Hawking, Cern team bag $3 million prizes

MEYRIN (SWITZERLAND ): It's been a good year to be a physicist. Yuri Milner, the Russian entrepreneur who startled the scientific world last summer when he handed out $3 million apiece to nine theoretical physicists and mathematicians, is at it again. On Tuesday Milner, who describes himself as a "failed physicist," is set to announce another round of multimillion-dollar prizes to physicists.

Headlining the list are a pair of "special" prizes of $3 million each, one to the British cosmologist Stephen Hawking for his work on black holes, and the other to be shared by seven scientists at Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, for the discovery in July of what is probably the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that endows others with mass.

Continuing last summer's largess, Milner will also announce a short list of nominees eligible for the 2013 edition of his $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize, and three winners of $100,000 prizes for emerging work.