Beaming in from Oslo, Norway, 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.
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 spacetime faster than the speed of light. They are Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Andrei Linde of Stanford University and Alexei Starobinsky of the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow.
The winners from the world of the very small — nanoscience — are Thomas Ebbesen of the Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg, France; Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen, Germany; and John Pendry of Imperial College London. They are being rewarded for their efforts in nano-optics, developing techniques to use ordinary light to see objects that are smaller than the wavelength of visible light, a goal once thought impossible.
Three neuroscientists shared the prize for inner space — the cosmos between our ears. The winners, Brenda Milner of the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University in Quebec; John O’Keefe of University College London; and Marcus Raichle of Washington University in St. Louis have advanced the understanding of memory and cognition by discovering and exploring specialized networks and regions in the brain.