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February 1 | Photo: Jack Mikrut / TT
Emeritus Professor Bengt Gustafsson during the presentation of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Nobel Prize-winning research on black holes shows that the most fundamental ones, like time and space, do not in fact behave as we think. That’s what Bengt Gustafsson, emeritus professor of astrophysics, says.
This year, the Nobel Committee rewards research that has discovered a supermassively compact object in the center of the Milky Way: a black hole.
Bengt Gustafsson, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Uppsala University, has been an active astronomer for almost 70 years.
TT: Why is research on black holes so important?
– It shows very clearly how the things we take for granted, time and space, are not a certain way at all. Black holes show that it can be very different and that the concepts are intertwined and can destroy each other.
A theater stage
Imagine a theater scene where you see behind the scenes a clock that simply ticks no matter what happens on stage. On the stage (the room) some actors perform a play.
But space and time go together. And the actors also bend the room and the time around them, the scene is affected by them walking there. The stage floor arches, the clock goes at different speeds depending on how they move. And conversely, curved spacetime determines how they move.
The example Bengt Gustafsson mentions symbolizes how time and space work, which is clearly noticeable in a black hole. The complexity is great, as the award-winning research shows.
– The realization that it does not have to be like what we see around us, is a fundamental insight, I think it can be useful on many occasions in life. It’s not that you should start to believe in a lot of nice things, but that you’re not so sure how things are, Gustafsson says.
– I think that for many of us who are doing this, it creates a humility in the face of reality. Nature is much more amazing than we have ever imagined.
Another aspect of Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez’s research is technological development. To study how the orbits of stars in the center of the Milky Way curve, highly sensitive instruments are needed. The sharpness must be incredible, the mirrors and telescopes must be able to compensate for the agitation in the atmosphere and the gravitational field of the Earth, and the detectors must be highly accurate. The researchers’ studies began in the 1990s.
– The technology that has been developed over the last 30 years has made it possible, says Bengt Gustafsson.
Einstein’s theory
The second part of the award goes to Roger Penrose, who discovered that the formation of black holes is a strong prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
– Einstein was huge and farsighted. She could see further ahead than most. But he did not see this, he saw the singularities, but he considered them as mathematical artifacts. What Penrose did was take them seriously and develop the theory as much as he could.
When Penrose’s paper came out in 1965, it showed new consequences for the theory, 50 years after Einstein published the theory of relativity.
– It was so long before you got serious in front of Einstein. I think it’s interesting, it says something very strong about Einstein, of course, but it also says something about how difficult it was to go down that path, says Bengt Gustafsson.
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