Earlier this week the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared between Giorgio Parisi for his work on complex physical systems and Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for their work on modelling the Earth’s climate. In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast I chat with spin-glass expert Steven Thomson of the Free University of Berlin about Parisi’s research legacy and to climate physicist Tim Palmer of the University of Oxford about how Manabe and Hasselman influenced our understanding of climate change.

Also in this episode, Physics World’s Tami Freeman is in conversation with Suman Shrestha, who talks about his experience of moving to the US from his hometown of Kathmandu in Nepal to pursue his interest in medical physics. He also chats about what he plans to do when he completes his PhD at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

• In 2020 Shrestha wrote about his experiences of working at the MD Anderson Cancer Center during the COVID-19 pandemic. See “Physics in the pandemic: ‘During challenges, what you focus on matters a lot’”.