Nobel Prize In Physics Awarded To 3 Scientists For Work On Black Holes (nytimes.com) 56
Raisey-raison writes from a report via The New York Times: The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astrophysicists for their work on black holes, regions of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing -- no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light -- can escape. They are Roger Penrose, an Englishman, Reinhard Genzel, a German, and Andrea Ghez, an American. Dr. Penrose proved that "black holes will form whenever the conditions are right," said Brown University physicist Sylvester Gates, incoming president of the American Physical Society. "It is almost an unstoppable process. That really was an astounding result."
The New York Times adds: "Working independently, Dr. Genzel and Dr. Ghez, and their teams, have spent the last decades tracking stars and dust clouds whizzing around the center of our galaxy with telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, trying to see if that dark dusty realm does indeed harbor a black hole." For what it's worth, Dr. Penrose was awarded half of the approximately $1.1 million prize and the second half was split between Dr. Genzel and Dr. Ghez. "Dr. Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, following Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018," the report notes.
The New York Times adds: "Working independently, Dr. Genzel and Dr. Ghez, and their teams, have spent the last decades tracking stars and dust clouds whizzing around the center of our galaxy with telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, trying to see if that dark dusty realm does indeed harbor a black hole." For what it's worth, Dr. Penrose was awarded half of the approximately $1.1 million prize and the second half was split between Dr. Genzel and Dr. Ghez. "Dr. Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, following Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018," the report notes.
Black Holes Matter (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Black Holes Matter (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Black Holes Matter (Score:3)
They waited for S. Hawking to die (Score:3)
From TFA: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/1... [nytimes.com]
John Preskill of Caltech: âoeIâ(TM)m thinking of how much Stephen Hawking would have enjoyed sharing a Prize for advances in General Relativity,â
This is not new, it happened with Fischer Black and the prize in Economics. The fact that the committee waited for him to die and awarded the prize to Scholes and Merton is explained in Derman's book, "My life as a Quant". Black was never an academic, only a practitioner and this was a no-no for a Nobel Pri
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They got the prize and apparently got it wrong, quantum particles readily escape black holes, in fact they are mostly quantum particle fountains, those quantum particles revert back to high energy particles was they cross the event horizon. So much for the blow people up award for physics. Normal matter reverted back into the quantum particles from which it is made, if not the energy continues to build up until gravity inversion, the majority of the normal space matter reverts to it's quantum constituents n
A singular result [Re:They waited for S. Hawking (Score:3)
The popularization of the prize wording is poor.
Oppenheimer proved black holes are inevitable. (Following on Chandrasekhar, who showed that neutron stars collapse).
What Penrose showed is that singularities can't be avoided.
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Be serious and consider the gravity of this announcement!
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Re: Penrose obviously, but the other two ? (Score:2)
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So, Roger Penrose has done a load of great work. He's also put out a bunch of bullshit like his work around AI (probably a good thing for a theoretical physicist nowadays; new ideas require some weird thinking). Without the work of experimental physicists and astrophysicists around these things it would be impossible to tell which was which. Have a look at the Wikipedia page for Andrea M. Ghez [wikipedia.org] and if you understand these things you will understand that Ghez is literally one of the people who has made Penr
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If you don't men who had to stop studying modern physics because a token was given the faculty position because of systemic anti-male bias, then you're a liar and the value of your speculation that someone is a "token" is far far below zero.
https://www.pnas.org/content/1... [pnas.org]
"where to point a telescope" ? (Score:1)
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No, because, unlike the Oscars, the Nobels, the democratic VOP choice, I AM NOT SEXIST.
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Erm, "VP", not the river in Smolensk Oblast, Russia.
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Here you go, this is what jealous, hateful selection-by-genitalia-and-skin-colour looks like:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/0... [cnn.com]
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It's called sexism. Systemic sexism.
It means tokens like Kalama Harris, Ghez, Coney Barett etc etc etc get pulled up the ladder because of their genitalia, whereas men have to work to attain and keep their positions.
https://www.pnas.org/content/1... [pnas.org]
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I'm not sure why the other two couldn't have been given next year's prize if their work was so important. There doesn't seem to be any direct link with Penrose's work other than being in the general field of "black holes".
It might just be that the Nobels generally suffer from being single awards - there's no "Nobel Prize, 2nd Class" or whatever. With the amount of science being done today, there's too many people to reward with a single prize.
I certainly agree that Penrose deserves a solo award for an incre
Re:Penrose obviously, but the other two ? (Score:4, Informative)
The Nobel prizes are often split between multiple people who did thematically related work, and they tend not to revisit themes more frequently than once per decade.
