Why Movie Stars Can’t Resist an Award Show About Particle Physics

If there’s one thing movie stars can’t resist, it’s a scientist who can measure the wobble effect of a subatomic muon particle.

How else to explain the huge A-list turnout for the Breakthrough Prize, the unabashedly geeky awards show held every spring at Santa Monica’s Barker Hangar? Why but for the love of science would the likes of James Corden (who hosted the 12th annual event April 18), Anne Hathaway, Margot Robbie, Ben Affleck, Robert Downey Jr., Sean Penn, Gigi Hadid and Jessica Chastain, among others, show up in black tie to present trophies for special advances in fundamental physics and hand out $100,000 grants to early career mathematicians?

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“It’s better than the Oscars,” one regular attendee gushes over the event’s shocking star power. “Everybody always wonders how they get such big names.”

One theory making the rounds? It has something to do with free rides on a Russian-born billionaire’s superyacht. That’s what Rambling Reporter is hearing from several sources involved in the ceremony who claim that stars who present, perform or even just attend are treated to getaways aboard the Multiverse, a 380-foot luxury vessel owned by Yuri Milner, the 64-year-old physicist turned Silicon Valley venture capitalist who launched the Breakthrough Prize in 2012 and has been bankrolling it ever since.

A spokesperson for the Breakthrough Prize denies that ocean voyages have anything to do with the show’s stellar attendance. “[The stars’] participation is driven by a genuine interest in supporting science, and any suggestion to the contrary is incorrect,” the representative insists, while acknowledging that several stars who’ve attended the awards have also ended up on Milner’s yacht. Milner and his wife, Julia, the spokesperson says, “have developed relationships with many guests and performers. Some of those friends have joined them on private family boat trips, entirely independent of the Breakthrough Prize.”