[HN Gopher] The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021
___________________________________________________________________
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021
Author : harscoat
Score : 227 points
Date : 2021-10-05 10:01 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nobelprize.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nobelprize.org)
| tediousdemise wrote:
| Two of these awards seem like virtue signaling for climate change
| and global warming, topics which exploded in media and politics
| this year.
|
| I personally believe that global warming and climate change are
| the most pressing issues facing humanity, but I oppose the
| politicization of prestigious award platforms. It's
| simultaneously obnoxious and unfair to the other candidates.
|
| We see the same thing happen in racially-charged atmospheres for
| artistic awards.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| I first learned about Manabe's works from the wonderful "The
| Discovery of Global Warming" project. Looking at the Nobel prize
| citation, they seem to consider his work on climate sensitivity
| (2 degrees for doubled CO2, obtained in 1967) the most important,
| but I think his work on coupled model of atmosphere and ocean was
| equally important.
|
| It is interesting to note his own view. On climate sensitivity
| calculation: "it is not advisable to take too seriously". On
| coupled model: "I am very proud of it".
|
| https://history.aip.org/climate/GCM.htm
| sanxiyn wrote:
| The linked page (and the whole site) is totally worth reading,
| but it is probably too long, so here are some quotes. On
| climate sensitivity calculation:
|
| > Wallace Broecker, who would later play a major role in
| climate change studies, recalled that it was the 1967 paper
| "that convinced me that this was a thing to worry about".
| Another scientist called it "arguably the greatest climate
| science paper of all time", for it "essentially settled the
| debate on whether carbon dioxide causes global warming".
| Experts in a 2015 poll agreed, naming it as the "most
| influential" of all climate change papers.
|
| So Nobel committee was right to cite it. On the other hand, the
| author's "don't take it too seriously" comment should be taken
| seriously. 2 degrees value is spot on, but knowing what we know
| now, it couldn't be the right value for the right reason. The
| most important is that 1967 model had no ocean. (Manabe went on
| to make the first successful attack with ocean in 1969.)
| Another is lack of data. The following quote is pretty funny:
|
| > Until satellite measurements became available later in the
| 1980s, most models used data from the 1950s that only gave
| averages by zones of latitude, and only for the Northern
| Hemisphere. Modelers mirrored the set to represent clouds in
| the Southern Hemisphere, with the seasons reversed -- although
| of course the distribution of land, sea, and ice is very
| different in the two halves of the planet.
|
| I mean, mirroring? It is obviously wrong, but what can you do?
| Other than waiting for satellites and noting the result
| shouldn't be taken too seriously, that is. Now we have adequate
| data and model, it is proper to acknowledge great effort went
| into these pioneering works.
|
| The last quote on amount of computation used (for 1969 paper).
| It was truly AlphaGo-scale computaiton of its time! It is
| interesting to note AlphaGo Zero trained for comparable time of
| 40 days.
|
| > Their costly Univac 1108, a supercomputer by the standards of
| the time... Manabe and Bryan were confident enough of their
| model to undertake a heroic computer run, some 1100 hours long
| (more than 12 full days of computer time devoted to the
| atmosphere and 33 to the ocean).
| leephillips wrote:
| These three propositions are all simultaneously true (in my
| opinion):
|
| 1) Every person who has ever received a Nobel Prize in physics
| has richly deserved it;
|
| 2) Culture and politics influence the awarding of the Prize;
|
| 3) Several people who did not get the Prize would have if they
| had not been women.
|
| (3) is a corollary to (2). One example is Jocelyn Bell Burnell,
| who discovered pulsars. The Nobel Prize for that was awarded to
| two men.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| Although it's factual, many people put their fingers in their
| ear and scream when you mention point (2). I would extend that
| point to _any_ prestigious award.
| leephillips wrote:
| At least (1) is still true. Contrast the Literature and Peace
| prizes, which have truly become bad jokes.
| tephra wrote:
| To argue a bit I'd say that the science prizes have it a
| bit easier.
|
| Here's the criteria that Alfred Nobel set out in his
| will[0] for the literature prize (kinda badly translated
| from 19th century Swedish): "one part to whom in literature
| have produced the most excellent work in an ideal
| direction".
|
| You have had 18 members of the Swedish Academy debating
| what the hell that means since forever.
|
| [0] https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred-nobel/alfred-nobels-
| testam...
| leephillips wrote:
| Hmmm. OK, that's quite something to have to interpret.
| barwell wrote:
| But at least in the case of Jocelyn Bell Burnell, even though
| she put in a lot of the legwork, it was her supervisors who did
| much of the theoretical work to explain the discovery. Also of
| note is that she agreed with the Nobel committee decision. From
| her Wikipedia page:
|
| "First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are
| always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it
| is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the
| success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a
| supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that
| it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair
| to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly,
| I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to
| research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do
| not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset
| about it - after all, I am in good company, am I not!"
