“Acceptance Speech” – 2015 Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences

Acceptance speech by Stephen Hawking, recipient of the 2015 Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences, awarded jointly with Viatcheslav Mukhanov for discovering that galaxies formed from quantum fluctuations in the early universe.
“Cosmology has changed enormously over the past sixty years. At the beginning of the century, it was widely accepted without question that the universe was essentially uniform and static. (…) Most people preferred to believe that the universe had always existed, as this avoided awkward questions about initial conditions and what came before the beginning.” These lines were written in 1982 by British physicist Stephen Hawking in the introduction to the concluding volume of a conference he co-organized that year in Nuffield, United Kingdom, which brought together some of the world’s leading theoretical physicists.

The work for which they receive

Acceptance speech by Stephen Hawking, recipient of the 2015 Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences, awarded jointly with Viatcheslav Mukhanov for discovering that galaxies formed from quantum fluctuations in the early universe.
“Cosmology has changed enormously over the past sixty years. At the beginning of the century, it was widely accepted without question that the universe was essentially uniform and static. (…) Most people preferred to believe that the universe had always existed, as this avoided awkward questions about initial conditions and what came before the beginning.” These lines were written in 1982 by British physicist Stephen Hawking in the introduction to the concluding volume of a conference he co-organized that year in Nuffield, United Kingdom, which brought together some of the world’s leading theoretical physicists.

The work for which they received this award “can be considered the most important experimentally confirmed discovery in the unification of fundamental theoretical particle physics with cosmology.”