Let’s Review: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020

“Theoretical foundation for black holes and the supermassive compact object at the galactic center”

Okay, finally Roger Penrose took his share from Royal Swedish Academy at the age of 89. Roger Penrose was widely known for his studies on Mathematical physics, his association with Stephen hawking can be known very well in the Movie “Theory of everything”, Hawking was studying the work of Roger Penrose, which proved that if Einstein’s General theory of relativity is correct, at the heart of every black hole there must be a point where space and time themselves break down and form a singularity. Yes, these below guys put that effort into understanding the depth of Blackhole. But cannot discard that Stephen Hawking’s Hawking radiation had a potential topic of Nobel award for many years.
Roger Penrose with Stephen Hawking

Coming to today’s prize, Einstein took birth again, he lives forever, in his contributions which laid a strong foundation to Modern Physics. his theory once again refreshed and relevant for now too, Einstein did not himself believe that black holes really exist, yes Einstein’s cosmological constant was a failure, his own Nobel award
on 1921 was not for Relativity in General or special it was for Photoelectric effect, But The Eddington experiment was an observational test of General Relativity, organised by the British astronomers Frank Watson Dyson and Arthur Stanley Eddington in 1919, these proved experimentally the General theory of relativity.
In January 1965, Roger Penrose proved that black holes really can form and described them in detail; at their heart, black holes hide a singularity in which all the known laws of nature cease.
A Penrose diagram of a star that collapses into a black hole. Time runs upwards and light rays are inclined at 45 degrees.

On 13 January 1916, less than two months after Einstein completed his theory of general relativity on 18 November 1915, and less than four months before his own death, the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild published a solution to Einstein’s field equations, describing the curved space-time around a spherically symmetric, non-rotating, mass (Schwarzschild 1916). His metric takes the form


Of Course I need some time to appreciate the Equation above, but surely understand the complexity of it. This year’s Nobel award is a complex mathematical work, people like Einstein, Hawking and Roger Penrose, our own Indian relativist, physicist C. V. Vishveshwara had the capabilities and interest to work in these fields. It was a teamwork in finding the first picture of the Balckholes, but Legacy of Einstein’ relativity, (GR) was Individual work which inspired many physicists, one among is Penrose.. Roger Penrose’s scientific and philosophical ideas about consciousness, philosophy, his many books will get boosted now.

“His groundbreaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein.” Says, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Reinhard Genzel German astrophysicist and Andrea Ghez American astronomer (Prof at UCLA) discovered that an invisible and extremely heavy object governs the orbits of stars at the center of our galaxy. Wow-what a great thing to Astrophysics geeks, thanks to all those Astronomers spent time in looking at those tiny stars and massive galaxies look like stardust, decades-long investigation of these Blackholes here in the center of our own galaxy, gathering evidence to convict it of being a supermassive black hole made Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez be laureates of 2020.

Another Women Physicist after Marie Curie in 1903,
Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1963), and Donna Strickland (2018): Happy about it
“The future of compact object physics and our quest to understand black holes is picking up pace, and hopefully there will be more Nobel prizes on this topic in the years ahead. I’m extremely happy about the call by the Nobel committees.