| leephillips wrote:
| Yes, (1) is true even in this case. It's not that her
| supervisors didn't deserve to share in the prize, it's that
| she should not have been excluded.
|
| I know of her statements about the incident. I think she's
| being modest, and I disagree with her idea that awarding the
| Prize to someone who happened to be a student during the time
| of discovery would somehow demean the Prize. Her work was as
| crucial as theirs. It wasn't just "legwork", she discovered
| the regular signals and recognized them as something new and
| important.
| kens wrote:
| As for (1), Dalen's 1912 physics Nobel Prize for a regulator
| for lighthouse illumination seems out of place.
| meister0 wrote:
| Lubos Motl, "Global warming: Nobel Prize in Physics has become a
| joke, too" https://motls.blogspot.com/2021/10/global-warming-
| nobel-priz...
| BoHerfVIJrEsq wrote:
| A link to a substantive critique of this prize by a working
| theoretical physicist should not be downvoted.
| freetinker wrote:
| From the post:
|
| "Obama got a prize for peace before he did anything of
| substance and before he started dozens of wars (Trump would
| have deserved the Nobel Prize in Peace about 50 times more
| than Obama but for obvious political reasons, he didn't get
| one)."
|
| Not suggesting that Obama deserved the Nobel prize, but to
| suggest that Trump deserved it "50 times more" is a
| ridiculous thing to say no matter how you slice it.
| olodus wrote:
| It is also not the same body that selects for the Peace
| Prize as the Physics one (different body in a different
| country), so I don't see how that could be used in any way
| as an argument against these ones.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Fifty times zero is still zero.
| freyir wrote:
| Not a substantive critique by a working physicist, a rant by
| a blogger who thrives on controversy.
| smarx007 wrote:
| > The explanation of the award involving the "interplay" is
| incredibly vague. What is the precise discovery or the paper
| that is being appreciated here?
|
| Nobel award explanations are directed at the general public.
| Prizes themselves are awarded for a lifetime contribution to
| the field and/or to the society through the work in the
| field.
|
| > I reserve the right to ban any commenter who mentions the
| Nobel Prize in a positive sense.
|
| A substantive critique?
|
| As far as I understood the post, the main weakness of the
| laureates' research is that it was not "hard" enough. And
| that the contribution of their research to the society should
| not matter. I am watching some lectures from laureates on YT
| now and I already wrote down a favourite quote from Syukuro
| Manabe: "You can never win, competing with nature in
| complexity".
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| As it's published within an hour of the announcement, you
| will allow me a measure of scepticism that this is really
| something "substantive" as opposed to merely "wordy".
| Ma8ee wrote:
| I think we disagree about the "substantive" part.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| A climate change denier rent about a Nobel prize awarded for
| work on climate change can be safely downvoted. Nothing of
| value is lost.
| gandalfgreybeer wrote:
| As a physicist primarily working in complex systems and machine
| learning, I was happy that complex systems were finally getting
| recognition.
|
| From the get-go this article was definitely the opposite of my
| opinions but I wanted to see what other people who obviously
| don't like the field don't like about it. His posturing using a
| Feynman anecdote left me confused but this quote just made me
| realize that it's not complex systems he doesn't like, it's the
| message of the study:
|
| > The other types of Nobel Prizes, especially those for peace
| and perhaps literature, have a track record featuring lots of
| terrorists and communists who got their award for something
| disgusting that was however popular among some leftists or
| haters of the Western world and similar folks. The late
| terrorist Arafat had to get one because he was a darling of
| many such people. Obama got a prize for peace before he did
| anything of substance and before he started dozens of wars
| (Trump would have deserved the Nobel Prize in Peace about 50
| times more than Obama but for obvious political reasons, he
| didn't get one). Al Gore got his one-half of a Nobel Prize for
| a fraudulent PowerPoint presentation about the catastrophic
| global warming because tons of dishonest leftists loved these
| kinds of anti-scientific lies.
|
| It is terrible when people who posture themselves as thinking
| scientifically suddenly throw out all logic when the results
| don't fit their narrative.
| left_physics wrote:
| I'm also a physicist and (also?) a leftist and I don't think
| Motl is particularly wrong in your quote. Exaggerated, but I
| do think the Nobel prizes have a leftist/progressist
| tendency, and his examples are not that far off.
|
| So in the context of this years prize, I think it's fair
| criticism, albeit somewhat carelessly delivered and
| unrigorous.
| lamontcg wrote:
| There's a neoliberal bias where the peace prize is given
| out to Kissenger, Obama, Arafat/Perez/Rabin.
|
| But if you only gave it out to actually peaceful people
| there would probably be a massive leftist/progressive slant
| (which makes no sense to the people in the crowd who think
| the CCP is leftist, but that is their problem).
