3 scientists win Nobel physics prize for black hole research
STOCKHOLM — Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for advancing our understanding of black holes, the all-consuming monsters that lurk in the darkest parts of the universe and still confound astronomers.
Roger Pen rose of Britain, Reinhard Genzel of Germany and Andrea Ghez of the United States explained to the world these dead ends of the cosmos that devour light and even time. Staples of both science fact and fiction, black holes are still not completely understood but are deeply connected, somehow, to the creation of galaxies, where the stars and life exist.
Pen rose, of the University of Oxford, received half of the prize for discovering that Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts the formation of black holes.
Genzel, who is at both the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the University of California, Berkeley, and Ghez, of the University of California, Los Angeles, received the other half of the prize for discovering a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.
The prize celebrates what the Nobel Committee called “one of the most exotic objects in the universe” and ones that“still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research.”
Black holes are at the center of every galaxy, and smaller ones are dotted around the universe. Just their existence is mindbending, taking what people experience every day on Earth — light and time — and warping them in such a way that seems unreal. Time slows and even stops in black holes.
“Black holes, because they are so hard to understand, is what makes them so appealing,'' Ghez, 55, told The Associated Press after becoming the fourth woman ever to win the Nobel in physics. “I really think of science as a big, giant puzzle.”
Pen rose ,89, proved with mathematics in 1964 that the formation of black holes was possible, based heavily on Einstein's general theory of relativity, even though Einstein himself didn't think they existed.
Pen rose, a mathematical physicist who got the call from the Nobel Committee while in the shower, was surprised at his winning because his work is more theoretical than observational, and that's not usually what wins physics Nobels.
What fascinated Pen rose more than the black hole was what was at the other end of it, something called a “singularity.” It's something science still can't figure out.
“Singularity, that's a place where t he densities and curvatures go to infinity. You expect the physics go crazy,” he said from his home. “When I say singularity, that's not really the black hole. The black hole prevents you from seeing the singularity. It's the nasty thing in the middle. If you fall into a black hole, then you pretty well inevitably get squashed into this singularity at the end. And that's the end.”
Pen rose said he was trying to figure this out using math while walking to work with a colleague 56 years ago, thinking about “what it would be like to be in this situation where all this material is collapsing around you.” He realized he had “some strange feeling of elation,” and that was when things started coming together.
Martin Rees, the British astronomer royal, noted that Penrose triggered a “renaissance” in the study of relativity in the 1960s, and that, together with a young Stephen Hawking, he helped firm up evidence for the Big Bang and black holes.
“Penrose and Hawking are the two individuals who have done more than anyone else since Einstein to deep en our knowledge of gravity ,” Rees said. “Sadly, this award was too much delayed to allow Hawking to share the credit.”
Hawking died in 2018, and Nobel Prizes are awarded only to the living.
Genzel, 68, and Ghez won because “they showed that black holes are not just theory— they' re real, they' re here, and there' s a monster-size black hole in the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way,” said Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist and mathematician at Columbia University.