YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 5, ARMENPRESS. STARMUS Festival co-founder, Queen guitarist Brian May was awarded with Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication in Yerevan on the sidelines of the STARMUS VI Festival for his great contribution to the popularization of science. 

Musician Rick Wakeman handed over the award to Brian May during the Festival. 

“It’s really a great honor for me. Brian May: he is the kindest, the nicest person I have ever met”, Rick Wakeman said.

In his turn Brian May made a joke at the stage, saying that he has asked the festival organizers not to do such a thing. 

“First of all I want to thank Armenia. STARMUS is important. It unites us and reminds us that we all are human”, Brian May said. 

He said that he was interested in music and astronomy at a young age, but he was told that he won’t succeed in both. “But I proved everyone that they were all wrong. Therefore, I want to share this Medal with everyone in this hall, who thinks that he is not so good enough”, he said. 

Under the name of the greatest scientist of the 20th and early 21st centuries, Stephen Hawking, and sponsored by Starmus, the Stephen Hawking Science Medal is a prestigious award which recognizes the merit of popular science on an international level.

The design of the medal used a portrait of Professor Hawking by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first man to perform a spacewalk and member of the Advisory Council Starmus since its first edition. The other side combines the image of Alexei Leonov of the first spacewalk and the iconic guitar – the “Red Special” – to demonstrate music, another major component of the Starmus Festival.