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."

Comments

Again, just a few winners

[PeterM from Berkeley]

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.
Consider, those "winners" are maybe only .1% better than the next guy below him.

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

Re:My immediate response was

[The Master Control P]

I am a physicist.

Almost none of us who get PhDs and go through postdocs in the hard sciences do it for the money, we do it because we love our chosen field.

Because you'd be retarded to go through this much effort and sacrifice if you didn't love your field.

That being said, as university, science, education and national lab budgets keep taking it up the ass year after year (while budgets for the police state, the War on Drugs, the Pentagon and old people's entitlements remain sacrosanct), I'm not surprised that some physicists would jump ship. It must be nice being well paid from the start, and not having the teabaggers that control half of Congress trying to destroy the institute you work for.