Italian physicist Giorgio Parisi (INFN, Sapienza University of Rome, vice president of the Accademia dei Lincei) wins the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on Complex Systems. He shares the prize equally with Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann. The two researchers received the award for their research on climate models and global warming. To date, 20 Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Italians since the prize’s inception (12 in science, 5 in Physics, 6 in Medicine, and 1 in Chemistry). The last Nobel Prize awarded to an Italian-born researcher was awarded in 2007 to Mario Capecchi, who worked in the US. However, the first Italian researcher to have carried out the majority of his work in Italy goes back 59 years, to the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Giulio Natta. Returning to Parisi’s Nobel Prize: as soon as the complexity of structures and systems increases, and when they are composed of so many interacting elements that they determine large-scale collective behavior, we face new situations in which knowledge of the properties of individual elements (particles, atoms, molecules, etc.) is no longer sufficient to describe the overall system. The point is that in such systems, the interactions between elements are such that they determine complex structures that cannot be directly derived from the properties of the individual isolated elements. For this reason, the behavior of the whole is fundamentally different from any of its elementary subparts. It is precisely in this context that the work of Giorgio Parisi fits in, who has also made important contributions to the field of elementary particles, quantum chromodynamics, and who received the Nobel Prize for “innovative contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems.” Neural networks in neuroscience, the collective behavior of flocks of birds, and the folding of proteins are examples of complex systems to which Parisi has made a decisive contribution. Parisi’s work is part of a fervent effort that began in the 1970s in various academies around the world, among which Italy played a central role. Parisi’s Nobel Prize is part of a long tradition of excellence in Italian physics, one of whose most illustrious representatives is Enrico Fermi, winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Italian physicist Giorgio Parisi (INFN, Sapienza University of Rome, vice president of the Accademia dei…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-664584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ca-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n