16.12.2020: Roberto Benzi - "The mechanism of stochastic resonance: how it was discovered..."

The mechanism of stochastic resonance was introduced almost 40 years ago by myself, Parisi, Sutera and Vulpiani. It is a general and counterintuitive mechanism which found applications in thousands of different physical systems. Interested readers can find more or less pedagogical introduction on the web as well as review papers on the subject. It is less known how we came through this concept and why it was first introduced in the context of climatic change. In this talk I will try to discuss the many difficulties and the misconceptions we were facing at that time, both in the context of climate dynamics and, more generally, in the context of nonlinear dynamical systems. https://sites.google.com/view/perspec...