| michannne wrote:
| I believe it is wiser to assume that bias exists everywhere
| and to choose whether you accept it or not. You accept it,
| Motl does not
| bjourne wrote:
| Pretty obvious that Motl has an axe to grind when he mentions
| Arafat's peace prize but forgets to mention that he had to
| share it with two Israeli war criminals. Or that the
| architect of the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger, also has
| received the prize. Certainly, some recipients of the prize
| have been controversial but it is not true that only
| leftists' darlings are awarded the prize.
| andrepd wrote:
| Who is this lunatic and why should I care about his ramblings
| about Al Gore' Marxist eco-terrorism camps?
| krastanov wrote:
| He was a very promising theoretical physicist who was well
| respected for his fundamental physics knowledge (including
| useful public service like his contributions to the physics
| stackexchange and a very informative science blog). Then he
| became very zealous in his non-scientific beliefs (the
| current link being a good example). If anything, it is good
| to know about him as a cautionary tale.
| buescher wrote:
| Right. Also informative is the tale of Billy Cottrell, but
| that's getting way off topic.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| Does anyone really care about Lubos Motl's ramblings any more?
| He seems to be the prime example of a smart person who gets too
| attached to his ideas and beliefs so he just digs deeper.
| topynate wrote:
| Yes for string theory and all related topics, with the
| exception of interpretation of quantum mechanics. In which
| his adoption of the Copenhagen interpretation is very
| reasonable as praxis, but doesn't make sense to me as
| metaphysics.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| He'll be the last string theorist when everyone else
| finally understood it was a dead end, thereby proving my
| point.
| dandanua wrote:
| It's not politically motivated, it's "existentially" motivated.
|
| Especially when world leaders ridicule the problem and dismantle
| efforts to fight it [1].
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51213003
| streamofdigits wrote:
| Complex systems are a largely unexplored area of physics in that
| we don't really have tools as powerful and generally applicable
| as the mathematical machinery developed to describe more
| "fundamental" physics. With the exception of near equilibrium
| phenomena of homogeneous systems like gases that can be described
| with 19th century statistical physics it is really hard to write
| down general laws or patterns.
|
| The work of Parisi (and quite a few others) in the eighties (non-
| linear systems, chaos theory, attractors, universality of power
| laws etc) have given us a first glimpse of what lies beyond, but
| a true revolution is still in the future and will require some
| pretty mind-bending mathematical inventions.
|
| Making serious progress is not just intellectually challenging,
| it is also of immense practical relevance for us understanding
| and moderating our impact on the biosphere. The Nobel committee,
| in their infinite wisdom, suggest as much.
| carlob wrote:
| Parisi work on spin glasses already has some pretty mind
| bending mathematics. That continuous limit where the rank of a
| matrix goes to zero for example?
| trenchgun wrote:
| >That continuous limit where the rank of a matrix goes to
| zero for example?
|
| What the fuck?
| Tycho wrote:
| Can someone elaborate on on this?
| carlob wrote:
| Chapter 3 of this [0] might help a bit
|
| [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0505032.pdf
| gajomi wrote:
| +1 on the whole references as a nice introduction. I
| think the authors overstate the preparation of their
| hypothetical "pedestrian" (either that or they need to
| get away from the physics department a bit more often),
| but a great reference nevertheless. I also got a lot out
| of sections of Nishimori's textbook [1]. In particular it
| helps motivate problems outside of physics and provides
| some references to start digging into more rigorous
| approaches via cavity methods (which I think,
| incidentally, are also more intuitive). I am a novice in
| this area but am sort of crossing my fingers that some of
| the ideas in this area will make their way into
| algorithms for inferring latent variables in some of the
| upcoming modern associative neural networks. What I mean
| here is that it would be cool not just to have an
| understanding of total capacity of the network but also
| correct variational approximations to use during
| training.
|
| [1] https://neurophys.biomedicale.parisdescartes.fr/wp-
| content/u... [2] https://ml-jku.github.io/hopfield-
| layers/
| gajomi wrote:
| Let me take a stab at this (I'll maybe take it halfway
| there). First of all we want to know what kind of matrix we
| are talking about.
|
| Imagine that you have a whole bunch generative models (its
| best if you imagine a fully connected Boltzmann machine in
| particular, whose states you can think of as a binary
| vector consisting only of zeros and ones) that have the
| same form but different random realizations of their
| parameters. This is a typical example of what a toy model
| of a so-called "spin glass" looks like in statistical
| physics (the spins are either up down down, usually
| represented as +1/-1). Each of these models, having been
| initialized randomly will have their up particular
| frequency of a particular location (also called site) of
| the boolean vector being either a one or a zero.
|
| If the tendency of a site to be either or one or a zero was
| independent of every other site the analysis of such a
| model would be pretty straightforward: every model would
| just have a vector of N frequencies and we could compare
| how close the statistical behavior of each model was to the
| other by comparing how closely the N frequencies at each
| site matched one another. But in the general case there
| will be some interaction or correlation between sites in a
| given model. If the interaction strength is strong enough
| this can result in a model tending to generate groups of
| patterns in its sequence of zeros and ones that are close
| to one another. Furthermore if we compare the overlap of
| the apparent patterns between two such models, each with
| their own random parameters, we will find that some of them
| overlap more than others.
