In the pantheon of modern physics, few figures can match the quiet authority of Gerard ’t Hooft. The Dutch theoretical physicist, now a professor emeritus at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, has spent much of the past half-century reshaping our understanding of the fundamental forces that knit together reality. But ’t Hooft’s unassuming, soft-spoken manner belies his towering scientific stature, which is better revealed by the mathematical rigor and deep physical insights that define his work—and by the prodigious numbers of prestigious prizes he has accrued, which include a Nobel Prize, a Wolf Prize, a Franklin Medal, and many more.
His latest accolade, announced on April 5, is the most lucrative in all of science: a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, worth $3 million, in recognition of ’t Hooft’s myriad contributions to physics across his long career.
His most celebrated discovery—and the one that earned him, along with his former Ph.D. thesis adviser, the late Martinus Veltman, the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics—showed how to make sense of non-Abelian gauge theories, which are complex mathematical frameworks that describe how elementary particles interact. Together, ’t Hooft and Veltman demonstrated that these theories could be renormalized, meaning that intractable infinite quantities that cropped up in calculations could be tamed in a consistent and precise way. This feat would change the course of science history, laying the groundwork for the Standard Model, the reigning paradigm of particle physics.
But beyond this, ’t Hooft has made many other breakthroughs, which are too numerous—and, in most cases, too technical—to thoroughly describe here. Among them, however, some of the most notable include his contributions to our understanding of the way that quarks are confined within protons and neutrons and the way that magnetic monopoles naturally emerge from the high-energy unification of fundamental forces, as well as the physics of black holes. In particular, his explorations of the latter area led to his proposal of the holographic principle in the 1990s. This is the notion that all the information within a three-dimensional volume of space can be encoded on a surrounding two-dimensional surface, akin to a hologram. The idea has since become central to many efforts to unify quantum mechanics with Einstein’s general theory of relativity in an all-encompassing theory of quantum gravity.
In a conversation with Scientific American, ’t Hooft spoke about his Breakthrough Prize, his optimism for the future of particle physics, his dissatisfaction with quantum mechanics, and the scientific and cultural effects that have arisen from some of his most provocative ideas.
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