The Fundamental Physics Prize In with a bang

The Economist, Dec 11th 2012, 11:10 by J.P.  http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/12/fundamental-physics-prize

THIS year's biggest physics news must have given the Nobel Committee a headache. When on July 4th Joe Incandela and Fabiola Gianotti, heads of two big experiments at CERN, Europe's main particle-physics laboratory, announced that they had finally nabbed what looks like the Higgs boson, many believed that the researchers behind the discovery had the 2012 prize in the bag. In the event, the secretive committee held their horses and recognised Serge Haroche and David Wineland for manipulating fragile quantum states instead. One reason might have been that it remains unclear whether the new particle discovered at CERN is precisely the sort of mass-giving beast its eponymous predictor, Peter Higgs, and five other less-well-known theorists came up with 48 years ago. Another could be that, since a Nobel prize can be shared by no more than three people, more time was needed to work out which three were the most deserving. 

Neither of these considerations encumbered the committee of Nobel's upstart rival, the Fundamental Physics Prize. On December 11th it revealed that Dr Incandela and Dr Gianotti will share a generous $3m special award with Peter Jenni, Michael Della Negra, Tejinder Singh Virdee, Guido Tonelli and Lyn Evans, who all spearheaded CERN's Higgs hunt since the project was approved in 1994. 

A second $3m special prize goes to another perennial Nobel candidate, Stephen Hawking, for, among other things, his prediction that despite black holes' ability to gobble up everything that comes close enough, including light, the laws of quantum mechanics imply that they must also emit energy. This hypothesis, too, is being tested at CERN, though the microscopic black holes that might bear it out have yet to be observed in its mammoth particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider.

Lack of clear experimental evidence means Dr Hawking may have to wait a little longer for a call from Stockholm. By contrast, the Fundamental Physics Prize, founded earlier this year by Yuri Milner, a Russian internet entrepreneur (pictured), eschews its venerable Swedish counterpart's conservatism by seeking to reward inspring, envelope-pushing research, without necessarily waiting to ensure that it holds up to the letter. And, as the CERN seven have found out, it can be divvied up between any number of people.

The laureates now join the ranks of the selection committee, composed of past recipients. (To kick-start things, in July Mr Milner shelled out a whopping $27m to nine handpicked "brilliant minds", but then recused himself from any future deliberations.) Besides recognising Dr Hawking and the Higgs hunters with the special awards, conceived as an occasional affair reserved for especially salient accomplishments, the committee announced the winners of three Physics Frontiers Prizes. These were chosen from among more than 100 nominations crowdsourced through the prize's website.

Alexander Polyakov of Princeton and Joseph Polchinski from the University of California, Santa Barbara, will each receive $300,000 for contributions to different aspects of string theory, a class of mathematical models based on quantum theory that seeks to describe reality at its most fundamental. Another $300,000 will be shared by Charles Kane from the University of Pennsylvania, Laurens Molenkamp from the University of Würzburg and Shoucheng Zhang of Stanford, for the theory and discovery of topological insulators, materials which do not conduct electricity on the inside but which, by dint of quantum-mechanical quirks, do so on their surface. (Three scientists under the age of 35 also received $100,000 each for work in other areas of physics.)

Dr Polyakov, Dr Polchinski and the topological trio automatically become the nominees for the 2013 Fundamental Physics Prize. The winner (or winners) will see the Frontiers prize topped up to the full $3m Mr Milner has promised to dish out each year for the main award. This will be presented at an Oscar-like ceremony at CERN near Geneva on March 20th, together with the other prizes announced today.

It will all no doubt be a far cry from the white tie and tails required of Dr Wineland, Dr Haroche and the other 2012 Nobel laureates as they accepted their medals and diplomas from King Carl XIV Gustav in Stockholm on December 10th. But Mr Milner's largesse, nearly three times as generous as the Nobel Foundation's $1.1m (down from $1.3m in previous years due to the economic crisis), his selection committee's cunning choice of talked-about laureates, and the propitious timing of its announcement, a day after the Nobel gala, guarantee that, appropriately, the Fundamental Physics Prize bursts onto the scene with a very big bang indeed.