|
| What we can then do is to ask the question of how much, on
| average do the patterns of these random models overlap with
| on another in the full set of all models. This leads us to
| the concept of an "overlap matrix". This matrix will have
| one set of values along the diagonal (corresponding to how
| much a models patterns tend to overlap with themselves) and
| off diagonal values capturing the overlap between. You can
| find through simulation or with some carefully constructed
| calculations that when the interaction strength between
| sites is small that the off diagonal elements don't tend to
| zero, but rather a single number different from the
| diagonal value. This is perhaps intuitive: these models
| were randomly initialized but they are going to overlap in
| their behavior in some places.
|
| Where things get interesting though is when you increase
| the interaction strength you find that the overlap matrix
| starts to take on a block diagonal form, wherein clusters
| of models overlap with one another at a certain level and
| at a lower but constant level with out-of-cluster models.
| This is called one replica symmetry breaking (1RSB). These
| different clusters of models can be thought of as having
| learned different overall patterns with the similarity
| quantified by their overalp. If you keep increasing the
| interaction strength you will find that this happens again
| and again, with a k-fold replica symmetry braking (kRSB)
| with a sort of self similar block structure emerging in the
| overlap matrix (picture is worth a thousand words [1]).
|
| Now the real wild part that Parisi figured out is what
| happens when you take this process to the regime of full
| replica symmetry breaking. You can't really do this with
| simulations and the calculations are very tricky (you have
| a bunch of terms either going to infinity or zero that need
| to balance out correctly) but Parisi ending up coming up
| with an expression for the distribution of overlaps for the
| infinitely sized matrix with full interaction strength in
| play. The expression is actually a partial differential
| equation that itself needs to be solved (I told you the
| calculations were tricky right), but amazingly, it seems to
| capture the behavior of these kinds of models correctly.
|
| Whereas mathematicians have a pretty good idea of how to
| understand the 1RSB process rigorously, the Parisi full
| replica symmetry breaking scheme is very much not
| understood and remains of interest both to complex systems
| researches trying to understand their models and applied
| mathematicians (probability people in particular) trying to
| lay the foundations needed to explore the ideas being
| explored by theorists.
|
| Hope that helps a bit!
|
| [1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Spin-
| Glasses%2C-Boolea...
| wnissen wrote:
| I work with many physicists. They are some of my most
| beloved colleagues. But man, physicists! Amirite?
| huachimingo wrote:
| y' = x - y (life is good)
|
| y' = x - y^2 (PANICC!!)
| throwaway98188 wrote:
| > The Nobel committee, in their infinite wisdom, suggest as
| much.
|
| Usually this phrase is used ironically, as in "they don't know
| what the [expletive] they're doing," but the rest of your
| comment reads genuine. Because people seem split on this and
| because I don't fully understand any of it, can you clarify one
| thing: are you throwin' shade?
| streamofdigits wrote:
| it was a bit of an innocent joke really, just to spice up the
| comment by alluding to the known fact that the committees are
| occasionally criticized.
|
| Granting Nobel prizes for science is not an exact science :-)
| witherk wrote:
| I think this is the first time I have seen the term 'infinite
| wisdom' used unironically.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| Can anyone with more insight into the three researchers explain
| if this is a political statement or if their work really
| represents the best physics research? I am genuinely asking as I
| don't know much about their research.
| pyb wrote:
| I don't know the other two, but Parisi is definitely a star in
| his field.
| bluescarni wrote:
| The fact that you think that climate change is a "political"
| topic speaks volume about the success of the right wing
| propaganda machine.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| Taking a look at Syukuro Manabe on Google scholar, one will
| find that his most cited work is decades old. They could have
| given him the prize years ago or years from now. Climate change
| being the biggest topic currently certainly was a contributing
| factor to the decision.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| That is often the case with the Nobel prize though. Higg's
| most cited paper was also many decades old before he got the
| Nobel prize.
| eganist wrote:
| Manabe's work was predictive. It's only in recent years when
| we've started seeing those predictions come true.
|
| Less "politics" and more "hey his models were right."
| fenomas wrote:
| That's how the scientific Nobel prizes work. The average
| delay between discovery and award for recent Physics prizes
| is over 25 years, and gaps of 40+ years are not uncommon.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The point your comment makes is one I imagine you have not
| grasped - the basic science of climate and CO2 was figured
| out by the late 1970s. Everything else since has been fine-
| tuning.
|
| For example, if you go back to the early 1950s this was not
| well known, and you had theories about how variations in the
| tides controlled climate and so on.
|
| P.S. Exxon scientists knew in 1978 that the science was
| accurate, and yet their executives spent millions of dollars
| for decades lying about it - and are still at it.
