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Space The Almighty Buck Science The 2000 Beanies

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.
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Nobel Prize In Physics Awarded To 3 Scientists For Work On Black Holes

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  • by SpaghettiPattern ( 609814 ) on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @02:05AM (#60580172)
    Sorry, couldn't resist.
    • by niftydude ( 1745144 ) on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @03:10AM (#60580226)
      All Holes Matter.
    • 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

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        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

    • Be serious and consider the gravity of this announcement!

  • Kudos to those 3 Scientists from starsoftware.co team for their work on Black Holes and having nobel prize
  • His influence in the field has been huge - a big chunk of Hawking's work was extensions and refinements of Penrose's seminal ideas. As for Genzel and Ghez - well, I suspect that every theoretical physicist will know very well who Penrose was, while Genzel and Ghez will be merely footnotes.
    • 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" sounds quite dangerous. Don't get too close!
  • 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.

Avoid strange women and temporary variables.

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