Breakthrough Prize Ceremony Live
The human mind is an incredible thing that can conceive of the magnificence of the heavens and the intricacies of the basic components of matter. Yet for each mind to achieve its full potential, it needs a spark—the spark of enquiry and wonder. I don't believe in boundaries, neither for what we can do in our personal lives nor for what life and intelligence can accomplish in our universe. So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist.
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Tonight, live from Hangar 1 at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, the brightest stars from the worlds of technology and Hollywood are gathered to award over twenty million dollars for excellence in mathematics and the life sciences.
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This is the Breakthrough Prize—scientists changing the world! Please welcome your host, Pierce Brosnan.
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"Look up!" Those were the words of Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest minds of our times. Earlier this year, that mind was lost to the world—a loss to science and to all of humanity, a loss as well to the Breakthrough Prize. He was not only one of our laureates but our guiding spirit, and yet that guiding spirit is still here with us tonight in the example he showed us and in the ideas he explored and expressed so beautifully. Look up! In those two words, he summed up how scientists can make discoveries and how all of us can live deeper and more meaningful lives.
We can't all be Stephen Hawking, but we can all be curious. Tonight, we will meet a group of women and men who are all living that maxim in different ways—by literally looking up, scanning the heavens to find a new kind of star, by gazing into the laws of nature or the infinite spaces of pure mathematics, and by looking inward to the universe within.
Exactly 300 years to the day before Stephen Hawking was born, Galileo died. By looking up, raising his homemade telescope to the skies, Galileo launched the great adventure of science that has brought us here. Later, some bright sparks turned their instruments the other way—to our trillions of cells, each one a kind of universe. Eventually, they hit a wall beyond which they could see no deeper. But great scientists like Stephen Hawking do not believe in boundaries and ingenuity; they break through.
Our first warrior tonight found a way to look past that wall and reveal the structures of life in spellbinding detail. To introduce, please welcome one of the Breakthrough Prize founders, Mark Zuckerberg, and the star of "Star Wars" and "Black Panther," Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong'o.
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Mr. E is the source of all true art and science. It evokes curiosity, which leads both artists and scientists to investigate and innovate. Mystery is why we look closer, deeper, longer at things to help us uncover, understand, and improve ourselves in our world.
Stephen Hawking called for us all to look up at the stars and not down at our feet, and that is what art and science share—the ability to inspire and elevate all of us. Tonight's honorees challenge us to look up, not just to realize our full potential but to look towards our children and the next generation of researchers who will carry us forward through the power of curiosity. These mathematicians, physicists, and life scientists are seeking answers to fundamental questions about our universe.
Tonight's first Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences goes to one such leading scientist who is looking to the innermost reaches of ourselves. Xiao Wei Zhang has developed new cellular imaging techniques and discovered previously unknown structures that make up the building blocks of our body.
Let's take a closer look at some of her work.
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"I think it's very hard to label me. Am I a physicist? Am I a biologist? Who am I? I did my whole college training in physics, and then when I started postdoc at Stanford, I thought, 'Well, I want to do something new.' So then I just got into biology. I really didn't even know the fundamentals. Like, I had to ask my colleague, 'What's the difference between DNA and RNA?' There are a lot of questions that are so hard to answer because tools are missing—like how things go wrong in disease, how do the immune cells interact with tumor cells inside cells?
There are many, many different molecules. Now, these molecules are really tiny—they're a few nanometers in size. If you really want to directly visualize how they interact and how they function, you need tremendous resolving power. So if you use conventional light microscopy to look at molecules, you hit this diffraction limit. So we need to overcome this diffraction barrier. That was the motivation to invent this super-resolution imaging tool called STORM.
This is an image of two structures inside the cell. If we didn't use the STORM, in the same field of view, that was a conventional image, and this is our STORM image. And then if you just do the contrast, you can see how sharp it is. You can see these kinds of things that are molecularly striking and functionally important but just were missed before. Eventually, we could visualize what's in our body at the molecular level, just like watching a movie. The tools that we invented will really benefit society and really are quite extraordinary.”
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For discovering hidden structures in cells through the development of super-resolution imaging transcending the resolution limit of light microscopy, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences is awarded to Xiao Wei Zhang. At age six, Sheryl Bruce Wayne was able to identify the atmosphere, impressing her physicist father.
