Stephen Hawking wins £1.8m physics prize
The renowned physicist who missed his 70th birthday celebrationsthrough illness in January, has won the Special Fundamental Physics Prize for a lifetime of achievements, including the discovery that black holes emit radiation, and his deep contributions to quantum gravity and aspects of the early universe.
The award is one of several set up in July by Yuri Milner, a Russian internet mogul, who quit his PhD in physics and made a billion dollars from investments in social media and other companies, such as Twitter, Facebook and Groupon. The prize winners were selected by an independent committee of physicists, such as Ed Witten, the string theorist, and Alan Guth, who proposed the theory of cosmic inflation. The awards can go to much younger researchers than typically receive the Nobel prize, as experimental proof of theoretical work is not required.
In an email to the Guardian, Professor Hawking said he was "delighted and honoured" to receive the prize. "No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before. Nevertheless prizes like these play an important role in giving public recognition for achievement in physics. They increase the stature of physics and interest in it," he wrote. "Although almost every theoretical physicist agrees with my prediction that a black hole should glow like a hot body, it would be very difficult to verify experimentally because the temperature of a macroscopic black hole is so low," he added.
The physicist, who rose to fame with his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, and made guest appearances on The Simpsons and Star Trek, has not settled on how to spend the windfall. "I will help my daughter with her autistic son, and maybe buy a holiday home, not that I take many holidays because I enjoy my work in theoretical physics," he wrote. Nima Arkani-Hamed, a member of the selection committee, said: "In the case of Hawking, what can you say? This is an absolutely true giant of modern physics. He's done massive, massive things."
Milner, 51, holds an advanced degree in theoretical physics from Moscow State University, but abandoned a PhD at the Russian Academy of Sciences for an MBA at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He remains a physics enthusiast though, and established the awards to recognise the greatest minds in fundamental physics, and help them to make significant contributions in the future.
Hawking, 70, is not the only winner. The scientists who led the Large Hadron Collider and discovered what looks like the Higgs boson share another $3m prize. The winnings go to Lyn Evans, the head of the LHC, and the six past and present heads of the two detector groups, Atlas and CMS, which found the particle... Read more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/dec/10/stephen-hawking-physics-prize
