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Aron Wall, a Stanford University physicist who
studies black-hole thermodynamics, believes there was a beginning of
time, a singular moment of creation like the Big Bang, inform Peter Fimrite, Reporter at San Francisco Chronicle.
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| Physicist Aron Wall studies black and worm holes and space-time. Photo: Nicole Egley Wall |
It
is a much-debated theory that essentially hinges on a question that
many a gum-chewing 12-year-old has asked of parents: “If the universe
had a beginning, what existed before that?”
Wall’s
answer to this fundamental question — which also forces one to puzzle
over the definition of nothingness — is what has made him popular in the
religious community and a bit unusual for a scientist...
He will be given his award along with 20 other
winners of the Breakthrough Prize, during a televised ceremony Nov. 4
at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in Mountain View. The prizes, touted as
the “Oscars of Science,” honor world-changing discoveries in life
sciences, physics and mathematics.
Wall is the only Bay Area resident to win a prize for the coming year.
Xiaowei
Zhuang, who got her doctorate degree from UC Berkeley and conducted her
postdoctoral research at Stanford, won a $3 million Breakthrough award
for scientific discovery. Zhuang, now a Harvard University professor and
optical imaging investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute,
won in the life sciences category for discovering hidden structures in
cells and developing super-resolution imaging.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