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"As a professor at Harvard, it feels really special to receive this prize from the Harvard graduates. What an extraordinary celebration of science! I have loved science since I was a school kid, amazed by the simple and elegant physics laws that explain the universe. As I grew older, I got more and more attracted by the unsolved mysteries in life sciences, influenced by my postdoctoral adviser, Steven Chu, who is also in the audience. So I decided to merge these interests and devote my research to solving biological problems using multidisciplinary approaches—inventing imaging methods to see the invisible molecular world of life."
"I share this tremendous honor with all my mentors, mentees, and collaborators for a wonderful journey together. Thank you!"
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Next, we honor the team that discovered a new material that could transform electronics and computing forever when the Breakthrough Prize returns on National Geographic.
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During my decade as an English spy, I fell into a lot of things—hydroelectric dams, ice palaces, dangerous love affairs. But even my worst nemesis never chucked me into a black hole. But what would happen if they did? Some of the deepest work on this question was done by another Breakthrough Prize laureate, one who passed away this year—Joseph Hutchinson, winner of the 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He was among the most influential physicists of his generation; he did critical work in quantum field theory, was a pioneer of superstring theory, and contributed brilliant ideas to the black hole information paradox. He is greatly missed by all his colleagues, and his family is with us tonight, but his ideas are still alive and could yet light the path to the next big breakthrough.
And hopefully, breakthroughs in the labs of some of our life science laureates around the world will one day conquer the brain cancer that took Joe Pulitzky from us. The thrilling adventure of physics continues on the shoulders of giants like Joe Polchinski and Stephen Hawking. To present this year's award, please welcome author, educator, and proud daughter, Lucy Hawking, joined by one of the founders of the Breakthrough Prize, Sergey Brin.
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In life, there was nothing my father liked more than being the center of attention, and so he would be delighted by this evening's tribute. For his family in France, we miss him so much. It is such a joy to have his extraordinary contribution celebrated tonight at NASA Ames, this amazing center of research in science and aviation now celebrating its 80th anniversary.
They were doing advanced innovation in tech here long before Silicon Valley became the center of the universe. Condensed matter physics is extremely difficult, largely because of the almost inconceivable number of states that bulk matter could be in simultaneously. It took nearly 50 years from the discovery of superconductivity until it was understood mathematically, and high-temperature superconductors still are not understood mathematically. Our next laureates mathematically described and predicted a new class of materials a couple of years before they were physically observed, and these materials are called topological insulators. They're amazing, not only because their surface is a conductor while the interior is an insulator, but because of how robust they are to broad swaths of perturbations.
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There's a little bit of a difference between the two of us, which I think helps make us a good team. I tend to be a little bit more driven by abstract theoretical aims, and Gene tends to be a little bit more grounded. That's actually a very true statement. A good fraction of my work takes a cue from experiment. It's not either explained to my satisfaction, or I think the explanation out there is really not right.
With the discovery of topological insulators, the interesting thing about them is they have this very special kind of electrical conductor. It doesn't conduct electricity on the inside, but on the boundary, on the edge. It does conduct electricity; it's like a one-way street for the electrons. I posed myself a thought experiment: if I was an electron riding along this edge and I approached a region where there's some dirt and disorder, what could happen? So there are only two possibilities; either you could go through it, or you could bounce back. What I realized is that there's a very special symmetry, which makes it so that the probability for bouncing backward is zero.
Generally, there are two kinds of applications when you have a new material like this. One is trying to sort of substitute them into known architectures and make them work better. I think the real payoff is that you might build things that don't follow the established architectures. There's an area now known as topological mechanics; it's when you make lattice structures and make them behave in weird ways. Topological photonics is a similar thing—you direct the flow of light. One idea that would be a game-changer is making a quantum computer. If you do make a quantum computer, that is not a marginal change; okay, there's a new language, a new framework that allows you to approach a whole new set of problems. To me, that's the most exciting thing—these materials were sort of waiting around in plain sight; people didn't know the right questions to ask. It was like a treasure that was waiting to be uncovered.
For new ideas leading to the prediction of a new class of materials that conduct electricity only on their surface, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is awarded to Charles Kane and Eugene Mele.
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Charles Kane grew up in the college town of Iowa City, where his father was a professor at engineering. Eugene Mele says that back in high school, his interest in science...
