9 Scientists Receive a New Physics Prize

"Unlike the Nobel in physics, the Fundamental Physics Prize can be awarded to scientists whose ideas have not yet been verified by experiments, which often occurs decades later. "

About half those awards went to string theorists, and they'll likely be waiting a lot longer than a few decades for experimental verification. Try centuries or never.

While I'm in favor of this kind of prize, I think this crop of winners shows a clear bias towards things that may not ever pan out while ignoring much more important contributions to science that are actually verifiable. Untestable theories are all well and dandy in that they might one day lead to something testable, but there's not much point in handing out awards for such stuff until it does!

untestable != unproven

Granted - but also unestable != not useful/not inspiring

It sounds like an odd award to me. I can't see how its existence would motivate anyone to behave any differently, though I like that it creates more social recognition of science and scientists.

It reminds me of Richard Feynman not seeing any point in honors like the Nobel Prize. It may apply here, though many people think differently than he. Still, I suspect people don't go into physics for the money. They probably like the recognition of their peers, but I expect winners of this new award will already have that.

Feynman said, "I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish academy just decides that this work is noble enough to receive a prize — I’ve already gotten the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding a thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it — those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me. I don’t believe in honors."

From the article: "future recipients of the Fundamental Physics Prize, to be awarded annually, will be decided by previous winners."

More on Feynman, again not directly related, but close: he became so exasperated [at the National Academy of Sciences] that he resigned his membership, saying that he saw no point in belonging to an organization that spent most of its time deciding who to let in.

It's amusing to see skeptical comments, but these are theorist who are held in very high regard by their peers and not many in the community would dispute their getting the award. The days of proposing easily provable conjectures are over. Now its almost exclusively high energy physics that is being probed.

I feel that as the physics gets increasingly complex to formulate, the prize money should go up too. And there's no better time to give away generous prizes than the highly skewed economy of today.