| Throwaway197401 wrote:
| Looks like this part is political: _"for the physical modelling
| of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably
| predicting global warming" "_
|
| And this part is actual science: _"for the discovery of the
| interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from
| atomic to planetary scales"_
| eganist wrote:
| > Looks like this part is political: "for the physical
| modelling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and
| reliably predicting global warming"
|
| All this is saying is that the predictive models they devised
| were proven correct given climate behavior today, e.g rise of
| temperatures and a general uptrend in severe weather activity
| that followed.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| He predicted 0.57C of warming by the year 2000, and we saw
| 0.54C of warming. So accurate at least according to that.
|
| https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1445359093905084417
| Throwaway197401 wrote:
| Which shouldn't be given a nobel price unless they can
| explain exactly why which they can't just like we can't
| really explain why the temperature didn't increase for a
| period after 2nd world war without getting into
| speculation.
|
| It's bogus and as far some anything related to scientific
| standards as we can come.
| baq wrote:
| nope.
|
| before you ask me for sources, you haven't provided any, and
| you're quoting from a release with sources.
| Throwaway197401 wrote:
| The source is the reason given. Modelling is NOT physics,
| it's not even science its statistics and does not actually
| produce the result that are claimed.
|
| There is a reason why the IPCC comes out with a range and
| not a specific number. They haven't found the right initial
| conditions or they would only use his to move forward.
|
| In fact if that had really been the case he should have
| been the only person who got the prize as that would have
| been an amazing achievement.
|
| This is just "sciencewashing" speculative modelling based
| on models about the climate that can't be proven to be
| correct in the future. (Hence the reason they are not going
| to stop modelling different initial conditions.
|
| So yes it's political nothing else. Politics not software
| is eating the world.
| sshb wrote:
| Here is a nice summary:
| https://twitter.com/thePiggsBoson/status/1445334496857841668
| smarx007 wrote:
| Rather than reading what tech/science writers can summarize
| on a lap (remember, they only learned the laureates' names a
| hour ago or so), I prefer to simply head over to YouTube and
| look for a lecture given by a laureate themselves. Most
| likely, Nobel is not their first prize and they have given a
| lecture summarizing their lifetime contributions before.
| Plus, it's always more pleasure to listen to nice people than
| reading Twitter :)
| Majestic121 wrote:
| You can also find a nice PDF summary of their contribution
| on the Nobel Prize website itself, including a popular
| version :
| https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2021/10/popular-
| physicspr...
| mygoodaccount wrote:
| High profile prizes will always be political. That said,
| Syukuro Manabe built the foundation for a lot of modern day
| computer-based climate simulation. I can't speak for the others
| but I'd say that's Nobel worthy.
| roenxi wrote:
| There is a level of politics that shreds credibility though.
| I am just struggling to see how someone gets a _physics_
| Nobel for modelling a climate system. Climate isn 't new,
| climate models have been getting better for decades and will
| continue to. The work may be important and well done, but it
| doesn't sound like it is pushing the boundaries of physics.
|
| The tag line sells it really poorly.
| counters wrote:
| Manabe contributed many pivotal works to the broad domain
| of planetary and atmospheric physics in the 1960's. The
| word "model" in reference to his work is substantially more
| than just computer simulations; really, it's referring to
| some of his seminal contributions providing "models" in the
| sense of physical frameworks for understanding the
| responses and evolution of planetary atmospheres (broadly
| speaking - with relevance far beyond the terrestrial
| atmosphere) to particular forcings. See Manabe and
| Weatherald (1967) [1] for perhaps one of the most critical
| contributions that he made.
|
| [1]: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1
| 520-04...
| jean_tta wrote:
| Below is a quote from the press release we are discussing:
|
| > In the 1960s, he led the development of physical models
| of the Earth's climate and was the first person to explore
| the interaction between radiation balance and the vertical
| transport of air masses. His work laid the foundation for
| the development of current climate models.
|
| As far as I understand (I am not a physicist), you're
| right: climate is not new, and climate models have been
| getting better for decades. And that's (in part) because of
| this guy's work, half a century ago. It sure pushed the
| boundaries of physics at the time, didn't it?
| paganel wrote:
| > computer-based climate simulation
|
| I'm no scientist by any stretch of the imagination, the last
| time when I read something related to higher physics was ~20
| years ago, in college, but I have to ask how is that topic
| related to modern physics. You're correct, it sounds like
| like a worthy Nobel for an Earth Sciences Nobel, or a
| Meteorology one (to be more direct), if those two things
| existed (maybe they should), but, again, don't know how
| meteorology (what computer-based climate simulation basically
| is) is the same thing as higher physics.
| evanb wrote:
| As a physicist, I try to avoid the snobbery of limiting
| myself to "higher physics". A wide variety of physical
| systems are interesting, not just fundamental particle
| physics. Physics contains multitudes; graphene, giant
| magnetoresistence, fiber optics, and systems more complex.
