Nobel Prize for Physics goes to a true Renaissance Man

• 

• 

• 

What have atoms, neurons, genes, proteins, species, agents, the climate and flocks of starlings all got in common? They are examples of complex systems. And until very recently the human response to how they all worked together was to hold our heads in our hands and and cry “we don’t know!”

Now Italian scientist Giorgio Parisi has changed all that. His work, together with that of Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselman has been so profound that all have been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics. We’ll let the Nobel Foundation [1] and Nature [2] do the heavy lifting for those who may be interested. Suffice it to say that when some airhead claims that models of climate change are flawed, you now know they are only demonstrating their own ignorance.

For us at LSS, Parisi stands in the great tradition of Italian science and learning. The achievements of late Middle Ages with thinkers like Pacioli and Fibonnacci grew into the Renaissance, the true fons et origio of the scientific tradition. Yes we will cite Galileo and Leonardo-but did you know that painters like Uccello and della Francesca were more than journeymen mathematicians as well? We could go on, but as the tradition carried in into modern times, we’ll end where we started with Parisi, a worthy link indeed in this great chain. Thank you, Signore Parisi for deepening our understanding of the world around us. Grazie, Chiarissimo Professore for such interesting insights. And above all for creating another defiant spark of light in the darkness of dense ignorance and stupidity that surrounds us all.

[1]https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2021/press-release/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d43978-021-00122-6

#parisi #complex systems #global warming #climate change #physics