Tuesday, October 06, 2020

2020 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was announced today.

The first thing that I noticed was that my Mathematical Institute (Unversity of Oxford) colleague Roger Penrose got half the prize. Additionally, Andrea Ghez from UCLA's physics department shared the other half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel. Ghez also got a Ph.D. from Caltech in 1992, so several of my institutions (and my former home department at Oxford!) did very well today. Congratulations!
Here is the terse citation: 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 with one half to Roger Penrose "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity" and and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy".

Some other websites to look at are the popular blurb and more advanced information from the Nobel page. Additionally, here are UCLA's press release and a blurb from University of Oxford's Mathematical Institute.

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