Stephen Hawking Is Among Scientists to Win Billionaire’s Big Physics Prize

The Milner Foundation announced on Tuesday that the British cosmologist Stephen Hawking and a team of seven scientists at CERN, the European research center for particle physics, had won a pair of $3-million prizes, just months after the foundation honored nine other scientists with a group of equally lucrative awards. The foundation, named for the Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, also introduced the list of nominees for its 2013 Fundamental Physics Prize, which is worth $3-million. In a news release, the foundation said the CERN scientists were being honored for their work on the discovery of a new particle that fits the description of the elusive Higgs boson. The foundation lauded Mr. Hawking for his “deep contributions to quantum gravity and quantum aspects of the early universe.”

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• Source: Nytimes

MEYRIN, Switzerland - It’s been a good year to be a physicist. Yuri Milner, the Russian entrepreneur who startled the scientific world last summer when he handed out $3 million apiece to nine theoretical physicists and mathematicians, is at it again.

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