to choose the laureate (s), up to three per prize. And they have the same financial endowment, this year of 10 million Swedish kronor (980,000 euros, $ 1.1 million).

NO CLEAR FAVORITES IN LITERATURE AND THE PRICE OF PEACE

The two Nobel Prize winners who generate the most expectations each year, Literature and Peace, are presented this time without clear favorites in the previous pools.

Thus, for the Literature class appear classics of speculations of recent years such as the Japanese Haruki Murakami, the Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiongo and the Guadeloupean Maryse Condé.

Among those who succeed the American poet Louis Glück among the laureates, there are also other lyrical artists such as the Canadian Anne Carson, her compatriot the narrator Margaret Atwood and the Russian novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya.

The prize pools for the Nobel Peace Prize, which last year awarded the United Nations World Food Program, are dominated by candidates linked to the defense of journalists, the environment and health issues.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg are some of the names ringing for the award. prestigious. .

ONLY 6% OF WINNERS ARE WOMEN

Since the failure of the first edition of the prizes in 1901, the Nobels – who have been deserted 49 times – have distinguished until 2020 930 people and 25 organizations, some on several occasions, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross , the American biochemist Linus Pauling or the scientist Marie Curie.

Curie won Physics in 1903, shared with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel, and Chemistry alone in 1911, a rarity in the list of Nobel laureates, in which women nevertheless play a marginal role.

Only 6% of the total laureates are women (57 in total), and almost half of them (28) have been honored in the past two decades.

In the last edition, there were four laureates: the American Andrea Ghez (Physics), her compatriot Jennifer A. Doudna and the French Emmanuelle Charpentier (Chemistry), and the also American Louise Glück (Literature).

(With information from AFP and EFE)

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