This year’s Nobel physics laureates have made sense of complexity

THE NATURAL world is filled with complexity. The more closely scientists study everything from planets to atoms, the more structure they find and the more detailed their explanations must get. But if you want to predict the behaviour of such systems, how much detail do you need? To understand how Earth’s oceans will behave, say, do you need to track every individual molecule of water within them?This year’s Nobel prize for physics was awarded to a trio of researchers who have studied complex, chaotic and apparently random systems and developed ways to predict their long-term behaviour. Half of the prize of SKr10m (about $1.1m) was shared by Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University and Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg. The other half went to Giorgio Parisi of Sapienza University, in Rome.