[emcl]

It's amusing to see skeptical comments, but these are theorist who are held in very high regard by their peers and not many in the community would dispute their getting the award. The days of proposing easily provable conjectures are over. Now its almost exclusively high energy physics that is being probed.

I feel that as the physics gets increasingly complex to formulate, the prize money should go up too. And there's no better time to give away generous prizes than the highly skewed economy of today.