Three scientists share Nobel physics prize for cosmology finds

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British mathematician Sir Roger Penrose has won the Nobel prize for physics for work he published 55 years ago.  

Professor Penrose used Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to prove that black holes do exist and explain how they form. 

Published in 1965, his seminal research paper is still considered the most important addition to Einstein’s work ever published. 

Einstein famously did not believe black holes were real and died ten years before he was proved wrong by Sir Roger’s work.

Until now, Sir Roger has received little public acclaim for his ground-breaking work – due in part to his famous collaborator, Stephen Hawking. 

While the late Stephen Hawking became the face and voice of 21st-century physics, Sir Roger, who was knighted in 1994, has remained little known outside academia. 

Nobel prizes are awarded to studies based on physical observations, something which Professors Penrose and Hawking did not qualify for due to the theoretical nature of their research. 

However, more than half a century after the work was published, the findings of the 1965 paper have been repeatedly observed and proved correct. 

Therefore, Sir Roger, now aged 89, was eligible to be awarded the Nobel prize for his research. 

A Nobel can not be awarded posthumously and, as a result, Stephen Hawking will never receive one, following his death in 2018.  

Experts lamented the fact that it had taken the Nobel committee so long to recognise their work, as Penrose may have shared the award with Hawking.

‘It’s a shame that Penrose and Hawking didn’t get the Nobel before now,’ Luc Blanchet, from the Paris Institute of Astrophysics and director of the National Centre for Scientific Research, told AFP.

‘This prize comes two years after (Hawking’s) death yet their work took place in the 1960s and its importance was recognised since the 1980s.’

Professor Pembrose shares the award with Professor Genzel, 68, from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, and Professor Ghez, 55, from UCLA.

These two world-leading astronomers will share half the award for ‘the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy’.

Professor Genzel and Professor Gheaz led two independent research projects which helped find the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A*. 

Speaking today at a virtual press conference from his home in Oxford, Sir Roger spoke about his achievement and work with Professor Hawking. 

He spoke about how he met Hawking following a lecture he gave on his theory of black holes in London and they then met up afterwards for continued discussions on the topic.   

In the film ‘The Theory of Everything’, Professor Penrose (played by Christian McKay) meets a young Stephen Hawking (played by Eddie Redmayne) in a small lecture theatre in Kings College London.

‘According to the movie, Stephen was sitting in the audience with sparks coming out of his head getting inspired by this lecture, but he wasn’t there!

‘I gave a repeat talk in early 1965 and Stephen was present at this one, and then I had a private talk with Stephen and George Ellis and this was a much deeper conversation where we talked about the details of my argument.

‘Stephen went away and developed these things, mainly to apply them to cosmology, very greatly.

‘And then we didn’t have a huge amount of contact, I was one of his phd examiners, and this theorem of his had clear advances on what I had done.

‘Later on, when I was at another conference and I had to develop all of Stephen’s theorems together into one lecture, I remember working hard into the small hours of the night to do this, and i developed a theorem which encompassed them all.

‘When I got back to England I phoned up Stephen and said ‘look I’ve got a new theorem’ and he said ‘Oh, I’ve got one too!’ and it turned out we had the same result, so we both found the same thing.

‘That was a paper we wrote together in the Royal Society together which more or less encompassed the theorems which had gone on before.’

The theory states that when a dying star implodes beyond a point of no return, its gravitational field will irresistibly create what is known as a gravitational singularity in space-time, where the known laws of physics cease to exist.  

From this point, the two mathematicians become long-term partners, winning awards and authoring books together. 

In 1988, Professor Penrose was awarded the lesser-known but highly coveted Wolf Prize for physics for his work on general relativity and singularities, which he worked on alongside Stephen Hawking.   

Jim Al-Khalili, author and Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey, said: ‘I can’t tell you how delighted I am that Roger Penrose has been recognised with a Nobel Prize. 

‘For many outside of physics he has been seen as being in the shadow of his long-time collaborator, the late Stephen Hawking. 

‘But while Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts the existence of black holes, Einstein didn’t himself believe they really existed. 

‘Penrose was the first to prove mathematically, in 1965, that they are a natural consequence of relativity theory and not just science fiction.’ 

On receiving the award, Sir Roger said: ‘It was an extreme honour and great pleasure to hear the news this morning in a slightly unusual way.

‘I had to get out of my shower to hear it.’

He added that he got a call from his personal assistant who had received a ‘strange message’, and she wasn’t allowed to talk about it as it was ‘deadly secret’.

But while waiting for the call, Sir Roger decided to have a shower. He was worried about being ‘stark naked’ and having to tell them, if asked, what he was doing at the time.

‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ he reassured press during a video call.

Ulf Danielsson, a member of the Nobel Committee, spoke about Sir Roger’s  enormous achievement at the announcement today. 

He discussed the mathematical quandary that was confounding all physicists,  mathematicians and astronomers in the early 60s. 

At this time, black holes were revered as almost mythical objects, speculated about and only existing on paper, with nobody able to prove they existed, or how they formed.

‘That’s what Roger Penrose did,’ said Danielsson.

‘He understood the mathematics, he introduced new tools and then could actually prove that this is a process you can naturally expect to happen – that a star collapses and turns into a black hole.’ 

‘The discoveries of this year’s Laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects,’ said David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

‘But these exotic objects still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research.’  

Professors Genzel and Ghez share the other half of the Nobel prize for their discovery of an invisible and extremely heavy object residing in a region at the centre of the Milky Way called Sagittarius A*.

During the 1990s, they both led independent projects studying Sagittarius A*, and found that in this space, there was ‘an extremely heavy, invisible object that pulls on the jumble of stars, causing them to rush around at dizzying speeds.’

It was a supermassive black hole four million times the mass of our sun and this helped prove there is a supermassive black hole at the centre of all galaxies.  

Professor Tom McLeish, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of York, said: ‘Penrose, Genzel and Ghez together showed us that Black Holes are awe-inspiring, mathematically sublime, and actually exist.’

Professor Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the physics prize, after Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018. 

At a virtual press conference following the announcement, she said: ‘I hope I can inspire other young women into the field.

‘It’s a field that has so many pleasures, and if you are passionate about the science, there’s so much that can be done.’ 

‘We have no idea what’s inside the black hole and that’s what makes these things such exotic objects.’

The Nobel Committee said black holes ‘still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research.’

Last year’s prize went to Canadian-born cosmologist James Peebles for theoretical work about the early moments after the Big Bang, and Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for discovering a planet outside our solar system.

The famed award comes with a gold medal and a share of the prize money, which stands at 10 million Swedish kronor (more than $1.1 million/£864,200).

The award and funds come courtesy of a bequest left 124 years ago by the prize’s creator, Alfred Nobel. The amount increased recently to adjust for inflation.

Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite and it is believed a surge of guilt late in life saw him write out a new will in 1895 leaving his fortune, believed to be around $250 million, to set up the Nobel Prize.  

He was an inventor with hundreds of patents, but his money was earned from dynamite, as he profited handsomely from the misery and death it caused. 

After reading an obituary on his life, published in error, he decided to set up the institute upon his death and alter his legacy posthumously.  

He would die just a year later, and his name lives on in the most coveted scientific award there is.  

Yesterday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize for physiology and medicine to Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton for discovering the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus.

The other prizes are for outstanding work in the fields of chemistry, literature, peace and economics.