Parisi's Nobel Theory in a comic

The theory that earned the Nobel Prize to physicist Giorgio Parisi becomes a comic: simple line drawings explain, under the supervision of physicists, the meaning of the theory that allows us to understand the secrets of complexity, so much so that it can be studied. The initiative is by the physicist Giorgio Sestili, head of the science communication network www.giorgiosestili.it, and by Giulio Pompei, of DoYouSpeakScience?, Who created it under the scientific supervision of the theoretical physicist Enzo Marinari, of the Sapienza University. of Rome and close collaborator of Parisi.

The story starts at the beginning of the 70s, when Parisi, just graduated, begins to be curious about a real puzzle for the physics of time, that is the behavior of. some disordered magnetic alloys, called 'spin glasses', which seemed to question some pillars of physics at the time. Between 1979 and 1980 Parisi managed to identify a sort of hidden structure in the apparent chaos of spin glasses, and a very powerful way to describe it mathematically. In particular, Parisi realizes that in these systems many fundamental properties of the physical approach used, called Statistical Mechanics, are no longer valid.

His great merit is that he managed to find order in what appeared disordered, thus opening the way to a huge number of complex phenomena apparently governed by chaos: from atoms, to biological systems, from the study of cells to that of the brain, up to the flight of flocks of birds and the periodicity of the ice ages.