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"I'd like to thank the electrons. Electronic materials can do the most amazing things; they're a foundation for technology, but they're also a window into the fundamental ways that matter can arrange itself. It's been my greatest honor to play a part in understanding and predicting some of that."
"But I'd also like to acknowledge the collective efforts of a broader community of scientists that made these new generations of electronic materials come to life. Thank you."
"So first of all, I want to congratulate my colleagues and collaborators whose outstanding work over the last 13 years has really led to the rapid development of this field—that's been remarkable. I'm also very proud that our own work was carried out at the University of Pennsylvania. This is an institution that was established by Benjamin Franklin for, in his words, 'the pursuit of those things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental.' And that is exactly the idea behind this subject. Thank you."
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"What makes tumors turn aggressive? If we knew, we might be able to stop them. Our next laureate's breakthrough could help answer this question. Then we salute the 17-year-old winner of the Breakthrough Junior Challenge—up next, live on National Geographic."
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Welcome back to the Breakthrough Prize, the only awards ceremony in the known universe that actually makes you more intelligent! To introduce our next laureate, we have the CEO of YouTube, joined by a brilliant director whose visions range from a galaxy far, far away to the beautiful mind of a mathematician right here on Earth.
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Please welcome Ron Howard and Susan Wojcicki.
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"As a major proponent of storytellers, including all types, like this prolific one standing right here next to me, I'm here to honor laureates who are finding ways to improve and extend lives. Way back in the 20th century, gazing down at his microscope, he saw some little bundles called chromosomes. The great physicist Erwin Schrödinger guessed they may contain a type of code substance for a person's future development.
Now, in my day job with Brian Grazer there at Imagine Entertainment, well, sometimes scripts and development issues feel like the most important things on Earth. And yet I'm here tonight with Susan in absolute awe of our next two laureates who are figuring out the genetic script issues that can harm our development."
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"Assistance is everything—that's my model in life. That's certainly something I'm trying to instill into my children; they're like the best things I've ever done. I have to say, having those two children, you know, that's the essence of biology, right? You want to pass on your genes. The way nature works is unmatched. The way our cells work, the way our bodies work—they work just perfectly. No engineer could design something as elegantly and as thoughtfully."
"Basically, understanding how biology works, I mean, that gets us close to the essence of who we are. All of us have 46 chromosomes in every single one of our cells—there's 23 pairs of each, so two of each, 46 total. Those chromosomes tell you who you are, how long you're gonna live, what you're gonna do. It's really important that you have 46 chromosomes—not more and not less. Any party means the wrong chromosome number. A hallmark of cancer is that they have the wrong chromosome number."
"We discovered that these alien cells, you know, they were extremely stressed, and that messes everything up. And it's not surprising; if you change the number of chromosomes, you change the number of copies of genes that that cell has, and it usually affects cells in a bad way. I think our work has led to a number of important insights and has led us closer to an understanding of how gaining or losing chromosomes causes birth defects or cancer."
"Any news from the sequencing?" "I got a sequencing that you did—oh my god, no, you can't really explain these Eureka moments of how they move you and how they affect you. That's like the best feeling ever, right? I kind of feel sad for non-scientists who don't have that happen to them very frequently in their lives. You know this sort of 'Oh my god, I get it!' feeling—that's the best."
So for determining the consequences of abnormal chromosome numbers resulting from the mis-segregation of chromosomes, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences is awarded to Angelica Olivares.
Angelica's mom lives by what she calls the grandma test: an idea has to be easily explained to keep her interest.
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"Making a discovery is the best feeling in the world—it's like Christmas when you were five. The beauty of experimental science is that these Eureka moments are often shared with other scientists, and I'm privileged to have experienced this. I therefore share this tremendous honor with the many wonderful students and postdocs that I was fortunate to have worked with and my family who supported me in my endeavor to seek the truth. Thank you very much!"
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This evening at the Breakthrough Prize, we're following Stephen Hawking's advice to look up. Sometimes that means looking up to a hero and discovering your own talent. For me, there was the great playwright Tennessee Williams, who cast me in one of his plays when I was 21 and changed my career. For the 16-year-olds about to meet, those heroes are great scientists like the ones we're celebrating tonight.
To introduce us to an extraordinary talent, please welcome a young Chinese musical sensation whose songs have amassed nearly 10 billion views—Jen, joined by one of the founders of the Breakthrough Prize, Julia Milne.
