This year’s Nobel prizes brought both delight and disbelief

SCIENTISTS SOMETIMES refer elliptically to winning a Nobel prize as “the trip to Stockholm”. Not this year, it isn’t. The white-tie award ceremony in the Concert Hall, the splendid banquet in the City Hall and—for those who can last the pace, the equally splendid unofficial after-party in the students’ union of one of Stockholm’s universities (they rotate the honour) are all cancelled, just as they were last year. That will probably not, however, diminish the joy of this year’s laureates. They will be on cloud nine already, having snagged the most famous awards in science.The physics prize went to three researchers who have studied complex, chaotic and apparently random systems and developed ways to predict their long-term behaviour, with implications ranging from how to study the climate to the exploitation of exotic materials. Half of the award 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, the principal university in Rome.