British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has canceled a planned visit to Israel in June because he feels he should respect a Palestinian call to boycott Israeli academics. Originally believing the decision to be based on health reasons alone, the University of Cambridge released a statement Wednesday explaining that Hawking decided not to attend the fifth annual Israeli Presidential Conference “based on advice from Palestinian academics that he should respect the boycott.” The original statement by the …More

Stephen Hawking, the internationally renowned British theoretical physicist and popular science author, is scheduled to visit Israel this summer, the Jerusalem Post reported. Hawking will travel to Israel to take part in the 5th annual Israeli Presidential Conference, titled “Facing Tomorrow.” The conference, which was inaugurated in 2008 by Nobel Prize Laureate and Israeli President Shimon Peres, gathers the world’s top leaders and intellectuals in Israel for discussions on everything from …More

Richard Feynman is arguably one of the world’s most famous physicists, a noted Jewish scientist who was a Nobel Prize winner, creator of the Feynman diagrams, an investigator on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and a developer of the atomic bomb. Feynman was born in 1918 in Queens, New York, to Ashkenazi Jewish parents. He showed a passion for science at a young age, setting up an experimental lab in his childhood bedroom and repairing broken radios. By the age of 15, Feynman had taught himself …More

A French-Jewish scientist has won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in quantum systems. Serge Haroche, born in Morocco but living and working in France, called the honor "overwhelming." “I was in the street [when I got the news] and passing a bench so I was able to sit down,” he said at a news conference Tuesday. Haroche, 68, was awarded the honor with David Wineland of the US, for their “groundbreaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum …More

Nobel Prize physicist Philipp Lenard decried the “Jewish physics” of Albert Einstein. The staunch German nationalist and chief of Aryan Physics under Adolph Hitler called Einstein’s work a deliberate work of fiction, with theories that “never were even intended to be true.” One of Einstein’s purported “Jewish frauds,” his theory of nuclear fission, went on help the Allied forced secure victory over the Nazis and helped cement Einstein as the most influential …More

A Jewish Russian investor made nine scientists instant millionaires when he awarded top honors for the Fundamental Physics Prize. Yuri Milner, who both funds and created the prize, direct deposited $3 million into the bank account of each winner. Milner said he established the prize because today's best scientists are poorly compensated. “I wanted this amount to be meaningful,” Milner told The New York Times. “I think top scientists need to be compensated at a different scale in society. …More

Though primarily known for his contributions to physics, Sir Isaac Newton was also a theologian who studied Jewish mysticism with as much interest as the scientific universe. Israel’s national library has now digitized these theological writings, some 7,500 pages in Newton’s own hand, and posted them online. An entire branch of physics bears his name, but the curator of Israel's national library's humanities collection told the Telegraph that Newton was also a devout Christian who believed that …More

Nicknamed “The God Particle,” the Higgs boson is an integral part of explaining why everything in the universe exists, and, until now, had remained a hypothetical. Scientists announced Tuesday the first indications that the only unobserved elementary particle predicted in the Standard Model of physics might actually exist. Working with an international team of scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN research center in Switzerland, astrophysicists with the Weizmann Institute of Science …More