Forum Wissen Award 2026 for the philosopher Thomas Ebers

What remains of a person after they die? Thomas Ebers puts questions like this to children, in front of ancient Egyptian Books of the Dead or sculptures at the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg. On November 12, the Bonn-based philosopher received the 2026 Forum Wissen Award at Forum Wissen, the knowledge museum of the University of Göttingen. He is the first humanities scholar to receive the award, following mathematician Albrecht Beutelspacher and physicist Astrid Eichhorn. The jury recognized how he introduces children and young people to questions of ethics and values, and how he turns museums into places of debate.

Born in 1964, Ebers studied philosophy, sociology and religious studies in Bonn, where he earned his doctorate in 2009 with a thesis on freedom, responsibility and guilt. After years of empirical research on changing values and youth, he has headed the 4 2 3 Institut für angewandte Philosophie und Sozialforschung (Institute for Applied Philosophy and Social Research) since 2011. To him, museums are “places for thinking,” as he put it in a 2014 essay. At Museum Insel Hombroich near Neuss, he leads philosophical walks.

An approach Georg Christoph Lichtenberg would have appreciated. Alongside his work as an experimental physicist in Göttingen, he filled notebooks with thoughts of every kind, which he called his “waste books.”

How it all began

SerNet founder Johannes Loxen told the story of the award sculpture in his welcome address. On March 27, 2022, Göttingen chemist Ernst Puschmann sent him an email: sculptor Ulrich Mekiska had carved Lichtenberg in wood, and a bronze version could serve as an award. On July 9, 2022, Puschmann presented the wooden figure at Göttingen’s Night of Knowledge (Nacht des Wissens), marking Lichtenberg’s 280th birthday. The makeshift label from that evening still hangs next to the sculpture.

Step by step, the idea became the Forum Wissen Award. Puschmann did not live to see the first ceremony: he died unexpectedly on April 13, 2024, and his bronze has been missing ever since. In the summer of 2024, SerNet commissioned Mekiska to cast five new bronzes. This year, SerNet Managing Director Oliver Seufer presented the third one to Thomas Ebers.

The figure shows Lichtenberg in the middle of an experiment. Looking through a spyglass at the clock tower of St. Jacobi church, he sees the bell strike before he hears it, and from the delay he determines the speed of sound.

The award of the Förderkreis Forum Wissen e. V., the museum’s support association, comes with 5,000 euros. Since 2024, the 225th anniversary of Lichtenberg’s death, it has honored outstanding contributions to science communication. Where the figures are today:

• No. 0, the ground state: the wooden original at the Institute of Physics on the North Campus.
• Puschmann’s bronze: location uncertain. Heisenberg would approve.
• No. 1 went to Giessen in 2024, to Albrecht Beutelspacher.
• No. 2 moved to Heidelberg in 2025, to Astrid Eichhorn, right on time for the International Year of Quantum.
• No. 3 has undergone a phase transition from physics to philosophy and now lives with Thomas Ebers in Bonn.
• No. 4 was emitted out of sequence: as an honorary award to Marie Luisa Allemeyer in Detmold, who led the development of Forum Wissen.
• No. 5 is metastable until November 2027.

Beyond the Forum Wissen Award, SerNet supports science in Göttingen through the Germany Scholarship (Deutschlandstipendium) and the Wiechert Earthquake Observatory.