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"When I was 13, I started writing my own songs. I discovered a deep satisfaction in creating something new, but first, I had to immerse myself in the musical traditions that came before me. Science, like the arts, needs fresh ideas, but to break through to something new, you have to absorb what is already known."
"The Breakthrough Junior Challenge is a global competition that inspires young people to explore scientific ideas and spreads knowledge with a short video. This study is a challenge because to solve the biggest problems, we need the next generation to be inspired by science. But great scientists, like artists, need more than just inspiration; they also need persistence. Last year, a 15-year-old from Bengal nearly missed out on winning the challenge—this year he tried again and went one better."
"I have known Somair for the last maybe four or five years. What I see in him is his ability to convert what he is learning currently into something bigger, something that benefits society. I'm very excited to see that look on his face when he finds out he has actually won the Breakthrough Junior Challenge 2018!"
"Hey, Somair! You did it, study!"
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"It's just surreal that this is actually happening. My mind is just blown and I'm just very, very, very happy."
"A breakthrough that has a far-reaching impact, from boosting grades to even fighting cancer. Welcome to the magic of circadian rhythm. Our body clocks regulate all functions like alertness, strength, cell repair, and the best time for any activity. My topics are generally inspired by personal experiences. One of my family members suffers from Parkinson's disease, and that's how I came across autophagy, my first Breakthrough Junior Challenge topic.
I've also had a few severe asthma attacks, and I noticed that these attacks seem to peak early in the morning, and I saw the correlation with the circadian rhythm."
"This is my school, and this is where the new Breakthrough Science Lab will be built. All our students are absolutely focused on science, so it'll be wonderful to give them a lab on which they can try out their various ideas because we never know where the next breakthrough comes from."
"Another thing the Breakthrough Challenge really opened me up to was the power of science through storytelling. I would love to be a part of working on the education system through a fusion of technology and entertainment. I really want to make science fun for everybody. Thank you for watching! My name is Somair, and in Sanskrit, it means time."
For his video, "Circadian Rhythm," the winner of the 2018 Breakthrough Junior Challenge is Somair Agarwal. Somair was born in Boston before moving back to India and is a huge Patriots fan.
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"Wow! What an honor to be here. For me, science is about unraveling the most complex machine in our universe—our bodies. From curing diseases to improving quality of life, these are the adventures I want to be a part of."
"Stephen Hawking said it is important for young people to keep their sense of wonder and keep asking why. The Breakthrough Junior Challenge allows us to do that—opening doors to the world of pure sciences, freeing us to learn with an open mind. Thanks to my teachers and family for their guidance. My sister, Sia, who keeps lecturing me—Sia, I hope I did okay! Thank you!"
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Grammy-winning global superstar Lionel Richie will have you humming all night long as he performs one of his greatest hits when the Breakthrough Prize continues.
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I'm thrilled to introduce one of the best-selling music artists on Earth and perhaps beyond—because he's an American. This musical giant has not yet been knighted, though I do recall he was a Commodore. Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Lionel Richie!
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"See, we're always— that's the way—"
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"See you together naturally—"
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"People playing games—"
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"Was a masquerade; from behind, homeboy was crying—"
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Coming up, we honor a biologist who discovered how cells detect invaders, and Eddie Redmayne pays tribute to Stephen Hawking on the Breakthrough Prize.
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Welcome back to the Breakthrough Prize, and now please welcome back Lucy.
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"My father's life was dedicated to finding answers to the biggest questions. He was fascinated not just by the universe but by life. How do we get here? Are we alone? What is our fate in the cosmos? I'm very pleased to welcome a great friend of my father's and his collaborator in exploring some of those questions—one of the Breakthrough Prize founders, Yuri Milner."
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"The first time I saw Stephen Hawking was at the physics conference in 1987, and he instantly became my hero. His pioneering work on black holes implied something shocking: that information falling into one is lost forever. It's like the universe losing its cellphone, he said recently.
I never forgot the impression he made on me that day. His words came through the interpreter, but his character came through loud and clear—his courage, his curiosity, and his honesty. Later, it was that characteristic honesty that led him to decide that his initial conclusion was wrong. The information in the black hole survives, and the universe does not forget. And neither will we forget Stephen Hawking—the scientist and the man."
"I would now like to introduce the actor whose Oscar-winning performance of Stephen Hawking remains so memorable—so, what's next? A one simple, elegant evasion to explain it."
