CSW Alumnus and Harvard Physics Professor Wins Prestigious Award

This $300,000 prize recognizes his achievements in theoretical physics and makes him eligible for a $3 million prize, whose winners will be announced in late 2014, according to Foundation representative Rob Meyer.

Strominger, Director of the Harvard Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature, was honored both for his joint publications with Physics professor Cumrun Vafa and for his collective body of work concerning a number of challenging problems that affect our view of the universe.

“One big question is: ‘What’s a black hole?’ The problem is baffling and it’s a tension between general relativity and quantum mechanics,” said Strominger.

While they have not found the solution to this problem, Strominger asserted that they have made significant progress by using the framework of string theory. In so doing, Strominger and Vafa managed to solve a puzzle that Stephen Hawking, one of last year’s winners and a member of the prize selection committee, had posed back in the 1970s.

While Hawking had made predictions, Strominger and Vafa’s work now verifies and confirms string theory as a viable explanation for some of the workings of our universe.

Princeton University physics professor Nima Arkani-Hamed, a member of the selection committee and a former Harvard faculty member, explained that this breakthrough is “a huge boost in the field… and a milestone in understanding quantum gravity.”

“I’m happy to get it,” said Strominger, who then emphasized that his work was part of a team effort. “There is a mythology, especially in theoretical physics, that advances are largely made by a few brilliant people, and that everyone else just cleaned up the details, but it’s the opposite. It’s progress that the whole community makes together and collaborates on.”