George Parisi, theoretical physicist of the La Sapienza University of Rome and of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn) and vice president of the Accademia dei Lincei, received the Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 together with two other researchers: the Japanese meteorologist and climatologist Syukuro Manabe and the German oceanographer and climate modeler Klaus Hasselmann.
Parisi was awarded for “the discovery of the interaction between disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from the atomic to planetary scale”, while Manabe and Hasselmann received the award for their research on climate models and global warming. All three, commented by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, have made a fundamental contribution to mastering the complex systems. “The discoveries recognized this year demonstrate that our understanding of climate rests on a solid scientific foundation, based on rigorous analysis of observations. This year's winners have all contributed to our understanding of the properties and evolution of complex physical systems,” said Thors Hans Hansson, chair of the Nobel Committee in Physics.
Parisi's is the fifth Nobel prize received by an Italian for Physics (another 15 arrived on other subjects), but it is also one of the very few obtained for research and activities carried out in Italy. To find a similar precedent, in fact, we need to go back to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Giulio Natta in 1959, while the last Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to an Italian dates back to 2002.
"I'm happy, I didn't expect it, but I knew there might be possibilities,” Giorgio Parisi said in connection with the Stockholm Academy of Sciences.
“It is a historic day for Italy and for this I want to say a big thank you to Giorgio Parisi. I think I can do it on behalf of many,” he commented the Minister of University and Research, Maria Cristina Messa. “To say 'congratulations' to our new winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics is even an understatement: Giorgio, with his life dedicated to science and research, with a passion that has never left him, has been over the years, and continues to to be so today, teacher and example for many young people, researchers and not". “Research requires original ideas, freedom, rigor, discipline; it requires knowing how to pursue one's goals with ups and downs, but it gives opportunities and hope to the world, especially to the new generations, it teaches how to use methods that encourage comparison and allow us to reach useful synthesis. This too – he concluded – is the lesson that Giorgio Parisi gives us today”.
As for Giorgio Parisi, this is what he said in an interview prior to the Nobel Prize, answering the question of what the next stages of discoveries in the field of physics could be:
“The beauty of science is that very often one does not know what is coming: we have had many completely unexpected discoveries, such as superconductivity at high temperatures or graphene. Of course, what we are all waiting for is the experimental discovery of dark matter, of which we have only clues, fingerprints. But we haven't touched it yet and we don't even know if we will be able to touch it”.
