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Internet Billionaire Creates Huge Physics Prize
gbrumfiel writes "Billionaire Internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner has spontaneously awarded $3 million prizes to nine prominent theoretical physicists. The new Fundamental Physics Prize dwarfs awards like the Nobel, which this year is estimated to be worth some $1.2 million (and that's before it's split by up to three winners). It's so much money that some theorists fear it could distort the field. Milner says that his only purpose for the new prize was to promote the field, which he studied in the 1980s: 'The intention was to say that science is as important as a shares rating on Wall Street,' he told Nature."
Could this be a boost for the fusion everyone here on /. are waiting for?
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
It wasn't clear to me in the synopsis. However, reading the award site, it's clear that Yuri has given 27 million dollars - 3 million to each of 9 winners.
Who writes this crap?
Captcha: deprive
"How can I get in on this action?" as in, i want some of that money too!
It's so much money that some theorists fear it could distort the field.
I call BS. Smart young students that gravitated toward something wall street-ish might rethink and go into quantum physics instead.
"Fear it could distort the field." Feh. Anyone who has gone through a physics education (or chemistry, for that matter) knows how much weight is given to Nobel prizes. (It's a huge amount - prize winners and their winning discoveries are mentioned constantly.) If this $3 million prize turned into a regular thing instead of a one-off, then it most certainly would distort things. The question is whether this prize would be a positive influence (like the Nobel), inspiring people who work in basic research, or a negative influence (like the Nobel), inciting petty bickering and prize whoring.
some theorists fear it could distort the field
Spoken like a true theoretical physicist.
This guy's mistake is selecting too few winners and giving them too much.
If he wants to promote the field, he needs to make the rewards more broadly available: i.e., instead of 3, $3M awards, how about 300 $30,000 awards? It's enough to provide good incentive while not removing the need of the winners to ever have to work again!
That's the problem with the current economic model. A few "winners" at the top and everyone else lives on the crumbs. .1% better than the next guy below him.
Consider, those "winners" are maybe only
But the next guy below him? His reward is NOTHING, not $2M.
How about you make "winners" out of the top 50% instead instead of just the infinitesimal ever-so-slightly-better????
--PeterM
It's so much money that some jealous theorists fear it could distort the field.
FTFY
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
It's so much money that some theorists fear it could distort the field.
I predict that a scientific paper with the title "The harmful distortion of the vector field of physics effected by highly concentrated monetary charge" will win the competing prize in the next year. That is, if they were talking about distorting the field of prizes for physics. I've heard these are highly competitive and violent about it, even more than the British dentists.
Ezekiel 23:20
That's not a huge physics prize, it's the biggest physics prize.
Interesting that his entire fortune is based on ripping off (admittedly) others ideas and companies, is now giving back so much, which in reality isn't that much at all at 2.7% of his net worth, still better than nothing.
there are no well-tested designs at all yet,
Of course there are! Rush Limbaugh told me they're all safe. And he's an expert, and so now I'm an expert!
Do you know how much RAMEN that will buy?!!!
That's enough to feed me for ten thousand years !
I might just have seconds.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
While one off prizes for fundemental research is nice and all, it doesn't really help the art.
Here's what I would do instead.
I would organize some private organizations around my parent country as a pilot program, with the goal of making expensive lab equipment and utilities available to the researchers, with the goal of driving down the innate costs to perform the research.
"Grant money" is the cancerous vice that kills academia. It makes professors steal the thunder of brilliant students. It makes people distort reeported findings. It stifles controversial findings being published. It kills the bread and butter of real science, which is the repeated testing of published experiments for veracity.
And without it, no research at all would get done.
As a philanthropist seeking to promote science, I wouldn't contribute to the vice of academia in the form of exclusive prizes. I would make research hardware and lab space available for cheap. 1st year chem students and dedicated researchers alike would profit, and science would be much better for it.
Research is expensive. Subsidize it smartly, and make it cheap. Researchers will research everything, instead of cherry picking for grant money. Science will improve.
I would provide equipment and lab/office space like follows:
It is important that the science being done is quality. That means the people using the equipment and lab space need to be competent. University degrees in the field of research, or concurrent university enrollment with passing grades in the field are a basic requirement for application. It won't stop degree holding crackpots getting labspace, but it should keep out most rifraff that think they can violate thermodynamics with magnets and tinfoil.
Academic dishonesty, getting scooped, and predation on academic works are very real and ever-present risks in academia, fundemental research in particular. For that reason, secure and locked offices can be rented for a small fee, comparable to renting a storage unit. They would be fully furnished with a nice desk, several file cabinets, a personal bookshelf, computer equipment, and a laser printer. Disposables like paper and toner are the researcher's responsibility. Internet access would be provided through an aggressive firewall.
The labs themselves would be tiered.
Tier 1 labs would be equipped for basic physics and chemical research. Access to calorimeters, glassware, reagents, force meters and the like are available. These are meant mostly to assist students with homework and independent research within their skill level.
