David Gross has won the Special Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics with a whopping $3 million prize, as announced by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation on April 18, 2026.
The prize honors scientists whose discoveries have contributed significant advancement to the development of human knowledge.
The Breakthrough Prizes—commonly known as the ’Oscars of Science’—were established in 2012 to celebrate the wonders of the 21st century scientific age.
David Gross, who is a Nobel Prize laureate in Physics (2004), served as director at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics at University of California, Santa Barbara for three decades.
In the early 1970s, there was a wide gap in quantum field theory, as it could not define the strong nuclear force, which holds the atom's nucleus together.
But in 1973, Gross and his graduate student Frank Wilczek cracked the mystery.
They discovered that the strong force works the opposite way to familiar forces like gravity: it gets weaker as particles approach each other, but stronger as they move apart.
That discovery led to the development of quantum chromodynamics.
After taking home the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, he drops a shocking prediction for humanity in an interview with LiveScience .
Gross, when asked if humanity will ever get to a place where we get rid of nuclear weapons.
Gross predicted, “We’re not recommending that. That’s idealistic, but yet, I hope so. Because if you don’t, there’s always some risk an AI 100 years from now, but chances of (humanity) living, with this estimate, 100 years, is very small, and living 200 years is infinitesimal.”
Gross became one of this year’s six awardees for his contributions to theoretical physics, earning the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
David Gross has remained an authority in fundamental physics for six decades.
