Abstract:
As Sir Charles Frank said "Physics is not just Concerning the Nature of Things, But Concerning the Interconnectedness of all the Natures of Things”, which encapsulates an overarching theme of the 2021 Prize. I provide a scientific overview of this year’s prize, colored partly by my role as a member of the committee. In particular, I highlight the history and provide a pedagogical view of the key tendrils of the research recognized this year, at the level of a typical first year graduate student.
About the Speaker:
John Wettlaufer is trained as a condensed matter theorist and has a wide variety of research interests in soft matter, statistical physics and applied mathematics. He is interested in trying to construct simple but observationally constrained theories and analogue experiments for complex phenomena in nonlinear dynamics, fluid dynamics, astrophysics, biophysics and geophysics – particularly rapid climate change. The scales of interest range from atomic to astronomical units. He collaborates with people from many disciplines and his students and postdocs come to Yale from departments of engineering, physics and applied mathematics.