| paganel wrote:
| But then again physics risks following the (wrong) road
| taken by economics a while ago, when it decided that
| almost all modern human-activity can be in fact studied
| through the economics lens.
| jean_tta wrote:
| Surely studying the climate, i.e. a physical system, is
| completely in the realm of physics. Certainly, it is
| closer to whatever definition of physics you may have,
| than education or kidney donation (to take two examples)
| are to economics.
| maep wrote:
| Meteorology is a sub-branch of physics.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I don't know how you would meaningfully rank physicists
| without resorting to subjective value judgements. The notion
| of importance exists only in relationship to our ability to
| accomplish our goals, and goals are subjective.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The same can be said of any attempt to measure 'merit'.
| Whatever is called 'meritorious' is simply so because of
| cultural and historical happenstance.
| [deleted]
| nabla9 wrote:
| Hasselmann deserved it. Hasselmann model is stochastic climate
| model that explains red noise.
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2153-3490.1976...
| I don't know much about Manabes work but he is a pioneer in
| climate modelling.
|
| ps. Climate science is political only because those who don't
| believe in science politicize it.
| michannne wrote:
| Politicizing it has almost nothing to do with whether or not
| it is believed, it is politicized when it has value on a
| political scale. Saying Country A has lower impact on the
| climate than Country B and therefore A should limit its
| production of weapons and infrastructure that rely on
| factories and industries that produce harmful chemicals is
| very obviously of value to a politician
| toolz wrote:
| The fact people think anyone should believe in science speaks
| to how political many scientific subjects have become so
| political.
|
| Imagine if scientists just "believed" science and never tried
| to reproduce. Belief is an awfully terrible trait to have in
| science.
| butokai wrote:
| Isn't trying to reproduce a part of believing science? It
| seems that you're loving less than half of it otherwise
| he0001 wrote:
| Isn't that the problem? Because for most people, believing
| in it is the only option? They don't have the tools or the
| ability to either refute nor confirm it.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| > Imagine if scientists just "believed" science and never
| tried to reproduce.
|
| You're mixing up scientists-as-individuals with scientists-
| as-a-whole.
|
| Scientists-as-a-whole should certainly reproduce results,
| both to check new claims, and to teach/learn/demonstrate
| old knowledge.
|
| Scientists-as-individuals need belief, since there's no way
| to indivudally reproduce everything. For example, climate
| models rely on decades of measurements from Earth-
| observation satellites; if scientist shouldn't "believe",
| how would they go about reproducing those measurements for
| themselves?
|
| Even if individual climate scientists began each of their
| projects by building and launching their own satellites to
| take decades of observations (which would lag behind
| existing data, in any case), how would they calibrate the
| instruments on those satellites (e.g. without "believing"
| in the zeroth law of thermodynamics)?
| nabla9 wrote:
| Individuals have to trust scientific community.
|
| In principle, every individual could spend 10 years to
| learn the subject, then comb trough the evidence in one
| particular detail. That's not possible in reality.
|
| Even climate scientists have to trust other climate
| scientists in details they are not experts in. Climate
| chemist has not checked 3D computational model and vice
| versa.
|
| It is said that Thomas Young (1773 - 1829) was the last man
| who knew everything. He was a polymath who had studied most
| of human knowledge in detail.
| ResearchCode wrote:
| That's not true. On the "believing" side, Al Gore certainly
| politicized it.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| No, Gore merely made a movie that a lot of people saw, the
| politicisation (in the sense of wilfully ignoring science
| results for partisan reasons) was started in the 1990's by
| oil companies and republicans looking to kill they Kyoto
| protocol.
| nabla9 wrote:
| You can say so only if you believe that reality is
| constructed, like some French postmodernist philosophers
| do.
|
| If you think there is some ground truth in hard sciences,
| and science community provides best approximation of it,
| then "other side too" argument is not valid. Al Gore
| educated, only climate dentists politicized.
| mjamil wrote:
| Is a climate dentist (a) a typo (i.e., you meant
| denialist); (b) a clever reference to Seinfeld and anti-
| dentites; or (c) a valid phrase that I'm unfamiliar with?
| buescher wrote:
| I want to know more about climate dentistry.
| stathibus wrote:
| It is obvious that the committee decided they wanted the prize
| to be about climate change this year before the selection
| process began, or it never would have shaken out this way.
| gandalfgreybeer wrote:
| How is it obvious?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| I guess first stathibus defined that anything that
| indicates the reality of climate change is part of one big
| conspiracy, and then "obviously" this event is part of
| that?
| stathibus wrote:
| Tell me you're way out of your depth without telling me
| you're way out of your depth
| scythe wrote:
| The Nobel Prize does not -- and cannot reasonably -- highlight
| the "best" physics research, because it is not possible to
| directly say one discipline is superior or more important than
| another. Rather, the Nobel features different disciplines in
| different years.
