Nobel Prize for Physics: the brilliant Roger Penrose continues the legacy of Hawking, Einstein, and Newton

It has been a rich season for Nobel prizes – with awards in physics for work on black holes, in medical science on the mysteries of Hepatitis C and in Chemistry for “the development of a method for genome editing.” Each is a big story, with, uniquely, the chemistry prize being given to two brilliant female scientists: Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna.

So far the awards have been uncontroversial – which is good in an event whose infighting and skullduggery have been spun into books and films, most notably “The Prize,” which was a hit both as a novel and on the silver screen. There have been the mysteries and misses. When Crick, Watson, Wilkins, Perutz and Kendrew won the Medicine and Chemistry prize in 1962, many felt that the contribution to discovering DNA structure made by Rosalind Franklin, who had died in 1958 at the age of 37, had been deliberately overlooked. In 1974 when Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle were awarded the physics prize for their work on pulsars, it was thought that the work of their colleague Jocelyn Bell Burnell was neglected. Not that she ever complained – and Dame Jocelyn continues to enlighten global audiences.

The Peace Prize, awarded to the likes of Yasser Arafat and Shimon Perez has often descended to bear pit levels of infighting and recrimination. So, too, the prize for literature. Awards in both categories are still to be announced. So watch out. Although, somehow I don’t think that Donald J. Trump will be in the frame for the Peace Prize, whatever his cheerleaders may wish.

The roll call of literature prize winners is gruesomely fascinating, not least for spectacular absentees. Dario Fo, who hardly wrote anything for the public domain and the meandering troubadour Bob Dylan have made the list. But why, for goodness sake, did the great Italo Calvino, stylist and essayist and maestro of magic realism never make it? Perhaps his jokes and word puzzles didn’t travel well in the Frozen North – but his omission by the awarding jury is a tale of Scandi Noir indeed.

The latest awards are an occasion for joyous celebration because of the recognition for Sir Roger Penrose, the 89-year-old mathematician who now resides in Oxford. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, yet the media and commentariat haven’t made nearly enough of the award given to this genial genius. There have been exceptions – the article by Sarah Knapton in the Daily Telegraph is outstanding. Nick Robinson on Radio 4’s Today programme had a brave stab at explaining the intricacies of Black Holes in an engaging interview with Sir Roger on a crackly telephone.

The work of Sir Roger leads us into the cosmological calculations of Einstein, Newton, Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus, Aristotle and Ptolemy. It is the story of our conception of astronomy and cosmology, big time and big bang, you might say. The crucial milestone in Sir Roger’s contribution to the theories of both Einstein and his colleague and friend Stephen Hawking is a paper of 1964. In the paper, he proposed that black holes are an inevitable consequence of general relativity. This came nine years after Einstein’s death.

In 1937 Einstein himself had cast doubt on the relevance and significance of black holes. The term black hole had been concocted by a country parson, John Mitchell, in 1783 who speculated that an object might become so dense that its gravitational pull would prevent even light escaping.

Stephen Hawking took Roger Penrose’s calculations to propose that black holes “leak” radiation and evaporate entirely. Both scientists boosted the theory of the universe originating in a “Big Bang.” The complexities of the arguments, speculations, and discoveries of what preceded the Big Bang, and how the universe ends, whether a cycle of Big Bangs and Big Crunches, or expands outside time are beyond bewildering.

I was reminded of the extraordinary gifts to the world of both Hawking and Penrose, in inspiration and the general joy of learning and enlightenment, by two marvellous short essays of appreciation by the Italian genius physicist Carlo Rovelli. They appeared in the Corriere della Sera in June 2018, and Il Sole 24 ore in December 2011 – and they reappear, beautifully translated, in Rovelli’s new collection of writings, “There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important than Kindness,” out this coming 5 November.

Rovelli emphasizes the extraordinary generosity of spirit of both men – Hawking and Penrose – whose work fed off each other’s. They are both authors of highly popular books. They are both learned, accessible, and responsible for some pretty good jokes. At the Physics award ceremony for this year, Stephen Hawking will be the ghost at the feast.

In a typical self-deprecating manner, Penrose, 89, said he wouldn’t have welcomed the prize earlier as it would have distracted him from his research – as he goes on researching into his nineties. “If you’re going to get a Nobel prize for science it’s good to get in when you’re good and old, before you’re absolutely clapped out, when there’s still something to do, that’s my advice.”

He told Rovelli that he could foresee that “black holes themselves would end up evaporating and there will be nothing left but a universe of waves of light racing through nothingness for all eternity. It’s a desolate and terribly boring prospect. But fortunately, the waves of light won’t get bored.”

“His greatness was his humanity, his character,” Rovelli writes of Hawking. His wit, his curiosity and sheer joy in cosmic ideas made him the global super star, and the icon of the Simpsons. And the jokes? “Falling into a black hole is definitely bad news. If it were a stellar mass black hole you would be made into spaghetti before reaching the horizon.”

Penrose and Hawking are links to a tradition extending backwards to Newton through Einstein, which should give us all pause to celebrate and give thanks this week. The Astronomer Royal, Professor Martin Rees saluted both of his friends and colleagues on hearing news of Roger Penrose’s prize:

“Penrose and Hawking are the two individuals who have done more than anyone since Einstein to deepen our knowledge of gravity. Sadly, the award was too much delayed to allow Hawking to share the credit with Penrose.”

In hailing Sir Roger and all his works, perhaps we should remember the advice of his colleague and friend, Hawking, about how we might shape the future: “Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet.”