2025 was a big year for the FQxI community. Here's what happened.
A busy awards season
Let's start with the prizes, because there were a lot of them.
In April, Nobel laureate Roger Penrose received the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement at a ceremony at Claridge's in London. The award was presented by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn. For those unfamiliar, the Golden Plate has been given since 1961 to people ranging from Neil Armstrong to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Past recipients have also included Bill Gates, Colin Powell, and Katalin Karikó. And Penrose was recognised for his lifelong contributions to physics and mathematics.
Alyssa Ney won the 2025 Patrick Suppes Prize for her book The World in the Wave Function. According to the American Philosophical Society, it's the world's largest book prize in philosophy. Ney is an FQxI member who won Second Prize in our 2018 essay competition "What Is 'Fundamental'?" and spoke at our 6th International Conference in 2019 (Mind Matters: Intelligence and Agency in the Physical World). Her new book makes the case for wave function realism: the idea that the quantum wave function isn't just a mathematical tool, but the actual stuff of the universe.
Nicole Yunger Halpern was awarded the IUPAP Early Career Scientist Award in Statistical Physics. The IUPAP citation recognised her "outstanding contributions bridging statistical physics, thermodynamics and quantum information theory," particularly her work on non-Abelian thermodynamics and the relationship between quantum chaos and fluctuation theorems. The prize was presented at StatPhys29 in Florence.
Markus Aspelmeyer won the 2025 Quantum Electronics and Optics Prize from the European Physical Society for his pioneering work in quantum optomechanics. This is one of the most prestigious prizes in optical physics. Aspelmeyer, who is Professor of Physics at the University of Vienna and Scientific Director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, helped establish quantum optomechanics as a field. His work centres around how quantum effects show up in macroscopic mechanical systems. The prize was presented at the CLEO/Europe-EQEC 2025 conference in Munich.
Sean Carroll received the Klopsteg Memorial Lecture Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers. The award was "for his significant efforts sharing the excitement and promise of modern physics with a broad audience" and for "conveying intricate aspects of contemporary physics clearly and thoroughly without cutting corners or oversimplifying." Carroll's Mindscape podcast has more than 340 episodes and regularly attracts more than 100,000 listeners, and he's written six popular science books, four of which hit the New York Times Bestseller list!
And finally, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, along with Sreenath K. Manikandan, took First Prize in the 2025 Gravity Research Foundation essay competition for their essay "Probing Quantum Structure in Gravitational Radiation." Their essay proposed new statistical tests that could reveal whether gravitational waves display quantum behaviour. "It's a nice ego boost, of course," Wilczek said. "And I hope it will call further attention to the line of work we've been pursuing." The Gravity Research Foundation essay competition has been running for a long time (since 1949!) and has been won by at least six people who later won the Nobel Prize.
Celebrating careers
Some of our members were honoured for their broader contributions to the field.
In June, the Perimeter Institute hosted "Lee's Fest: Quantum Gravity and the Nature of Time", a conference celebrating Lee Smolin as the institute's "Master of Time." Smolin is a founding faculty member of Perimeter and a co-creator of loop quantum gravity. The conference brought together physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and philosophers to explore the nature of time. Speakers included Carlo Rovelli, Jenann Ismael, Bianca Dittrich and Roger Penrose who gave a talk titled "Lee Smolin: His Important Critical Role with Regard to Unconventional Physical Theories."
In May, Anton Zeilinger turned 80 years young! The 2022 Nobel laureate in Physics was celebrated by several institutions, including the Slovak Academy of Sciences, which awarded him an honorary scientific degree (DrSc. h. c.).
Books and ideas
Vlatko Vedral released Portals to a New Reality: Five Pathways to the Future of Physics, arguing that we could have experimental tests of quantum gravity within five years. Fellow FQxI member David Deutsch provided a cover blurb, calling the book "stimulating and provocative."
Julian Barbour published a three-part masterclass on "Complexity in the Cosmos" through FQxI's QAcademy. In it, he shares his ideas about shape dynamics and the emergence of complexity in the universe.
Jenann Ismael had a very strong year. The Australian Philosophical Review devoted an entire 2025 issue to her paper "The Open Universe: Totality, Self-reference and Time." And she also delivered a colloquium at the Santa Fe Institute titled "The Limits of Prediction: Counterprediction, Self-Reference, and the Crack in Determinism."