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Please welcome Eddie Redmayne.
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"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It is an extraordinary honor to be here with you this evening. Having the opportunity to meet and spend time with Stephen and his family has genuinely been one of the great, great gifts of my life. As actors, we of course relish playing human beings of complexity and contrast, but there is no human being quite like Stephen Hawking.
He was a man of extraordinary power but also of deep vulnerability, and he had this mind that could soar to the edge of black holes, and yet he also had to slug it out in a grueling daily battle against a cruel, cruel disease. But when I first met Professor Hawking, the thing that blew me away was this other side to him, perhaps not quite as well known as his brilliance and his defiance. Stephen was one thousand percent pure showman.
He had this glint in his eye, this sort of James Dean quality and this sense of humor and this sense of timing that had to be seen to be believed. By virtue of that extraordinary mind and extraordinary wit, he literally held every single person who met him in the palm of his hand.
Professor Hawking was a huge inspiration to me, just as he was and remains an inspiration to people all across the world—young people, older people, people with disabilities, people of science, and people who frankly just are curious about our existence and what that could all mean."
"So, there is Stephen. Thank you for having me. Now, let's also present our next prize. Please welcome an Academy Award-winning nominee joined by an executive who understands that the notebook was a great movie but an outdated piece of technology—Rachel McAdams and the CEO of PayPal, Dan Schulman."
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"It's such an honor to be here at my first Breakthrough Prize. This is an extraordinarily inspiring event that makes me feel so much better about the state of the world today, which is a real nice change of pace. In the eloquent words of the great scientist Marie Curie, 'Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less.'
Our next honoree is a biochemist whose breakthrough work in the discovery of the DNA sensing enzyme, cGAS, has tremendous implications. The more we know about these frontline fighters of the immune system, the less we may have to fear on many medical fronts."
"I grew up in a small village in China—very isolated. We didn't really know anything about science and technology. When I was twelve years old at the time, there was a design that if you learn math, physics, and chemistry, then you can explore the whole world.
For a kid coming from a small village, you know, the possibility of exploring the whole world was very tempting. DNA can initiate immune responses, but you need to have something that knows when the DNA is there. We set out to identify this DNA sensor, but we got a lot more than what we were looking for.
This DNA sensor that we called cGAS recognizes not just pathogen DNA; it also recognizes our own DNA. Think of cGAS like a motion sensor in our house. When this DNA comes into our cells, cGAS can then trigger the immune response. Everything suddenly made sense and not only provides the answer to the longstanding question of how our immune system recognizes DNA, but also immediately provides the link to many human diseases.
Drug companies are particularly interested in identifying inhibitors of cGAS for clinical trials. It is very gratifying to see our discovery, which started with curiosity, helping our patients who suffer from cancer and other new diseases.
From the thrill of making a discovery..."
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For elucidating how DNA triggers immune and autoimmune responses from the interior of the cell through the discovery of the DNA sensing enzyme cGAS, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences is awarded to Z. Jin Chen.
Growing up in a remote mountain village, Jin Chen's education began...
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"By sitting in on classes taught by my elementary school teacher mother.
Well, I think I'm the living proof that education is the greatest equalizer; education that helped me out of poverty allowed me to explore the wonderful world of science. It allowed my colleagues and me to explore the interior of ourselves and discover molecules that no one had ever seen before.
For this, I want to thank the many people who have helped and supported me along the way. I also want to say to all young people around the globe—hey, if I can do it, you can too. Thank you very much!"
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Next, a legendary astronomer who discovered the most exotic stars in the universe when she was just 23. When the Breakthrough Prize returns—
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Please welcome one of the Breakthrough Prize founders, Anne Wojcicki, and actor and humanitarian, Orlando Bloom.
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"I’ve seen the beautiful complexity that makes every one of us unique. A single error can cause so much harm, though, but we live in a moment when fixing those errors with gene therapies is becoming possible, and that means we live in a time of hope—hope lies in dreams and imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality."
"Those were the words of Jonas Salk, whose breakthrough work with the polio vaccine changed countless lives. Our next laureates have made dreams into reality and kindled new hope."
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"February 6, 2013—a beautiful girl came into the world, healthy, happy, kicking around. Thirteen months, all hell broke loose. Her crawling became more labored, and she could barely hold her head up."
