Let's bring out our first two presenters, two men who, up until the stock market crashed, both had a full head of hair. Let's see how they're getting on now. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and the Breakthrough Prize co-founder, the one, the Yuri Milner!
One planet. In this immense universe, we only know one planet where matter has formed into minds. Minds that can ask big questions. Like, what is matter anyway? What is this planet? What is the universe?
Well, asking big questions may be rare, but being able to answer them is rarer still. Back in college, I actually hoped to become a theoretical physicist. But one day, I'd been wrestling with a particular partial differential equation for three hours, and I couldn't solve it. And I went to my friend Yosantha, and Yosantha solved it in a few seconds in his head. It was at that moment that I knew I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist. And so I switched to computer science.
Well, that was actually pretty smart of you, Jeff. I got to the end of my physics PhD before I figured out that I was unlikely to find the answers. But great scientists can. It is actually pretty remarkable that just by asking questions and testing the answers here on this little planet, they've launched a quest to explore and understand our entire universe. From the instant of creation, to our present time and far into the future. I believe that this quest is humanity's fundamental mission.
And this quest, driven by pure curiosity, has improved all of our lives. Particle accelerators designed to probe matter at subatomic scales have led to medical imaging tools like PET and MRI, new cancer therapies, advanced information technologies that benefit billions. At the Particle Accelerator at CERN, near Geneva, where scientists created the World Wide Web. On behalf of quite a few of us in this room, Fabiola, thank you for that.
In 2012, scientists at CERN found an answer to one of the biggest questions. When they detected the particle that had been predicted 50 years ago, the Higgs particle, the particle that gives mass to matter. The particle without which our universe, our planet, and even you and I could not exist.
But that historic answer, of course, just left more questions. For all their success, our best theories still remain silent on the greatest mysteries. Why is there so much more matter than anti-matter? How stable is our universe? And what is the nature of dark matter?
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Bezos, J. (2025, April 13). Jeff Bezos & Yuri Milner Award 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics to 4 CERN Experiments [Interview transcript]. Breakthrough. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/148790/
MLA
Jeffrey Bezos. "Jeff Bezos & Yuri Milner Award 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics to 4 CERN Experiments." Breakthrough, 13 Apr. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/148790/.
BibTeX
@misc{bezos2025_148790,
author = {Jeffrey Bezos},
title = {Jeff Bezos \& Yuri Milner Award 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics to 4 CERN Experiments},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Breakthrough. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {apr},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/148790/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