|
| In this context, it's important to recall that the development
| of modern climate science is one of the most significant
| developments of 20th-century physics, and before this year,
| _no_ Nobel Prize had been awarded for climate science. Similar
| prizes were awarded for the development of the integrated
| circuit and the light-emitting diode, and in these cases almost
| nobody finds it to be in the slightest untoward that the Prize
| is awarded in relation to the social impact of the work. (There
| are always a few crotchety purists, but more people pretend to
| be so when it suits them.)
|
| So yes, awarding the Nobel for climate science is a political
| decision. _Not_ awarding the Nobel for climate science would
| _also_ be a political decision. In this context, it appears
| that the recipients are two of the most influential early
| theorists of climate science, who did their work decades ago.
|
| The Nobel committee has no choice but to be politicized when
| science is politicized. They handled it admirably.
| [deleted]
| mstade wrote:
| Is it unreasonable to suggest that maybe it could be both a
| reflection of politics and world class scientific achievements?
|
| To suggest that the prize is given simply in order to make a
| political statement seems like an insult to both the academy
| and the laureates. Besides, wouldn't it be just as bad to avoid
| awarding a prize that is politically sensitive, even though the
| actual science may well be prize worthy?
|
| It's fine to not consider a laureate a worthy winner, for sure,
| but it's not like they gave the Nobel prize in physics to Greta
| Thunberg..
| whatshisface wrote:
| It's a defensible suspicion given the other prize that shares
| the name "Nobel."
| inasio wrote:
| Physicists developed a whole bunch of tools to find the base
| energy levels of spinglasses, which were repurposed in the past
| 10 years as general purpose solvers for NP hard combinatorial
| optimization problems (by converting them to QUBO format, which
| is equivalent to the Ising format in spinglasses). There are pros
| and cons to them, but it opened a whole new area in optimization,
| currently multiple companies are building custom hardware QUBO
| solvers (D-Wave, NTT, Fujitsu, Hitachi, ...)
| dav_Oz wrote:
| As with the NP for Med/Physio it is unfortunate that the trope of
| "saving the planet" has such a vile revival. And if I'm not for
| the one team I'm for the other.
|
| Irrespective of that this years NP in Physics is an
| achknowledgment of a "young" (in terms of NPs) but promising
| field.
|
| For anyone interested, I found this podcast very informative:
|
| https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/08/17/110-...
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| Psychohistory by Hari Seldon
| tumblewit wrote:
| The most fascinating physics nobel prize for me in recent times
| was for gravitational wave detection using LIGO. I spent days
| learning and watching videos of the three of them. The ingenuity
| of the detector is fascinating and the fact that every year they
| simply got closer but 'not there yet' and the fact that it took
| more than two decades says that the goal was probably secondary
| but they enjoyed the journey far more. Of course they would have
| hoped to see the waves be detected in their lifetime but for Kip
| Thorne it was 50 years from the start. Most of the stories behind
| Nobel prize winners are mind boggling.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Manabe (and a lot of other people!) really figured out the
| control dials on climate back in the 1970s The basic science on
| carbon dioxide and climate was settled by 1979, and ExxonMobil's
| scientists agreed internally, as recent revelations demonstrate
| (1). Everything since has mostly been fine-tuning and improved
| resolution due to computational technology advances. There has
| been a huge political effort to discredit this science ever
| since, by the fossil fuel industry and affiliated interests,
| since they have huge finacial interests in maintaining the
| current energy supply system - so, the science got politicized.
|
| Let's take a look at the general concept though, from Manabe et
| al.'s 1975 paper (2):
|
| > "The atmospheric part of the model incorporates the primitive
| equations of motion in a spherical coordinate system. The
| numerical problems associated with the treatment of mountains are
| minimized by using the "sigma" coordinate system in which
| pressure, normalized by surface pressure, is the vertical
| coordinate. For vertical finite differencing, nine levels are
| chosen so as to represent the planetary boundary layer and the
| stratosphere as well as the troposphere. For horizontal finite
| differencing, the regular latitude-longitude grid is used. To
| prevent linear computational instability in the time integration,
| Fourier filtering is applied in the longitudinal direction to all
| prognostic variables in higher latitudes such that the effective
| grid size of the model is approximately 500 km everywhere."
|
| So, let's note that this general approach is applicable to
| planets like Mars and Venus as well as Earth. There is no ocean
| on those planets, however, but the atmospheric radiative-
| convection model approach is identical. Mars has something like
| 1% of Earth's surface pressure, Venus has 90X that pressure, but
| the same approach works. It's even applied to the gas giants.
| Note that 9 layers in the model is quite simple relative to
| modern models.
|
| > "For the computation of radiative transfer, the distribution of
| water vapor, which is determined by the prognostic system of
| water vapor, is used. However, the distributions of carbon
| dioxide, ozone and cloudiness are prescribed as a function of
| latitude and height and assumed to be constant with time. The
| temperature of the ground surface is determined such that it
| satisfies the condition of heat balance."
