The 2020 Physics Nobel Winners Helped Us Better Understand the Universe ’s Most Mysterious Phenomenon

An awful lot of time elapsed between the day Roger Penrose was walking to work in 1964 and the moment his phone rang while he was in the shower on the morning of Oct. 6, 2020. Back then, his walk was interrupted by “some strange feeling of elation,” as he told the Associated Press yesterday, about the moment he had his first glimmers of insight into the equations that would eventually make him famous. It was surely with another kind of elation that he answered his phone yesterday to learn that those same equations—which were the first to prove the existence of black holes—had earned the 89-year-old University of Oxford mathematical physicist the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. Penrose was not alone alone in his delight. Also honored this year were astronomers Andrea Ghez, 55, of the University of California, Los Angeles; and Reinhard Genzel, 68, of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, for their research on what, to humanity anyway, is the most important black hole of all: the supermassive Sagittarius A*, which sits at the center of the Milky Way. “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, in a statement that accompanied the announcement. “But these exotic objects still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research.” It was very much past research that earned Penrose h...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news