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A Computational Account of Nobel Prize History - The Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences
A Computational Account of Nobel Prize History - The Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences
the negative entropy and the lack of stability of the model solutions. Although the main problem was related to the assumption of ‘replica
symmetry’, as pointed out by Jairo Rolim Lopes de Almeida and David J. Thouless, an effective method of breaking this symmetry was still unknown.
Parisi solved this problem by realizing that there are an infinite number of states within the ordered phase of the spin glass, and by further
introducing a new order parameter. Notably, the idea that Parisi proposed was an extension of the ‘replica trick’ method introduced
(https://doi.org/10.1088/0305-4608/5/5/017) by Samuel Frederick Edwards and Philip Warren Anderson. Given the timing of his work, it had a
substantial impact on how people set out to think about networks, optimization, the concept of ultrametricity, and so forth — the list goes on.
Ultimately, Parisi’s proposal concerning symmetry breaking among replicas was a conceptual advance that reconciled major obstacles in spin-
glasses.
The other half of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics was jointly awarded to Syukuro
Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann. Which of their many contributions stood out for
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11/3/23, 3:42 PM A computational account of Nobel Prize History | The Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences
We are facing many challenges related to climate change. How can mathematical
modeling and computational science play a role in overcoming these challenges?
The development of climate models and numerical methods themselves is of crucial importance. For example, Hasselmann developed the
fingerprint method to wed climate models and observations; the idea is to explain the statistical significance of observational trends by
incorporating them into a model. This is a specific approach to what we nowadays call data assimilation, which is, in all of its facets, the key to using
observations. The challenge here is that we only know what the observations are up to right now; as Niels Bohr once said, “prediction is very
difficult, especially if it’s about the future!” This is the problem with models themselves: there is a lot of inter-model variability, the models are
hugely expensive to run, and it is not obvious which models provide the best solution. Note that there are still unresolved processes for prediction.
For instance, we still cannot resolve turbulent motions, and they are essential: we don’t know which clouds are going to form and where, and we
cannot predict the mixing of water masses in the ocean that changes properties such as nutrients, salinity and temperature.
So, where should the computational emphasis be placed? The key is data. My contention is that we are not (yet!) using data to its fullest potential
fruition. The satellite era began around 1979 and offered very high-resolution, daily observations of all sorts of things. If we go back in time and look
at longer timescales, we have a lot of proxy data of various types with reasonably high resolution in space and time; we also have paleoclimate data
on very long timescales, which is coarsely resolved in time and space. The question is then: how to use the confluence of sparse and finely resolved
data in a rational manner that is linked to the underlying physics? For example, it is common practice to look at paleoclimate data by just comparing
the timing of various wiggles. However, there are very powerful mathematical methods that we and others use from non-equilibrium statistical
physics that I think are really valuable but not yet common in the field. Going forward, we need to inform models with the up-to-date data in a
robust and self-consistent way, which I think will involve science, software, hardware — an interdisciplinary collaboration. This sounds like a cliché,
but it really doesn’t work if people don’t speak each other’s languages.Recently, we have had more extreme weather events, such as hurricanes. For
example, work by Kerry Emanuel shows (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2007742117) evidence of an increase in hurricane intensity, but not frequency, that
is attributable to greenhouse gases. However, not only do climate models struggle to capture hurricanes, but practically speaking, the havoc they
wreak on humanity depends on both their intensity and frequency. Clearly, there is a great need to combine data and models to optimize the utility
of both.
How important do you think machine learning and data-driven approaches will be
for the field of climate modeling in the future?
At the highest level, they will be extremely important going forward. However, I worry about the way machine learning models are most commonly
applied to various problems. Many people are using machine learning as a black box — they can download and use models without fundamental
knowledge of how the models actually work. My own opinion is that we really need to have data-driven approaches, however we need to advance
the use of data and machine learning by knowing how the latter actually works. In my own research field, there are collaborations working on
climate problems in which researchers are theoretical computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists and, importantly, climate scientists, which is
a really important type of interaction going forward.
Each year, the committee writes a report of the entire effort and the recommendation for that year’s prize. This document is written in Swedish and
only available to the physics class of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. After 50 years, the names of the nominees and nominators are
publicly available and historians of science can apply to gain access to the archive of materials. As committee members, we use computers for this
effort but they are modified so that they cannot be connected to the Internet. Each year on the day of the announcement, the physics class gathers
to make a final decision on the recommendation of the committee, and immediately following this the incipient laureates are called.
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