Who is and what does Giorgio Parisi, the Italian scientist awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for the study of complex systems
Giorgio Parisi brings the Nobel Prize for Physics to Italy after 37 years. The last Italian scientist to receive the most coveted prize for research in the field of physics was, in 1984, Carlo Rubbia.
Along with Parisi, the Nobel Prize for Physics went to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann, climatologists to whom we owe “the physical modeling of the Earth’s climate.”
Parisi was awarded by the Swedish committee for “the discovery of the interaction between disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from the atomic level to the planetary scale.”
Giorgio Parisi, the physicist “of complex systems”
Born in 1948, Professor Giorgio Parisi graduated from La Sapienza University in Rome in 1970 with a thesis on the Higgs Boson.
In addition to the Higgs Boson, Parisi’s studies have focused on fascinating and complex topics such as interactions between neurons, artificial intelligence and even the behavior of birds in the flock system – which earned him the cover of Physics Today in 2008.
His professor and mentor, Nicola Cabibbo, is one of the missed Nobels in the history of Italian research: Parisi has always said he was very sorry that Cabibbo never received the honor, and he did not fail to remember him after receiving the call from Stockholm.
The study that earned Professor Parisi the Nobel Prize in Physics is the one, decades old, that has seen him engaged from various angles in the search for physical laws within complex systems.
Discovering the dynamics that lead from the infinitely small to the infinitely large means understanding, for example, how the behavior of individual neurons is related to the general functioning of the brain, or how the movements of a single bird in a flock are consistent with a more general physical pattern.
These are studies that Parisi himself, when he was awarded the Max Planck Medal in 2010, defined as “a laborious and complex work”.
Chaos, awards and research in Italy
Along with Carlo Rubbia and Michele Parrinello, he is one of three Italian physicists who are members of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Parisi, who is vice-president of the Accademia dei Lincei, has won the most important prizes in scientific research: the last one, just before receiving the Nobel Prize, was the Wolf Prize for Physics awarded to him for “pioneering discoveries in quantum field theory, in statistical mechanics and in complex systems”.
“I have been working on chaos”, Parisi told Repubblica, “there is nothing more fascinating than finding an order inside it”: from neural particles to the substance of a small piece of glass, the systems studied by Parisi still have a lot to reveal to science.
Having always been involved in scientific divulgation and in sensitizing the general public to the themes of scientific and technological progress, including artificial intelligences, Parisi has never left Italy.
“There are systems whose rules are all to be discovered,” says the Nobel laureate, and continues, “there are still many things I would like to discover.”
The research of Parisi does not end with the Nobel: it is rather to open the way to new studies, such as that of the co-laureate Nobel climatologists, that can help us to predict the future thanks to science.