|
| Here's another key point - water vapor is modeled as a feedback,
| CO2 is modeled as a forcing. About 2/3 of radiative forcing in
| the atmosphere is due to water vapor, but that water vapor
| increases due to CO2 forcing (which has greatest effect higher in
| the atmosphere, closing windows that would allow IR to escape to
| space). This was verified by the Pinatubo explosion incidentally,
| in which predictions about water vapor feedback were highly
| accurate (3).
|
| > "The prognostic system of water vapor includes the contribution
| of three-dimensional advection of water vapor and condensation in
| case of supersaturation. To simulate moist convection, a highly
| idealized procedure of moist convective adjustment is introduced.
| The prediction of soil moisture and snow depth is based upon the
| budget of water, snow and heat. Snow cover and sea ice are
| assumed to have much larger albedos than soil surface or open
| sea, and have a very significant effect upon the heat balance of
| the surface of the model."
|
| So, that's the albedo effect, and as the poles melt albedo drops
| and you get more warming. You also get polewards heat transfer.
| Thus these scientists predicted warming at poles would be much
| faster than warming at equator, and that's been proven as well.
| Cloud feedbacks introduce a certain degree of variability, but
| definitely don't change the overall conclusions (see MIT's
| Richard Lindzen for that worn-out fossil-hyped argument if you
| like).
|
| Now, I'll stop here but note that Manabe's other great
| contribution was linking the atmospheric model to the rather more
| difficult ocean circulation model. This allowed quantification of
| the lag effect, i.e. ocean warming absorbs a great % of the
| atmospheric forcing but warmer oceans warm the atmosphere and so
| on.
|
| Incidentally, none of this would be at all controversial if human
| civilization had exhausted global fossil fuel reserves by 1980
| and renewable adoption had been forced by necessity.
|
| It's rather interesting though - science was once completely
| accepted by industry, but then scientific advances began
| undermining business profits - the discovery of industrial
| carcinogens, the discovery of fossil-fueled global warming, etc.
| really changed the dynamic and accurate science became as much of
| a threat to established interests as it was a boon.
|
| [edit sources]: 1.
| https://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1978-exxon-memo-on-g...
|
| 2.
| https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/phoc/5/1/1520-048...
|
| 3. https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.296.5568.727
| spodek wrote:
| The climate and environment are critically important, as everyone
| knows from daily front page disasters that will increase.
|
| I have a PhD in physics and have made sustainability my mission.
| I wish I didn't have to as fixing problems past generations stuck
| us with isn't my first passion, but I can't change the past.
|
| As important as the science was to get us here, we have to move
| to the next stage, which is leadership. I don't mean just passing
| laws. Even prior to our twin problems of overconsumption and
| overpopulation, the damage we're suffering is the physical
| manifestation of our values, especially material growth,
| extraction, efficiency, externalizing costs, and comfort and
| convenience. Technology, innovation, laws, and markets augment
| those values. As long as we hold them as a culture and
| individuals, we will innovate technologies, laws, and markets
| that exacerbate the problem.
|
| I will always support more research and value these scientists'
| work that enabled us to get past the science to restoring our
| values of stewardship: personal growth, enjoying what we have,
| humility to nature, resilience, responsibility for how our
| behavior affects others, meaning, purpose, and the satisfaction
| of a job well done. With those values, we will innovate solutions
| that increase Earth's ability to sustain life.
|
| Again, as important as the science is, we must restore our
| personal and cultural values to solve the problems science
| revealed. That's leadership and teamwork. We can all act
| immediately. Since systemic change begins with personal
| transformation, the fastest, most effective way to change
| governments and corporations is to act here and now, learn from
| the experience, act more, and lead others to join.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Sound like you are an ideologue posing as a scientist. When you
| see people everywhere loosing their trust in science look in
| the mirror for the reason.
| missedthecue wrote:
| _" I have a PhD in physics and have made sustainability my
| mission. I wish I didn't have to as fixing problems past
| generations stuck us with isn't my first passion, but I can't
| change the past."_
|
| Somehow, I don't think you'd have a PhD in physics had the
| industrial revolution never occurred.
| bhu8 wrote:
| Nice thread on Giorgio Parisi by Montanari:
| https://twitter.com/Andrea__M/status/1445405295811960841?s=2...
| cft wrote:
| It's encouraging to see that the second part to Parisi
| (completely unrelated to the first) is still non-political.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The first is hardly political either. Most people simply don't
| want to admit that the science of carbon dioxide and climate
| was figured out by the late 1970s and everything since has been
| fine-tuning the models and improving their resolution.
| harscoat wrote:
| Summary Pr. John Wettlaufer
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezsbf42_RTA&ab_channel=Nobel...
| spoonjim wrote:
| These are worthy winners of the Nobel Prize, but it also seems
| like we're starting to see the science Nobels enter the Culture
| War.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Say rather that the climate denialists have used politics to
| attempt to discredit science, thus politicizing, for their own
| purposes, the results of research.
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