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Comment by mygoodaccount | Hacker News Reader

High profile prizes will always be political. That said, Syukuro Manabe built the foundation for a lot of modern day computer-based climate simulation. I can't speak for the others but I'd say that's Nobel worthy.

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I don't know how you would meaningfully rank physicists without resorting to subjective value judgements. The notion of importance exists only in relationship to our ability to accomplish our goals, and goals are subjective.

The same can be said of any attempt to measure 'merit'. Whatever is called 'meritorious' is simply so because of cultural and historical happenstance.

> computer-based climate simulation

I'm no scientist by any stretch of the imagination, the last time when I read something related to higher physics was ~20 years ago, in college, but I have to ask how is that topic related to modern physics. You're correct, it sounds like like a worthy Nobel for an Earth Sciences Nobel, or a Meteorology one (to be more direct), if those two things existed (maybe they should), but, again, don't know how meteorology (what computer-based climate simulation basically is) is the same thing as higher physics.

Meteorology is a sub-branch of physics.

As a physicist, I try to avoid the snobbery of limiting myself to "higher physics". A wide variety of physical systems are interesting, not just fundamental particle physics. Physics contains multitudes; graphene, giant magnetoresistence, fiber optics, and systems more complex.

But then again physics risks following the (wrong) road taken by economics a while ago, when it decided that almost all modern human-activity can be in fact studied through the economics lens.

Surely studying the climate, i.e. a physical system, is completely in the realm of physics. Certainly, it is closer to whatever definition of physics you may have, than education or kidney donation (to take two examples) are to economics.

There is a level of politics that shreds credibility though. I am just struggling to see how someone gets a physics Nobel for modelling a climate system. Climate isn't new, climate models have been getting better for decades and will continue to. The work may be important and well done, but it doesn't sound like it is pushing the boundaries of physics.

The tag line sells it really poorly.

Below is a quote from the press release we are discussing:

> In the 1960s, he led the development of physical models of the Earth’s climate and was the first person to explore the interaction between radiation balance and the vertical transport of air masses. His work laid the foundation for the development of current climate models.

As far as I understand (I am not a physicist), you're right: climate is not new, and climate models have been getting better for decades. And that's (in part) because of this guy's work, half a century ago. It sure pushed the boundaries of physics at the time, didn't it?

It doesn't sound like it from that tagline either, it makes it sound like he discovered that sunshine makes air move around. Which is also not news on the scale of the Physics nobel.

Obviously he discovered something a lot more noteworthy than that, but these one line summaries are doing a terrible job of hinting at what.

Manabe contributed many pivotal works to the broad domain of planetary and atmospheric physics in the 1960's. The word "model" in reference to his work is substantially more than just computer simulations; really, it's referring to some of his seminal contributions providing "models" in the sense of physical frameworks for understanding the responses and evolution of planetary atmospheres (broadly speaking - with relevance far beyond the terrestrial atmosphere) to particular forcings. See Manabe and Weatherald (1967) [1] for perhaps one of the most critical contributions that he made.

[1]: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04...

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