Fundamental Physics Prize

At the beginning of the year, we published an interview with Dr. Zohar Komargodski on this blog. Apparently we were not the only ones impressed by Komargodski’s accomplishments: The Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation has announced that he will be one of three recipients of a New Horizons in Physics Prize. This prize is given to promising young theoretical physicists, and it includes $100,000 in prize money. We also wrote about last year’s Fundamental Physics Prizes, handed out by billionaire Yuri Milner. The new Prizes will be officially announced in March, 2013, at CERN. Our…

Science magazine seemed to imply there was some grousing about the new Fundamental Physics Prizes awarded by billionaire Yuri Milner, but we in Rehovot think it’s a good thing. While one can quibble about which fields are still underfunded, we believe that any support for truly basic research -- the kind whose applications, if they exist, will be decades in the future, but which enlightens today us about the universe we live in – is most welcome. It turns out that  two (at least) of the nine winners have ties to the Weizmann Institute, and, completely by chance, we had recently written about…