I wrote about this year's Breakthrough prizes for Nature, which
spotlighted pivotal advances in foundational physics–both on the theory and the experimental side. A special prize in fundamental physics was awarded to Nobel laureate and FQxI member Gerard 't Hooft, one of the principal architects of the Standard Model of particle physics. Alongside this, over 13,500 physicists at CERN were honored for their collaborative efforts at the Large Hadron Collider, where they’ve rigorously tested the Standard Model, refined measurements of the Higgs-boson mass and interactions, and explored exotic states like antimatter and the quark–gluon plasma.
't Hooft, a theoretical physicist at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands, was partly recognized for his groundbreaking work developing the mathematical techniques used to manipulate the equations describing the weak and strong nuclear forces. As a graduate student in the 1970s, he and his supervisor Martinus Veltman were wrestling with the problem that these equations seemed to give ridiculous answers. "When you just see them for the first time and you're asked to calculate something, you say, hey, it's impossible, it gives infinity as an answer and that can't be right," 't Hooft recalls. "In fact, it was some fellow Dutch physicists, way before I started this work, who had ideas that the infinities really meant that you start off with the wrong parameters."
't Hooft and Veltman developed a technique to 'renormalize' the equations, adjusting the parameters in the correct manner to absorb those infinities into the definition of those parameters, cancelling them out of the problem. It was an achievement that would win them both the Nobel prize in physics in 1999. "I'm so very proud of renormalization, because it was hard work, and we really found that in a fantastic way, all the ends seem to meet at some point in Yang-Mills theory" (the quantum theory that describes nuclear binding), says 't Hooft. "That was the big thing."
Among 't Hooft's many other achievements are insights into how quarks are confined in the nucleus and the discovery that unifying the forces of physics requires the existence of magnetic monopoles. "It's now a joint discovery by Alexander Polyakov and myself that there are particles that only have a North pole, or only have a South pole, and it was exciting to see how these magnetic monopoles could do things in this theory to keep quarks bound together." says 't Hooft. His work has also advanced research into quantum gravity and condensed-matter theory.
The now infamous holographic principle, which states that information within a 3-D region of space can be encoded on its 2-D boundary, also originated with 't Hooft–although today it is not one of his favorite insights. "It's amazing that people pay so much attention to something which I said in only a weak moment. People run away doing mysterious things with it, but they don't really build theories that I can understand," says 't Hooft. "I think if I would do my life again, I would swallow the holographic principle and say, no, no, I'm not going to say that, because then they're going to go off to do weird things."
't Hooft is now engaged in a project to find a deterministic underpinning to quantum theory. "Quantum mechanics is not what people say it is, it's not a weird kind of mysterious procedure you just have to go through mumbling magic words," he says. "That's not the way you should formulate the theory." Rather, 't Hooft has long argued, quantum mechanics is just a way of doing statistics. "We have a theory of which we don't know the equations, but we do know how to do statistics, and that's called quantum mechanics," he says. Although, he adds with a laugh that when he says such things his colleagues often think he is "getting too old and talking nonsense."
"Gerard 't Hooft is a genius of the ages who deserves multiple Nobels and multiple Breakthrough prizes," Ashutosh Kotwal, a particle physicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina told me.
And 't Hooft also has words for young up-and-coming scientists who may want to follow in his footsteps: "What you have to do is make steps backwards, so when someone of the older generation tells you something cannot be done, don't believe them," he says. "If they say it's impossible, it's because their method makes it impossible. But you should try it again, using your own methods and maybe you'll discover there's a loophole. You have to think harder than those old guys did, and that's always how breakthroughs get get done.
Also winning big were 13,500 physicists at CERN, working on the CMS and ATLAS experiments that are pinning down the properties of the Higgs boson, working on the LHCb experiment that attempts to understand the subtle differences between matter and anti-matter, and working on the ALICE experiment that recreates the quark-gluon plasma that existed soon after the Big Bang. Kotwal welcomes the fact that Breakthrough recognises entire collaborations, likening the huge efforts of so many at CERN, to the mammoth task of building of the pyramids.
Life sciences prizes were also awarded for the development of GLP-1-based drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, gene-editing technologies, and discoveries linking Epstein–Barr virus and B cell antibodies to multiple sclerosis. Dennis Gaitsgory won the Breakthrough prize in mathematics for his work on the Langlands programme.
Each Breakthrough prize is worth $3 million.