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Copernican Awards

The Copernican Awards are granted for outstanding scientific achievements of groundbreaking importance and international scope.
Nagrody Kopernikańskie

Awarding of the Copernican Awards

Since 2023, the Copernican Academy has awarded the Copernican Awards annually, rotating through the following categories: astronomy, economics, medicine, philosophy or theology, and law. According to the regulations, recipients of the award become Members of the Academy upon receiving it.

The laureates are selected by the Presidium of the Academy. Nominations may be submitted by: the President of the Republic of Poland, the Prime Minister, the Minister of Science and Higher Education, a Chamber of the Academy, ten Members of the Academy, or any previous recipient of the Copernican Award.

Copernican Awards 2023

The Copernican Awards, presented by the Presidium of the Nicolaus Copernicus Academy, recognize researchers whose work pushes the boundaries of human knowledge. These awards honor exceptional scientific achievements that are both groundbreaking and internationally significant.

In 2023, the award was presented for the first time, with a monetary prize of 500,000 PLN. In this inaugural year, the distinction was awarded—exceptionally—to two individuals.

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Barry Clark Barish

(born January 27, 1936 in Omaha)

American experimental physicist. Together with Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves. Member of, among others, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the US National Academy of Sciences, winner of, among others, the 2016 Enrico Fermi Prize.
Barry Clark Barish

Philip James Edwin Peebles (Jim Peebles)

(born April 25, 1935 in Winnipeg)

Canadian astronomer and cosmologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019.

He studied at the University of Manitoba, where he received a BSc degree. In 1958, he moved to Princeton University, where he received a PhD in 1962. He connected his entire scientific career with this university.

He mainly dealt with theoretical cosmology, developing models of the Big Bang. In the 1960s, together with Robert Dicke, they assumed the existence of the microwave background radiation (previously postulated by George Gamow) and planned to confirm its existence. They were preceded by a group from Bell Labs (Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson). Peebles studied the characteristic features of this radiation, trying to use them as assumptions for models of the universe. He studied the occurrence of helium and other light elements in the universe, demonstrating on this basis the agreement of the Big Bang theory with observations. He presented evidence for the occurrence of significant amounts of dark matter in the galactic halo.

On October 8, 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology. He received half of the prize, the other half was shared by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz.

Gallery A broadcast of the event
Philip James Edwin Peebles
Dwie Nagrody