The 2021 Nobel prize in physics was given for ground-breaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems. In particular, to developing models for understanding chaotic systems. This was broken into two parts, climate, and spin-glass. The climate section was awarded to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for the physical modeling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability, and reliably predicting global warming. These major contributions were performed in the 1960s and have had a drastic impact on how we view our impact on the world around us and how we try to understand these impacts.

The second half of the Nobel prize was given to Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”. While Parisi had many contributions to this field a fairly notable one was his work on spin-glass. Here he developed a model that was applied to many other systems that exhibit chaotic behavior. Helping to understand and model many systems that were previously impossible to understand.

Here I briefly describe this fundamental work and why it led to a noble prize in physics in 2021.

For more information check out the following links. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/phy...

https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/20...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...