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The 2021 Nobel science prizes and the winners are......
2021年諾貝爾科學獎的獲得者是……
This year’s Nobel prizes brought both delight and disbelief
今年的諾貝爾獎讓人既高興又難以置信
Important work was honoured, but there was a surprising omission
重大科學成就得到了尊重和認可，但也有一個令人驚訝的遺漏
SCIENTISTS SOMETIMES refer elliptically to winning a Nobel prize as “the trip to Stockholm”. Not this year, it isn’t.
科學家有時會將獲得諾貝爾獎的過程簡略地稱為“斯德哥爾摩之旅”。今年可不是這樣。
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.
音樂廳最隆重的頒獎典禮、市政廳的盛大宴會，以及斯德哥爾摩一所大學學生會同樣精彩紛呈的非官方慶祝會（它們將會輪流頒發榮譽）都被取消了，就像去年一樣。
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.
然而，這可能不會減少今年獲獎者的喜悅。他們已經獲得了科學界最著名的獎項，已經欣喜若狂了。
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.
諾貝爾物理學獎頒給了三名研究人員，他們研究了復雜、混亂和完全隨機的物理系統，并開發了預測它們長期行為的方法，涉及的范圍從如何研究氣候到開發創新材料。
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.
1000萬瑞典克朗（約合110萬美元）獎金的一半由普林斯頓大學的真鍋淑郎（Syukuro Manabe）和克勞斯·哈塞爾曼（Klaus Hasselmann）共享。
The other half went to Giorgio Parisi of Sapienza, the principal university in Rome.
另一半給予了就職于羅馬的重點大學——羅馬大學的喬治·帕里西（Giorgio Parisi）。
Drs Manabe and Hasselmann laid the foundations of the modelling of Earth’s climate that led to “quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”, according to the Nobel Committee for Physics of Sweden’s Royal Academy of Science.
瑞典皇家科學院諾貝爾物理學委員會表示，真鍋淑郎和哈塞爾曼為建立地球氣候的物理建模奠定了基礎，該模型可量化可變性并可靠地預測全球變暖。
Dr Parisi was awarded his share for discoveries around the “interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”.
帕里西博士發現了從原子到行星尺度的物理系統中無序和漲落的相互作用而獲獎。
In the 1960s Dr Manabe, an atmospheric scientist, wove together emerging strands of understanding of the dynamics and thermodynamics of Earth’s atmosphere to make the first reliable prediction that doubling the level of carbon dioxide present would also increase the planet’s surface temperature.
20世紀60年代，氣象學家真鍋淑郎博士對地球大氣動力學和熱力學的新認識結合，做出了第一個可靠的預測，即目前存在的二氧化碳水平翻一番也會提高地球表面的溫度。
His work led to the development of physical models of Earth’s climate and laid the foundation for the climate models used today.
他的成果促進了地球氣候物理模型的發展，并為今天使用的氣候模型奠定了基礎。
Around the same time, scientists such as Edward Lorenz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were beginning to describe weather as a chaotic system—in other words, something that had so many interacting individual components, such as temperature, pressure, humidity and wind speed, that even small variations in initial conditions could result in enormous differences at a later stage.
大約在同一時間，麻省理工學院的愛德華·洛倫茲等科學家開始將天氣描述為一個混沌的系統，換句話說，它包含非常多相互作用且獨立的成分，如溫度、壓力、濕度和風速，以致于即使初始條件的微小變化也可能導致后期巨大的差異。
In this description, weather evolved rapidly and became essentially unpredictable even just a few days into the future.
在這個描述中，天氣演變迅速，甚至在未來短短幾天內也變得基本上不可預測。
In the 1970s Dr Hasselmann developed models to show how weather, despite being chaotic and unpredictable in the short-term, could yield reliable models to foreshadow Earth’s climate over much longer periods.
在20世紀70年代，哈塞爾曼博士開發了一些模型向大家展示，短期內在混亂和不可預測的情況下，天氣如何產生可靠的模型來預測更長時間內的地球氣候。
In describing his work he made an analogy to Brownian motion, the jostling movement of pollen grains in water that was first observed down a microscope by Robert Brown, a botanist, in 1827.
在描述他的工作時，他將其比作布朗運動，1827年植物學家羅伯特·布朗（Robert Brown）首次在顯微鏡下觀察到水中花粉顆粒的不規則碰撞運動。
Almost 80 years later, Albert Einstein posited that the slow zigzagging of such grains could be explained by their continual bombardment by much tinier, fast-moving water molecules.
將近80年后，阿爾伯特·愛因斯坦（Albert Einstein）提出，這些顆粒的緩慢之字形運動是因為它們不斷受到更細小、快速運動的水分子的轟擊產生的。
The large-scale climate can similarly be seen as a consequence of numerous smaller events.
同樣，大范圍的氣候變化也可以看作是眾多小事件的結果。
Around 1980 Dr Parisi found some of the rules that govern apparently random phenomena.
大約在1980年，帕里西博士發現了一些支配明顯隨機現象的規則。
He studied a type of material called “spin glass”, in which, for example, iron atoms are mixed at random into a matrix of copper atoms.
他研究了一種名為“自旋玻璃”的材料，例如，在這種材料中，鐵原子被隨機混合到銅原子內部。
The iron atoms each behave as tiny magnets but, whereas in a normal lump of magnetised metal their north-south poles all point in the same direction, in a spin glass they do not.
每個鐵原子的行為都像微小的磁鐵，但在正常的磁化金屬塊中，它們的南北極都指向相同的方向，而在自旋玻璃中卻不是這樣。
Dr Parisi devised a way to understand how they find their optimal orientations.
帕里西博士設計了一種方法來了解它們是如何找到最佳方向的。
His mathematical ideas not only help explain some of the complex systems of Earth’s climate, as described by his two fellow laureates, but also illuminate other apparently random phenomena in fields as diverse as animal behaviour, neuroscience and machine learning.
他的數學思想不僅有助于解釋地球氣候的一些復雜系統，正如兩位獲獎者所描述的那樣，還解釋了動物行為、神經科學和機器學習等領域中的其他明顯隨機的現象。
This year’s physics prize is the first scientific Nobel awarded for understanding of the climate.
今年的物理學獎是首個因對氣候的理解而獲獎的諾貝爾科學獎。
Asked if this was a not-so-subtle message to world leaders ahead of the upcoming COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, members of the award committee said the prize was meant to celebrate the discoveries themselves.
當被問到這些發現是否在格拉斯哥舉行的COP26氣候峰會之前向世界各國領導人傳遞了一個不那么微妙的信息時，頒獎委員會成員表示，獲獎是為了慶祝這些發現本身。
But, they added, it also showed that the modelling of the climate and the notion of global warming rest on solid physical science.
他們補充說，這也表明氣候模型和全球變暖的概念是建立在堅實的物理科學基礎上的。
Human beings can no longer say they did not know how or why Earth is heating up.
人類再也不能說他們不知道地球是怎樣變暖以及為什么變暖的。
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