3 December 2016 — On Sunday, December 4th, at 10ET/9c, tune into the National Geographic channel to watch LIGO and other remarkable scientists and mathematicians receive this year’s Breakthrough Prizes. The star-studded ceremony will be hosted by Morgan Freeman, and will include a performance by Alicia Keys.
In May of this year, LIGO was named the recipient of a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. This “Special” prize (separate from the ‘regular’ Breakthrough Prize) can be awarded at any time by the selection committee, which includes an impressive array of internationally renowned scientists. Previous winners of the Special Prize include seven leaders of the Large Hadron Collider teams that discovered the Higgs Boson. This time, the $3 million dollar prize acknowledges LIGO’s historic detection of gravitational waves and the subsequent empirical confirmation of the most difficult-to-detect predication of general relativity. The prize will be shared between LIGO founders Ronald W. P. Drever, Kip S. Thorne and Rainer Weiss, and 1012 contributors to the discovery. The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was founded in 2012 by Yuri Milner to recognize those individuals who have made profound contributions to human knowledge.
Kip Thorne and Rai Weiss will be on hand to accept the award on behalf of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. If you can’t tune in live this Sunday, Fox Network and NatGeo stations will re-air a one-hour version of the ceremony on Sunday, Dec. 18, at 7:00-8:00 PM ET/PTth. For more details on the Breakthrough Prize and on how to watch this event live, check out these websites:
The Ceremony: https://breakthroughprize.org/News/33
LIGO Named as Special Prize Winner: https://breakthroughprize.org/News/32
Breakthrough Prize website: https://breakthroughprize.org