Frequent FQxI contributor Niayesh Afshordi, earlier this year, published the popular science book "Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins." It was named as one of Smithsonian's Ten Best Science Books of 2025 and a New Scientist Best Book. FQxI members Rovelli and Hossenfelder call it 'an intellectual feast' and 'a must-read.' Afshordi also appeared earlier this year on our podcast to talk about dark energy (and it's a great listen!).
Sara Imari Walker's 2024 book Life as No One Knows It continues to generate discussion. In April, she gave a Long Now talk on assembly theory, her framework for understanding what life is and how it emerges from non-life.
Chiara Marletto and David Deutsch published a new paper in May called "Constructor theory of time." Constructor theory's laws don't refer to time, so how can they still account for dynamics and duration? That's what the paper addresses. And in October, the Conjecture Institute announced funding to support Marletto's constructor theory research at Oxford.
On the WVXU “Looking Up” podcast Janna Levin discussed what happens if you fall into a black hole and shared some of her research on the early universe, black holes, the big bang, large scale structure of space time. It's a really fun listen!
Science meets the world
Back in May, Carlo Rovelli lectured on the "incompleteness" of modern physics to students in Gaza as part of Al-Aqsa University's Gaza Excellence Talks series. He joined a lineup that also included Fields Medalist Terence Tao and Nobel laureate Alain Aspect. Rovelli's lecture, titled "Half Way Through the Woods: The 20th Century Scientific Revolution and Its Incompleteness," is available on the Academic Solidarity with Palestine YouTube channel.
In December, Brian Greene hosted the inaugural Global Space Awards at London's Natural History Museum. The event honoured innovators that are currently shaping the space industry. Greene, who is the co-founder of the World Science Festival, is "one of the most prominent science communicators of the 21st century," said Sanjeev Gordhan. The event was dedicated to the late Apollo 13 astronaut James Lovell, whose family attended.
And at Oxford's "What Quantum?" centenary conference in November, Bob Coecke performed on his quantum guitar alongside composer Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin. Yes, a quantum guitar. The guitar uses quantum computing to generate sound. The two gave free concerts as part of the centenary celebrations marking 100 years since the birth of quantum mechanics. The world premiere of their piece, "Quantum Universe," was a fabulous success. Coecke wasn't the only FQxI member at the conference though, speakers also included FQxI members: Emily Adlam, Natalia Ares, Jonathan Barrett, Eric Cavalcanti, Bob Coecke, Elise Crull, Christopher Fuchs, Lucien Hardy, Matthew Leifer, Gerard Milburn, Wayne Myrvold, Roger Penrose, Simon Saunders, Antony Valentini, David Wallace, Nicole Yunger Halpern, Marcus Appleby, Daniel Bedingham, Jonathan Halliwell, Richard Healey, Adrian Kent, Eleanor Knox, Bryan Roberts, Ruediger Schack, Tony Short, Karim Thébault and Jos Uffink. Wow, that's a turn up for the books!
The 5000:1 bet
One storyline we're still keeping an eye on is the high-stakes wager between FQxI members Jonathan Oppenheim and Carlo Rovelli.
Back in 2023, Oppenheim published a radical theory in Physical Review X suggesting that gravity might remain fundamentally classical rather than quantum. Most physicists assume gravity must eventually be "quantized" to fit with quantum mechanics. Oppenheim thinks that assumption might be wrong.
To back up his conviction, he placed a 5000:1 bet with Rovelli and Geoff Penington. Rovelli is a champion of loop quantum gravity. Penington is a string theorist. Both believe gravity is fundamentally quantum.
The stakes being that if Oppenheim wins, he gets "bucketloads of potato chips, colorful plastic bazinga balls, or shots of olive oil." Each item is capped at 20 pence (about 25 cents). The bet hinges on experiments that could test whether spacetime fluctuates in ways predicted by Oppenheim's theory. One proposed test involves weighing a mass with extreme precision to detect tiny fluctuations over time.
As of 2025, the bet remains open. Will 2026 be the year we find out who wins?
Looking ahead
2025 was a year to remember, and we are so proud to support researchers who are asking hard questions and finding new ways to share their work with the world.
If you would like to help make more of this possible, please consider donating to FQxI. Your support helps a community of scientists working on the deepest questions about the nature of reality. Every contribution matters.
Collage: Photos via Wikimedia Commons (CC licenses) by Fronteiras do Pensamento, Victor R. Ruiz, Bengt Oberger, BorisBarbour, Christopher Michel, Temugin, Biswarup Ganguly, Sgerbic, SebastosOctavian, and Jacqueline Godany. Additional photos courtesy of Vlatko Vedral, Jenann Ismael, Niayesh Afshordi, Chiara Marletto, and Perimeter Institute.