In a statement, Nobel laureate for physics Roger Penrose said that his colleague Stephen Hawking deserved a share of the honor for his contributions to black hole research.
The 89-year-old British mathematician shared that he had just come out of his shower when news of his Nobel win arrived.
"I wasn't expecting it at all. It's a huge honor, and I'm sure it will be a benefit to promoting ideas which I hope people will look at a little more seriously, ideas about cosmology," the Nobel laureate for Physics told reporters from his Oxford home.
Roger Penrose - awarded this year's #NobelPrize in Physics - was born in 1931 in Colchester, UK.
He is a professor at @UniofOxford, UK.https://t.co/Jm9iOU99N3 pic.twitter.com/Vsm7xHZivv — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 6, 2020
Shedding Light on Black Holes
Penrose explained that understanding black holes are important to understand the origin of matter and galaxies, adding that the singularities hiding at the center of these black holes are the "greatest puzzle" faced by astrophysicists. He added that physicists have not "the faintest idea" on how to describe the physics that occurs in the middle of these objects.
Sir Martin Rees, Great Britain's Astronomer Royal and a fellow at Trinity College Cambridge, said that Penrose and Hawking were "two individuals who have done more than anyone else since Einstein to deepen our knowledge of gravity."
Roger Penrose served as one of Hawking's Ph.D. examiners in 1966, and they later collaborated, leading to, among other things, the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems. Their theorems are a set of results in general relativity, which attempts to explain when gravitation creates singularities.
"Sadly, this award was too much delayed to allow Hawking to share the credit with Penrose," Rees said.
Stephen Hawking died March 2018 after a lifelong battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). His life's work focused on studying black holes' nature and existence and explaining the origin of the universe. Penrose explained that while a Nobel award for Hawking would have been "well-deserved," he said that it was possibly held back by the Nobel committee's desire to recognize observable science over theoretical science.
Penrose on His Nobel Award: "Happy to Have Waited"
The British mathematician said that for his Nobel prize, he was happy to have waited. He considered getting the prestigious honor early being "a bad thing."
"I know people who got their prize I would consider too early, and it spoiled their science," Penrose said.
Roger Penrose shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics with German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel and American astronomer Andrea Ghez. Half of the award was given to Penrose, "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity." The other half was shared between Genzel and Ghez for their work, which led to discovering a "supermassive compact object" at the center of the Milky Way.
Both Genzel and Ghez led their respective teams in the 1990s on studies that focused on Sagittarius A* - a very compact radio source located at the galactic center of the Milky Way. Their works mapped the brightest stars, independently confirming the presence of "an extremely heavy, invisible object" that tugs at these stars nearing the Milky Way's galactic center.
They also developed methods to see through huge galactic clouds at the same location, refining techniques to work around observational and computational distortions from the Earth's own atmosphere. Together, their works have provided the strongest evidence to date that there is a supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way.