Re:Penrose obviously, but the other two ? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Penrose obviously, but the other two ? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure why the other two couldn't have been given next year's prize if their work was so important. There doesn't seem to be any direct link with Penrose's work other than being in the general field of "black holes".
As with most things, the Nobel prize has become political. The physicists I know are getting a bit vocal over the fact that astrophysicists have won the Nobel prizes for 2017, 2019, and now 2020.
There's going to be some very grumpy physicists about if 2021 also goes to an astrophysicist.
Re:Penrose obviously, but the other two ? (Score:5, Interesting)
As with most things, the Nobel prize has become political.
It was never any different. Thus the "has become" should read "have always been". It's right there in the foundation document:
Kapitalet av utredningsmännen realiseradt till säkra värdepapper skall utgöra en fond, hvars ränta årligen utdelas som prisbelöning åt dem som under det förlupna året hafva gjort menskligheten den största nytta.
The capital, realized into safe securities by the executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest of which is distributed annually as a prize reward to those who during the past year have made humanity the greatest benefit.
Evaluation who made humanity the greatest benefit is a thoroughly political process, and awarding the price thus is a political act. I know, that for some reasons, people use "political" as a swearword, completely ignorant of the fact that in each interaction between people, there is always politics involved.
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It was never any different. Thus the "has become" should read "have always been". It's right there in the foundation document:
Kapitalet av utredningsmännen realiseradt till säkra värdepapper skall utgöra en fond, hvars ränta årligen utdelas som prisbelöning åt dem som under det förlupna året hafva gjort menskligheten den största nytta.
The capital, realized into safe securities by the executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest of which is distributed annually as a prize reward to those who during the past year have made humanity the greatest benefit.
Interesting. How quickly did the committee realise that "the last year" is far too short a timeframe to judge whether something is actually a breakthrough rather than a promising dead-end?
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There's life beyond politics, or at least there used to be.
There never has been, there is only the view backwards through rose-colored glasses.
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You were on the ball, the left these days are horribly, hatefully less tolerant then the right.
But then you compared Trump to Obama, and anyone who possesses a brain can see you do not.
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Ah, one of them's a token. As you were.
And I bet you'd pitch a fit if someone called you sexist.
You don't know anything about the people, the work or the prize and you assume that the one woman there must be a token despite a long and storied history of the Nobel committee not awarding prizes to thoroughly deserving women.
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Damn. I came here hoping to get some interesting thoughts on black holes and the work that got these people the prize, but, no such luck.
So you thought you'd call out me rather than the sexist troll because...?
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Because you ARE the sexist troll.
Supporting tokens chosen for their genitalia is SUPPORTING sexism, duh.
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I bet you'd wet yourself if someone called you a sexist.
You don't know anything about the people, the work or the prize and you assume that the one woman there cannot be a token despite Penrose having contributed FAR FAR FAR more to science than she ever will.
And do you or do you not oppose the explicit tokenism of the fem1naz1's new Oscar rules, because that is clearly, undeniably sexist ?
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Ah new UID, blatantly sexist. I fed the troll. Oops!
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Briefly, they like to make the award for both the theoretical work and the experimental work that verifies it. Penrose and Hawking published a paper in the 60's showing that Einstein's equations described real world physics, and that black holes weren't just a meaningless mathematical side effect. Starting in the 90's, Genzel and Ghez independently started looking at orbital mechanics in the center of the Milky Way and eventually produce
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You do understand a Nobel Prize is not meant to be a lifetime achievement award, right? It is for specific work done. In this case Penrose’s and Steven Hawking’s joint work was on the theoretical side of black hole formation while Genzel with Townes and Ghez confirmed in separate work that a super massive black hole is at the center of the Milky Way.
The prize can be awarded a maximum of 3 people. Hawking and Townes are not eligible posthumously. The monetary split is half to Penrose, one quarter
Re: Penrose obviously, but the other two ? (Score:1)
Congratulates (Score:1)
Highly deserved for Penrose (Score:2)
Mark the tokens with a (*) (Score:1)
We now have to go through all the Oscar, Nobel, VP, all awards made to explicitly sexist rules, and mark the undeserving tokens with a (*).
And still, like the Trump kids or Chelsea Clinton or a royal family, they walk around as if they've done something to warrant their privilege.
Work on Black Holes? (Score:2)
Will be revoked at some point (Score:2)
It's going to be SO awkward, when this prize has to be revoked.
The object at the center of a galaxy is basically a self-sustaining Faraday generator in plasma.