Tier 2 labs would have access to mass spectroscopy equipment, provisions for experimental small scale fusion devices, nanotechnology devices, like AMFs, electron microscopes, etc.
Tier 3 labs have the really fancy toys in them. A small silicon lithograph is available to producing experimental nanotech structures and devices for fundemental research, large contained fusion devices, etc.
Tier 1 would be the bread and butter. Tier 2 would catch most advanced students. Tier 3 would take awhile to fully provide, due to the extreme costs of the equipment, and would be reserved for published researchers only.
It is not meant to replace university equipment; it is meant to suppliment it, and provide a "professor free" environment for independent research for later publication.
I think doing that on a big scale would do way more for science than cash prizes would.
How exactly does this award help anyone? He's given a prize to a bunch of professors who already have tenure. They do not need incentives to do original work. Meanwhile, grad students and postdocs (who do most of the real work in the field and are the most capable, and motivated) live hand to mouth, have no sense of job stability, and no possibility to pursue truly creative work. Instead they live under the thumb of just those kind of people that received this award. They're forced to pursue old, dead ideas that have not gone anywhere (but are favorites of their advisers/supervisors). Theoretical physics has been stagnating for decades. The Higgs boson is a 40-50 year old idea, and virtually all new ideas in the meantime have been utter bullshit (string theory, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, etc). The field is grasping at straws because the majority of the people working cannot pursue long-term goals, or risky ideas.
A better award would be to give say $500k to 54 promising postdocs who do not have tenure, to encourage them to go in new directions.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Before anyone tries to motivate innovation with big cash prizes they should watch this TED talk from Daniel Pink: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
He might not like the way Nobel picks the winners. The awards with the most money behind it gets the most people the show up and the most press. If he agree with the way Nobel does it, he would just add to the prize money This is the cool part of his way: "As for the panel's composition, he admits that "any nine names I would have chosen would not be a perfect set". Future prizewinners will be chosen by winners from previous years. As the prize committee gradually expands, Milner believes that any imbalances in the panel will self correct. Each year, the laureates will also select three junior researchers to receive a $100,000 'New Horizons' prize, and, if warranted, a winner of an ad hoc prize."
The list of winners contains all the recent heavy hitters in string theory research. This isn't as limited as it seems since they're mostly trying to figure out how plain old QFT works. And succeeding. Nima Arkani-Hamed's recent work in particular simplifies the calculations for scattering amplitudes greatly and are already in use for background calculations in the LHC.
They'll have quite the weight in the field in the future, especially since the current / original winners are all on the board for deciding future winners. Not that getting someone like (Fields medalist) Ed Witten interested in your work hasn't meant instant recognition before, but now he has the money to fund the research as well.
All in all, I think this gives the most influential people in the field a channel that makes them actively wield their influence.
I believe most nuclear reactors have paper clips on their grounds. In fact in the event of a meltdown, the paper clips would be able to absorb some of the radiation becoming more powerful than you can possibly imagine. Paperclips are in every major business and government. I think you might be on...
hold on a sec, my box of paperclips just scattered all over the desf*)(~3&thy&733&r&*#(+@{{;\*PU&alve&UI#-
EVERYONE SHOULD USE PAPERCLIPS FOR ALL THINGS. THAT IS ALL.
... but I love the website.
The guy's obviously not a liberal.
Bit surprised to see two awards go to researchers in cosmic inflation, a speculative theory with no evidence for it. (I guess string theory is in the same basket though!)
Parent can't be moderated above 5.
I should be able to moderate higher and if 2-3 people also agree then it becomes a 6. Not that complex of a feature to add. Use exponential growth; int(score_as_float) when enough people contribute to the total it'll reach 6,7,8 and so on but require more moderators each time. I'm suggesting a non-linear moderation scale. A 6 would mean multiple moderators gambled a point to raise it above 5. It would be extremely rare to achieve an 8 (in which case that post should be turned into an article?)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Seems like the recipients could just vanish into the lab since they might no longer need to do any sort of teaching work, this might not be so great for the next generation of researchers. Still I guess they would still be submitting papers and writing books.
Also seems like a slant towards string theory...
I total agree this sort of prize money could distort the field. It is hard to imagine how that much money could not cause a distortion to the field. Giving a truck load of money to the most brilliant sciensts we can find to do more brilliant research where there is a proven track record of brilliance.? Yep, I reckon there will a quite a distortion.
The rich man has his priorities mixed up.
It's like spending $27 out of several $1000.
Just offering some perspective.
I'm a physicist. As far as I know, the only one who has done real work in physics is Alexei Kitaev, for his amazing contributions for quantum computing. The rest work on either untestable ideas (string theory), or testable ideas who have been shown to be wrong (supersymmetry). I guess that's what you get from a guy who knows nothing about physics but saw something about string theory on the TV and found it cool. Nature has a more or less balanced report; for a more inflamatory one, I recommend Peter Woit's blog.
entropy happens
n.t.
I like my spaghetti with source.
Researching for end goals often leads us to think about what we know rather than what we don't... that's why radical advancements are few and far.
