The 2025 Breakthrough Prize winners were announced yesterday. On their website there’s a video saying that Hollywood is set to roll out the red carpet for the Breakthrough Prize ceremony, scheduled for Saturday April 12 at 3pm Eastern time. But, there are lots of pics of celebrities at the ceremony now available on the Footwear News website. I guess the ceremony was yesterday, edited video available April 12.
- On the mathematics side of things, big winner was geometric Langlands, with a \$3 million prize to Dennis Gaitsgory and a \$100,000 New Horizons prize to Sam Raskin. There’s a nice interview with Gaitsgory at Scientific American.
- On the physics side, there was one \$3 million prize given to all the LHC experiments, with money going to the CERN & Society Foundation. A second \$3 million prize was given to Gerard ‘t Hooft for his work forty-fifty years ago on renormalizing Yang-Mills and non-perturbative effects in QCD.
Debates about the future of CERN post-LHC continue (see two articles by Davide Castelvecchi here and here). In June there will be an Open Symposium in Venice as part of the process for producing next year an update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics. Submitted contributions for this discussion are now available here. The leading proposal (“FCC”) has been for a new very large tunnel, to host first an electron-positron Higgs factory, then later a new proton-proton machine. This however would be extremely expensive and take a very large time to build and operate, with no guarantee of finding anything new. An alternative being proposed would give up the huge new ring, instead build first a linear collider as a Higgs factory, then later a muon collider.
Idiocy about “observational evidence for string theory” will never die. For the latest, see here.
“A second $3 million prize was given to Gerard ‘t Hooft for his work forty-fifty years ago on renormalizing Yang-Mills and non-perturbative effects in QCD.”
There’s certainly no denying the significance of ‘t Hooft’s work on the renormalizability of Yang-Mills, but as you point out, it was ~50 years ago. It’s also already been recognized with a Nobel prize (and presumably just about every other honor the physics community has to bestow).
I don’t begrudge ‘t Hooft his 3 million, but I’m wondering what the Breakthrough Prize folks are doing here. Is the plan to try to soak up some prestige by associating the prize with Nobel laureates?
“…What makes the collider issue difficult is the high cost. If looking for a non-zero CC cost over ten billion dollars, I bet it would never have been done. I don’t think it makes sense to decide not to build a collider just because theorists don’t expect it to find something new. Deciding not to build such a thing will be a decision to give up on this fundamental field of science with a long and distinguished history, because it’s not worth the expense to test the theory at this new higher energy scale. This is a question of values and I come down on the side of those who think it’s worth the likely expense. I also though think this debate over values is a sterile one until there’s a definite plan for how to pay for this on the table…”
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11792
I know, this is 5 years ago and lot of things have changed but do hope you are still a bit on that side…
The 3x thick volumes of the final FCC Feasibility Study were out last day:
https://home.cern/science/cern/fcc-study-media-kit
Budget has been somewhat confirmed and better articulated but note the statement from Fabiola Gianotti in the article by Davide Castelvecchi you cite:
“…The feasibility study had been asked to provide funding scenarios for the project, but this information will now be provided at a later date, she said…”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01018-x
So I think we need to wait for more on the funding. CERN has a highly distinguished historic of navigating the European and International HEP “politics”, the good one, to get things done.
Many talk about competitive projects, per se a good thing, particularly CEPC, which is also not a given:
“….In a curious way, the CEPC begins to resemble the SSC project, originally promoted by the Reagan administration as a means of re-establishing US leadership in high-energy physics….”
https://physicsworld.com/a/high-energy-physics-are-the-days-of-international-collaboration-coming-to-an-end/
“Debate signals cloudy outlook for Chinese supercollider”
https://www.science.org/content/article/debate-signals-cloudy-outlook-chinese-supercollider
And there are signs of extended collaboration:
“…Gianotti was joined on stage in Prague by Lia Merminga for Fermilab, Shoji Asai for KEK and Yifang Wang for IHEP. Each director championed a different project that could be hosted by their lab, be it the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a muon collider, the International Linear Collider, or the Circular Electron–Positron Collider (CEPC). There were seeds of cooperation. IHEP will not pursue CEPC if the FCC is approved, said Wang, and Asai and Merminga emphasized the international nature of their projects, should they be approved. There was no need for Gianotti to do so: this has been written into CERN’s DNA since it was founded 70 years ago, on 29 September 1954…”
https://cerncourier.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/CERNCourier2024SepOct-digitaledition.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com
As after the WWII, a peace scientific project at CERN with the existing best infrastructure for HEP with its LHC, WW collaborative frameworks in place, to renew and/or adapt, and a distinguished historic of success is maybe the best bet if the community as a whole, both theorists and experimentalists wish so and are able to unite with a single voice and respect to politicians and the public in every Country.
Maybe one can also dream of a truly World lab for this fundamental science.
So let me get this straight… The 2025 Breakthrough Prize winners were announced in a ceremony filled with Holywood celebrities (I had no idea this was a thing!), and the Physics prize is given to a forty-five year old work… A wonderful breakthrough (the latest?), but 45 years ago… And so goes Fundamental Theoretical Physics in the 21st century… 100 years after Heisenberg…
Rui Pinto,
The Breakthrough Prize has been running this “Oscars of Science” ceremony in Hollywood for a couple years now.
‘t Hooft’s work on renormalizability of Yang-Mills was actually more than 50 years ago, closer in time to Heisenberg’s breakthrough than to us.
Pasquale di Cesare,
My opinions about this are pretty much the same as five years ago. The big question about the FCC is whether it can be funded. I’m skeptical about prospects for getting large amounts of new funding beyond the current CERN budget for a project with uncertain payoff.
If the FCC can’t be funded, I hope there’s another plan (a linear collider?) that can.
I’m happy for ‘t Hooft’s prize as I think he has remained consistently creative throughout his career — whatever one may think about his ideas about black holes or quantum mechanics, he has certainly proved that he can think outside the box. But it’s odd to make it about his work that has already received a Nobel prize. I am saying this from a public perception standpoint, it looks like the American warm-up of a Swedish dish.
Also, the prize for the LHC experiments just makes me feel sorry for all the people at CERN experiments that are *not* @LHC. If they want to hand out money, why not make that for wakefield acceleration and at least draw attention to the research area?
It just looks terribly unoriginal.
Congratulations to ‘t Hooft, his work was a real breakthrough.
Instead, what is the breakthrough of LHC, given that all breakthroughs disappeared (the digamma resonance, lepton flavour violation in RK…)? Some time ago, some experimentalists got some prize for not discovering dark matter.
It’s not a good sign for the field.