"Anna Larson is a Type 1 SMA patient—spinal muscular atrophy—a motor neuron disease. Eventually, patients get muscle weakness and paralysis and respiratory failure, and it could be very life-threatening. You're holding that; you won't find a few months back what you thought was a happy, healthy baby; now you get almost handed a death sentence."
"Frank works in biotechnology. Their focus is on drug development. Very quickly after learning about the disease and the molecular mechanism, I thought, 'This is something that we have to work on.' He called me up one day in 2004 and agreed to start collaborating in my lab."
"I've been interested in a process called RNA splicing—it's understanding the basic workings of the cell and how genes function. Our initial collaboration was how to use antisense technology to modulate splicing in ways that might have therapeutic benefits."
"Within some time after that, we began to focus on spinal muscular atrophy. Adrianne did a lot of the basic biology behind the project, and we were doing work to better understand how to deliver the drug."
"What our technology is based on is designing small pieces of nucleic acids, and they're designed to bind to the RNA intermediate molecule and modulate. That's what we're doing for SMA; we're altering the function of the RNA so that it makes the protein that we wanted to make."
"Since she's gotten that first injection, not only has the disease stopped, but she's gotten stronger! We're not just stabilizing the disease; we're actually improving. This is my first experience where I've worked on a drug that had this big of an impact on a patient—still brings tears every time I see it."
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In the film you just saw, a wonderful family whose lives have been transformed by Dr. Bennett and Dr. Kramer. Please welcome Emma Larson, her mother Diane, and her father Matt.
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"Thank you. On July 22, 2014, our daughter was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy. SMA is the number-one genetic killer of infants. Doctors told us there was no treatment or cure, so basically we were going to watch our daughter slowly get weaker and die. On her second birthday, we enrolled her in a trial. There was hope. On December 23, 2016, the drug created by Dr. Kramer and Dr. Bennett became the first FDA-approved treatment for SMA. Thank you both!
Thank you both for your continuous years of research. Thank you for the sleepless nights working on this drug—and thank you for the time spent away from your family to save ours. With science, there's hope. Thank you!"
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For the development of an effective antisense therapy for children with degenerative disease spinal muscular atrophy, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences is awarded to Frank Bennett and Adrian Kramer.
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"Thank you so much for this great honor! While we are here tonight to celebrate science, including the basic and applied research that gave us an effective drug to treat spinal muscular atrophy, we must not forget that tens of thousands of SMA patients around the world do not yet have access to this treatment. This must change, and I'm certain it will, but for these patients, every day counts. Thank you!"
"I'm extremely grateful and honored to be recognized as a co-recipient of the Breakthrough Prize. My wife Paula deserves special thanks for her support for over 30 years. I would like to acknowledge the patients and their families, such as the Larsons, who have participated in our clinical studies. They are my source of inspiration. Drug discovery and development is very much a team effort that requires a healthy ecosystem of basic and clinical scientists, drug owners, developers, and regulators to transform a dream into reality. Thank you!"
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It's so inspiring to see real progress against neurological diseases—those shadows that touch so many of our lives. One of our next presenters won an Academy Award for her powerful portrayal of a woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease in the 2014 film "Still Alice."
"I've always been so defined by my intellect, my language, my articulation, and now sometimes I can see the words hanging in front of me, and I can't reach them, and I don't know who I am, and I don't know what I'm gonna lose next."
Accompanied by one of the founders of the Breakthrough Prize, Dr. Priscilla Chan.
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In 1967, Jocelyn Bell stood before the ancient walls of Cambridge University, feeling like an impostor. She wondered, "What was she doing here among all these brilliant minds?" She was certain that she'd be found out and sent back to Northern Ireland in disgrace. So Jocelyn made a promise to herself: she would give everything she had to science, leave nothing on the field, and leave with her head held high.
She started literally in a field, swinging a 20-pound sledgehammer, helping to build a huge radio telescope. Once she built it, she ran it every spare hour, hunched over, reaching out, searching for the shimmer of distant galaxies.
Then one day, she sees something—a scribble of ink amid miles of paper—that few scientists would bother to investigate. But Jocelyn isn't a scientist; she's an imposter. So she's working twice as hard. It's a pulse, irregular like a heartbeat; a pulse produced by no star known to science.