I think scientific research is most fruitful when motives are purely for seeking out the unknown (Think Higgs Boson), And while there are usually very significant practical applications to be gained for the world, they are often very far and detached, people forget this and complain that science is a waste of money each time a new project like the LHC is funded, then forget about it 30 years later when their cheap space flights become a possibility. It's unfortunate that the human life span and common arrogance gives us such short shortsightedness.
Of course there are fields of research that are more focused on the end goal of a practical application, like fusion power. However i think it will take something more for that to take a big leap. I think of it like the way peoples brains tend to work wile crunching problems... sometimes you hit a wall and the only way to solve it is let your brain idle on it in the background and do other things, then without even thinking something unrelated will kick that background thought process in the right direction.
I'm not saying focused projects like fusion power are pointless ether though... just that sometimes it's about timing, eventually that work has to be done if we want fusion power, that kind of technology isn't going to come all at once as an accident. And also these practical projects tend to lead to the development of a whole host of other useful technology on the path to achieving their main goal (think NASA)
'The intention was to say that science is as important as a shares rating on Wall Street,'
If not more, but that would've been too much to ask. With that one sentence, that guy who I've not heard about before, has put himself well up there.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I'm not saying that theoretical research shouldn't be done - far from it. Rather I'm complaining that we don't really fund any research all that much as a society, even the more applied stuff with direct and obvious benefits that just happen to be "next decade" rather than "next quarter".
It is great to hear of an effort similar to the Perimeter institute, of technology billionaires giving back to science.
As a first year undergraduate Physics student, I had a chance to meet one of the awardees, Dr. Ashoke Sen for lunch with a group of physics students. Not only is he a brilliant scientist, he is the rare combination of a brilliant scientist, and an extraordinarily inspiring and patient teacher. I won't forget the two hours we spent peppering him with utterly stupid physics questions young students tend to ask, and he answered them all with interminable patience and good humour. Couldn't happen to a better person.
The intention was to say that science is as important as a shares rating on Wall Street,
Science is only as important as "shares rating on Wall Street"? Scientists do real work - they make new discoveries that in time benefit us all in uncounted ways. Investors, bankers and stock brokers, on the other hand, produce nothing and discover nothing; they live by siphoning nutrients out of the money stream, so to speak - they are best compared to filter feeders or parasites. Science is many orders of magnitude more valuable than what goes on in Wall Street.
...a physicist who uses the word "retarded". That certainly confirms my admiration for people with a passion for science.
Researching for end goals often leads us to think about what we know rather than what we don't... that's why radical advancements are few and far.
I think scientific research is most fruitful when motives are purely for seeking out the unknown (Think Higgs Boson), And while there are usually very significant practical applications to be gained for the world, they are often very far and detached, people forget this and complain that science is a waste of money each time a new project like the LHC is funded, then forget about it 30 years later when their cheap space flights become a possibility. It's unfortunate that the human life span and common arrogance gives us such short shortsightedness.
Of course there are fields of research that are more focused on the end goal of a practical application, like fusion power. However i think it will take something more for that to take a big leap. I think of it like the way peoples brains tend to work wile crunching problems... sometimes you hit a wall and the only way to solve it is let your brain idle on it in the background and do other things, then without even thinking something unrelated will kick that background thought process in the right direction.
I'm not saying focused projects like fusion power are pointless ether though... just that sometimes it's about timing, eventually that work has to be done if we want fusion power, that kind of technology isn't going to come all at once as an accident. And also these practical projects tend to lead to the development of a whole host of other useful technology on the path to achieving their main goal (think NASA)
Our problems are social not technological. We do need technology as part of the solution. For instance our Justice system is completely broken now that we understand neuroscience and now that we have devices which can read peoples thoughts such as FMRI. We also have artificial intelligence, yet we still rely on humans to make laws which can have people put to death, or put in prison for 20+ years. I'm all for surveillance if we have fair and logical laws which actually focused on protecting people but the majority of our laws are politically motivated.
The drug laws don't protect people. The drug laws are politically motivated. The drug prisoner is a political prisoner. These would have been considered very radical positions but these positions will eventually become the mainstream yet the policies still aren't changing. Instead the police want to fly drones over our house to arrest people growing pot. Technology can save the day but only if the technology helps to liberate rather than enslave. As a scientist you have to be careful not to build your own prison.
I'm not saying that theoretical research shouldn't be done - far from it. Rather I'm complaining that we don't really fund any research all that much as a society, even the more applied stuff with direct and obvious benefits that just happen to be "next decade" rather than "next quarter".
That's because money is one of the worst motivations for scientific research. If a problem isn't important enough to you personally to solve without making money then perhaps it shouldn't be solved.
Dump a billion dollars against a problem, it will be solved, period.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
a theoretical physicist - just too lazy to do the work
They give lots of millions to people playing games every year. Why shouldn't scientists who are doing things that really matter get a big payoff?
anything other than pirate someone's software and sell pie in the sky? No wonder he's a venture capitalist now.