UCL alumnus named amongst Laureates recognised in Nobel Prize for Physics

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for contributions to science that were literally “out of this world”.

Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez, Reinhard Genzel (source: Flickr)

The three scientists that have been awarded The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 are Englishman and UCL alumnus Sir Roger Penrose, German Reinhard Genzel, and American Andrea Ghez. They were recognised for their work on black holes, supermassive objects with gravitational pulls so strong that not even light can escape.

Professor Penrose, a mathematician from the University of Oxford, was awarded half of the award “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity”, or in other words, proving that black holes must exist if Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct.

The second half of the prize was shared by Dr Genzel and Dr Ghez “for the discovery of supermassive compact objects at the centre of our galaxy”, or their lengthy investigation into the centre of the Milky Way and gathering definitive evidence for it being a black hole.

Dr Ghez became only the fourth woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics, joining the company of Maria Skladowska-Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963), and Donna Strickland (2018).

Although Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts the existence of black holes, Einstein himself didn’t believe that they existed. The general theory of relativity is concerned with gravity, which is treated as a geometrical phenomenon due to the curvature of spacetime.

German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild was the first to point out that Einstein’s equations predicted that if enough mass was crammed into a small space, space-time would collapse into a singularity. In 1965, Roger Penrose would show that indeed these singularities could form as black holes.

Born in 1931, Sir Roger Penrose graduated with a first-class Mathematics degree at UCL in 1952, before embarking on a PhD at St John’s College, Cambridge. Later he would be appointed Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.

He is well known for the invention of Penrose diagrams, which are a way of portraying spacetime and are prolifically used in cosmology. He proved that if enough matter condenses in a too-small place, it will collapse into a black hole, and at the edge of the black hole, called the event horizon, one would have to travel faster than the speed of light in order to escape.

He is also famous for the discovery of Penrose tiles, a way of tiling an infinite plane using two distinct shapes in a way that prevents the pattern form ever repeating, as well as his views on artificial intelligence and the connection between physics and the human consciousness, published in renowned books like “The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics”.  

Non-physicists will most likely recognise him from the so-called “Penrose Staircase”, or impossible staircase, an optical illusion portraying ever-ascending or descending stairs joined together at right angles.