Dutch Nobel Prize winner Gerard ‘t Hooft gets a great science prize

During a gala event in Los Angeles, the Dutch Nobel Prize winner Gerard ‘t Hooft (78) received a special Breakthrough prize for fundamental physics on Saturday. He receives an amount of three million dollars for his fundamental work on the development of the standard model of particle physics. It describes all known elementary particles and the forces that work on them.

The Breakthrough prizes have been awarded since 2013 for scientific breakthroughs. The prices – of which the amount that transcends from the more famous Nobel prices – are an initiative of Julia and Yuri Milner, Anne Wojcicki, Sergey Brin from Google and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta – the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. The presentation, which the organization calls the « Oscars of Science », is a glamorous event with presentations by celebrities and live music of well -known artists.

« For scientific researchers like me it is very worshiping to hear that your research is a breakthrough – a breakthrough – and that attention is given to that, » said professor Gerard ‘t Hooft shortly before he would fly to Los Angeles.

‘t Hooft made important contributions in the 1970s to the developments that would lead to the standard model of particle physics. At that time, physicists worked on theoretical models to be able to describe the behavior of basic particles, the smallest building blocks of atoms and molecules, and their mutual forces. The models for the forces did not work well. « If you were going to count on it, for example, the reactions turned out to be infinitely strong, » says’ t Hooft. « And just as a car cannot drive infinitely, particles cannot practice infinite forces either. » So that had to be different.

Mathematical

With his promoter Martinus Veltman, ‘t Hooft managed to get these theoretical models mathematically correct, so that the calculations provide sensible answers. « The procedure we learned to use is called » Renormalization, « he says. « Our solution turned out to work fantastically if you compared it with observations to elementary particles, » he says. « The fact that we could understand those particles came to many people as a thunderbolt in clear sky. That was seen as a breakthrough. »

For the mathematical foundation they put for the theory of the so -called weak nuclear force – which is involved in certain radioactive decay, Veltman and ‘t Hooft already received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1999. After that, ‘t Hooft also contributed to the insights into the theory of the so -called strong nuclear power – which holds core particles in atomic nuclei. These insights ultimately lead to the development of the standard model that describes all basic particles and their powers.

The Breakthrough Prize acknowledges that ‘t Hooft has not been sitting still since then. For example, he is now working on understanding black holes and a theory for quantum gravity – which unites quantum mechanics that describes the basic particles with gravity. And there are still open questions within the standard model.

« I am very intrigued by those questions, » says’ t Hooft. « And I think a lot of breakthroughs are needed. According to some researchers, there are things that we will never understand. I don’t believe that. I have faith in human ingenuity and that there will soon be discoveries that no one has ever thought of. »

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