Nobel Prizes 2021!

 It is Nobel week! 

Physiology: Two Americans won, David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian, for determining how the body takes physical sensations and turn them into electrochemical signals within the body so the brain can interpret them as changes in temperature and touch. See the announcement and some details here. 

Physics: Three split the Prize for their work in understanding the science behind complex systems. One of the best examples of how others apply their work is in climate science, and how one begins to understand one of the most complex systems there is, global climate, that has countless of thousands of parameters and variables that interact in so many ways. How does one approach complexity? How does one go about trying to calculate and simulate such a system? How can we possibly understand how to take microscopic processes and figure out how those affect a macrocosmic system? Well, the work of Giorgio Parisi (Italy), Syukuro Manabe (Japan/Princeton), and Klaus Hasselmann (Germany) created the means to do this. 

Chemistry: A German and American split the chemistry prize for their work twenty years ago, where they independently discovered a third type of catalyst for creating organic molecules; the two types of catalysts prior to this work were metals and enzymes. This has had a major impact in creating new medicines and other areas where organics is a key. Catalysts are those molecules that can help accelerate chemical reactions, but do not directly end up in the products. These are key to all areas of life, including the enzymes that keep us alive. The scientists are Benjamin List and David MacMillan (a 2nd for Princeton this year). 

Literature: A Tanzanian author has won this year, Abdulrazak Gurnah. He is the first black African author to win the prize in 35 years. His work is described in a statement:

 "Abdulrazak Gurnah's dedication to truth and his aversion to simplification are striking," the Nobel Committee for Literature said in a statement.

"His novels recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world."

"[His] characters find themselves in a hiatus between cultures and continents, between a life that was and a life emerging; it is an insecure state that can never be resolved."

Economics: Three Americans won for their work in finding real-world situations to do 'natural experiments' to test economic theories and models, and for quantifying how to find cause and effect relationships for economic models. Unlike natural scientists, where one has control over controlled experiments (put fertilizer on one field and none on the other to see which one has the best crop yield, for instance), this process of experimentation is much more difficult for social sciences, including numerous ethical considerations for different topics. But when one state has one economic policy such as raising the minimum wage, and a neighboring one does not, now economists can get data to see how raising minimum wage affects the local and state economies, and what effect this has on labor in general. Turns out raising the minimum wage does not cause job losses, and instead has almost no effect at all, despite widespread beliefs among many. The winners are David Card (UC Berkeley), Joshua Angrist (MIT), and Guido Imbens (Stanford).

Peace: Two journalists won the Peace Prize for their reporting of authoritarian government scandal and abuse of power, often putting their lives at risk in countries where journalists can be imprisoned or even killed. Their emphasis has been on trying to preserve freedom of expression/speech as a basic human right, which is essential for honest reporting as well as for sustained peace. Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia are this year's winners.