Reply to post: The right thing

Massive news, literally: Three super-boffins awarded Nobel Prize in physics for their black-hole breakthroughs

Anonymous Coward
Boffin

The right thing

I'm so glad Penrose has won this. I know less about the other two recipients, although obviously the experimental work around GR in the last 30 years has been just heroic and prizes are richly deserved for it. But Penrose is the person who told everyone that black holes were not just some mathematical curiosity in the theory, but something that must happen: starting from any reasonable set of initial conditions, Penrose showed that GR says that you get singularities. That wasn't only a really clever bit of maths, it made a very testable prediction: if we didn't find black holes, GR would be false. And if course he has done an enormous amount of other very beautiful work. It's just great he's won.

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