But for her own heart, it could be too fast—there was work to be done. Prove that the signal is real. Analyze the source. Find others like it. And over and over again, convince her professors to take her seriously. Jocelyn Bell had made one of the discoveries of the century: she had discovered pulsars, among the most exotic objects in the universe—the embers of exploded supernovae, with the mass of the Sun squeezed to the size of San Francisco.
Look up for a moment. There, out there in the blackness, strobing out a pulse—the persistent heartbeat of the cosmos. Journalists descended and asked how many boyfriends she had and whether she described herself as a blonde or a brunette. It was her professors who got the science question, and then a few years later, it was her professors who got the Nobel Prize.
But tonight, we're making that right here at NASA Ames Center. We're awarding a special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the discovery of pulsars and a lifetime of scientific leadership to a woman scientifically proven to be the real deal—Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
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"Thank you! Thank you very much! Thank you for this very great honor, and thank you for doing me the honor of being here this evening. I plan to use the money that's been awarded to me to create research studentships in physics for people from underrepresented groups in physics. Diversity is important in all our communities, and one of the most delightful things is that some people have subsequently been in touch saying how could we also contribute and add to this fund? So, hey, Breakthrough—we might have a breakthrough! Thank you!"
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Each winner of the Breakthrough Prize traditionally receives a trophy designed by the artist Olafur Eliasson, and this year the famous Swiss jeweler and watchmaker Schaffhausen is celebrating our new laureates with sets specially designed of earrings, cufflinks, and pins—blue sapphires for physics, yellow sapphires for life sciences, and tsavorite for math. Like all Schaffhausen creations, they are made from 100% ethical gold. Congratulations to all the laureates for the shining example they set for our next generation.
The Breakthrough Prize for Mathematics and Chinese music sensation Jen performs "Lightyears Away." Up next, live on National Geographic.
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Science is an international community, and the Breakthrough Prize has always been a profoundly international event. In that spirit, it's especially fitting to welcome back Jen, who's going to sing a beautiful song she created for the science fiction movie "Passengers" about her journey of love that is measured in lightyears.
Ladies and gentlemen, an amazing talent who has traveled the universe to be here tonight performing "Lightyears Away," Jen!
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"Yes!"
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"It's my honor to be here tonight. Please welcome the CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, and star of "Westworld," Ed Harris."
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"Playing an AI character in 'Westworld' makes me constantly think about what's created and what's real. The honorees tonight show us that science and mathematics are beautiful worlds in themselves—infinite amusement parks for the mind—and they're also key in comprehending our real world and how we can change it for the better."
"Our next laureate is deeply committed to both of those worlds. He's pledged to devote a large part of his time to mathematical research that could help our planet in the fight against climate change. At other times, he enters a world of pure abstraction. Let's take a glimpse at what it's like to live there."
"The conceptual space and symmetries are central in mathematics. Mathematicians first have to make conjectures, which are disease—and what should be tall. And of course, conjectures are very difficult; then they are to find new ideas to pull these conjectures."
"My trust in mathematics began at four or five years old. I ran into height; it was the oppression of trying to do it. I was interested in the big questions of arithmetic and particularly the hypothesis of a formal scheme."
"When I began to work on the Neurones for Gamma-Kind, most of the main conjectures I found on the school of German; finally, the results I obtained were not the one that I was looking for. Mathematicians are driven by curiosity and beauty. They should have the innocence of children who do not hesitate to ask simple questions, and they are not afraid of discovering something different from what is expected."
"We are curious about hidden truths. We rely on intuition, dreams, visions, and analogies. The beauty of mathematics realizes the harmony of the different parts and the way we discover unexpected things."
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For groundbreaking contributions to several areas of mathematics, in particular to the Langlands program in the functional field case, the Breakthrough Prize for Mathematics is awarded to V. H. Lafargue.
Benson Lefort likes to spend his free time hiking in the foothills of the...
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"I thank my teachers and colleagues and my institution in France—generous! The beauty of mathematics is eternal, and fortunately, the beauty of our planet is in great danger. This place reminds us of the great success of the Apollo program. Today, to save our planet, we need such a collective effort for basic research and research and development for clean energy. Thank you!"
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The Breakthrough Prize—scientists changing the world—will return live on National Geographic.
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What an evening has been! Thank you all here and at home for being with us. And now let us welcome to the stage those who have looked up and so deserved to be looked up to—this year's Breakthrough Prize laureates!
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