Nobel Prizes 2021 in a nutshell I: Physics & Peace

Since 1901, the Nobel Prize has been honoring men and women for outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and for work in peace. This event will review the 2021 Nobel Prizes in physics (because of their contribution to the understanding of complex physical systems), and work in peace (for the efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy). The speakers will briefly go through the key aspects of each of the fields’ achievements that lead to this important distinction.

For the Nobel Physics Prize, two of the honorees are climate scientists which have been awarded because of their work on physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming. Their work has helped scientists (and society) to understand climate change. The Nobel Prize committee has chosen a topic critical to society, and the prize to climate science comes in a timely manner as next week world political leaders gather in Glasgow in the United Nations Climate Change conference to seek solutions to mitigate ongoing effects of climate change. In the seminar we will learn how these scientists demonstrated how increased levels of carbon dioxide led to increased temperature, and how they identified signals and fingerprints on natural phenomena and human activities.

In the case of the Nobel Peace Prize, we will take a look into the reasons for awarding the 2021 Prize to investigative journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov for their contributions to advancing freedom of expression and the press under particularly adverse conditions. We will take a look into the trajectories of the honorees. We will also talk about what freedom of expression is and how it relates to “democracy and lasting peace”, two of the reasons given by the Nobel Prize Committee as justifications for this award and highlight the challenges that journalists and a free press face today around the world. Finally, we will take a quick look into how the Committee decides on who to award the Nobel Peace Prize and what is it that they take into account when making a decision.

This event will be held at 26 Trowbridge St., Cambridge MA and online over zoom. 

Speakers: Alba Lorente. SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Utrecht, Netherlands & School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University. Rodrigo Cetina Presuel. Real Colegio Complutense & Harvard Law School, Harvard University. 

Sponsors: RCC; Science@RCC; Postdocs@RCC.