Nobel Prize in Physics for American, German and Italian

The Nobel Prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, equivalent to almost 1 million euros. One half is for the American Syukuro Manabe and the German Klaus Hasselmann. The other half of the amount will go to the Italian Giorgio Parisi. Parisi discovered “the interplay between disorder and fluctuation, from atoms to planets.”

Manabe (90) was born in Japan and moved to the United States about 1960. There he went to work for the Federal Weather Service. There he discovered that the average temperature on Earth rises as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases. When the amount of CO2 doubles, the temperature on earth rises by more than 2 degrees. This discovery is the basis of climate change. That long-term forecast was difficult to combine with the short-term weather at the time. The weather in more than a week is already difficult to predict, because small movements in the air can have major consequences. Hasselmann discovered at the Max Planck Institute in Germany that there is a structure in this chaos. “He answered the question of why climate models are reliable, even if the weather is changeable and chaotic,” explains the Nobel Committee.

The fact that Manabe and Hasselmann will receive the Nobel Prize this year is also a message to world leaders, who will soon meet at a climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. “Climate models are firmly based on physical theories. Global warming is supported by sound science”, said the jury.

Parisi, the third winner, works in a different field, but there are similarities. He studies complex systems, with particles that seem to behave unpredictably and randomly. Around 1980 he discovered that there are hidden patterns in that chaos. “His discoveries make it possible to understand and describe many different and seemingly arbitrary materials and phenomena, not only in physics, but also in mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning,” explains the Nobel Committee.