Nine Scientists Are Awarded Kavli Prizes

The New York Times:

Beaming in from Oslo via the web, officials of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters invaded the World Science Festival in New York on Thursday to announce that nine scientists had won this year’s Kavli prizes. The winners will split million-dollar prizes awarded in three categories: astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience.

The prize is named for Fred Kavli, the Norwegian-born inventor, businessman and philanthropist, who died last year. He spent the last decade of his life handing out money to establish Kavli research institutes at universities around the world and the prizes, which are awarded every two years and which he hoped would someday rival the Nobels.

The astrophysics award this year goes to the founders of the theory known as inflation, which posits that the Big Bang began with an extraordinary ballooning of space-time faster than the speed of light. They are Alan H. Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Andrei D. Linde of Stanford and Alexei A. Starobinsky of the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow, Russia.

Read the whole story: The New York Times