Nine Unsuspecting Scientists Win $27 Million in Suddenly Announced Largest-Ever Annual Physics Prize
Exploding Universe Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford University who studies cosmic expansion and created this visualization, is one of nine $3 million winners of a new Fundamental Physics Prize. Andrei Linde A Russian physics student turned social media billionaire just made theoretical physics the most lucrative thing in science, heaping $3 million apiece on nine researchers. The new Fundamental Physics Prize is worth more than double the Nobel, at least monetarily speaking. Yuri Milner, whose investments are reportedly worth $12 billion, studied theoretical physics as a student in Russia in the 1980s and 1990s and founded the prize for his love of the field. He told the New York Times that the quest to understand the universe "really defines us as human beings." And he told Nature News yesterday that physics should get its day in the sun: "The intention was to say that science is as important as shares...