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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Physics Nobel for black holes too late for Hawking

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PARIS: Scientists greeted the news that the Nobel Physics Prize was awarded Tuesday for research on black holes with regret that the accolade came too late for world-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who died in 2018.


British mathematician Roger Penrose was awarded half of the 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.1 million, 950,000 euros) prize money for mathematically proving in the 1960s that black holes could exist according to the theory of general relativity.


Penrose, an emeritus professor at the University of Oxford, worked alongside Hawking for years, and experts lamented the fact that it had taken the Nobel committee so long to recognise their work.


“It’s a shame that Penrose and Hawking didn’t get the Nobel before now,” Luc Blanchet, from the Paris Institute of Astrophysics and director of the National Centre for Scientific Research, said.


“This prize comes two years after (Hawking’s) death yet their work took place in the 1960s and its importance was recognised since the 1980s.”


Hawking, who died in March 2018 after a long neurodegenerative illness, dedicated much of his life to explaining the existence of black holes, space’s enigmatic monsters.


After meeting in London early in their careers, Hawking and Penrose worked together on the origins of the universe.


Martin Rees, a British astronomer and fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, said the pair were “the two individuals who have done more than anyone else since Einstein to deepen our knowledge of gravity.”


“Sadly, this award was too much delayed to allow Hawking to share the credit with Penrose,” he said.


The phone call from Stockholm took 68-year-old German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel by surprise. “There is a saying that a necessary quality for a scientist to win the Nobel Prize is to be long-lived,” he says.


Asked about his first response to the news, he says: “There were a few tears.” Then a glass of bubbly was raised with colleagues. His family is not near where he works, so plans for an evening celebration are up in the air.


Genzel, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, near Munich, believes he had little choice in his career. “My father was a physicist, and even worse, he was a director at the Max Planck Institute,” he says. The physicist sees the honour as one for his entire team and plans to go back to work immediately. — AFP/dpa


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