Nobel of Physics for 2020 is shared by mathematician physicist Roger Penrose for his work on the theoretical basis of black holes, and astronomers Reinhard Ganzel and Andrea Geez, who led independent teams to test the existence of black holes. In the middle of our galaxy.
Penrose showed that the result of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity is the formation of black holes, which do not break up stars, but also in certain g ense areas of space. Such black holes capture everything: nothing can come out, not even light.
Ganzel and Gaz and their respective teams independently demonstrated by tracking the path of the star that a superhero – object – about 4 million solar masses – exists at the center of the galaxy.
Geez is the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, the first being Marie Curie, who won in 1903.
The Nobel Prize has assumed a halo that it does not deserve. Alfred Nobel paid blood money to make dynamite, which added to the horrors of war. But in science, it is still seen as a touchstone of greatness, its value declining in peace and literature, which is seen to be more guided by politics. How do we explain Henry Kissinger’s Peace Prize in 1973 and Winston Churchill’s Literature Prize in 1953?
There are two Indian connections with black holes. The first is through physics.
He was the Indian physicist Subramanian Chandrasekhar, who showed in 1930 that a star does not break if it is larger than 1.4 times the solar month. Chandrasekhar was the nephew of CV Raman, India’s first Nobel laureate in physics. Chandrasekhar was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983. He moved to the United States in 1936 and received American citizenship in 1953.
Below the mass known as the Chandrasekhar limit, the star will become a white dwarf. If the mass of the star were high, he would not have guessed what would happen. We now know that it is blown into a supernova, and then squeezed with its atoms into nucleus-sized locations to form a neutron star. Or don’t stop collapsing, create a black hole there.
Another Indian connection, and an unhappy one, is how the word “black hole” came about.
It has now been established that Robert Dickey and John Wheeler, professors of physics at Princeton University, were the first to coin the term black hole for the gravitational collapse of the unifying star. And whenever he couldn’t find a house to ask if he had disappeared into a black hole in Calcutta, Dikke’s family remembers using his black hole line.
Calcutta’s Black Hole, as we know it, a number of East India Company English soldiers and European employees were locked in a small prison with two small windows, and many of them were suffocated to death.
The number claimed by the East India Company at the time was disputed by many historians, but the mass killings, plunder and lands provided the impetus to occupy the land that had become the British Empire in historic India. In English – Numerous massacres carried out by the British in its colonies and it fell into the devastating famine that came with the British rule.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity, formulated in 1915, led to the publication of a solution to Einstein’s field equations, led by astronomer Carl Schwarzschild, who served in the German Army during World War I, showing that if matter and energy exceed a certain limit. Space-time to break down on its own, to create loneliness – or black holes. The outer world feels its gravitational effect, but no mass or even light can escape such a black hole.
Although Einstein’s general theory predicted the possibility of black holes, he did not really believe that they existed. One of the major objections to the formation of black holes was that they sought to make the fall symmetrical, and it was argued that no fall could be perfectly symmetrical, and therefore the formation of black holes was a remote possibility.
Using the mathematical topology, Penrose showed that he had developed what is known as the Penrose Transform, that unlike other etymologies for black holes, his approach did not require a complete symmetry of collapsing objects. Using the general principle of relativity, Penrose showed that a given space only had a sufficient density of matter, and this condition was sufficient for the formation of black holes.
Such a theoretical derivation is not enough for physicists; Physics needs experimental evidence to confirm a theory. Or at least theory alone is not enough for the Nobel Prize and the Swedish Academy which privileges experimental physics over theory. This was the argument against awarding the Nobel Prize to Einstein, although the reasons were very deep.
Einstein became world famous for knocking down the familiar world of Newtonian physics. But despite his worldwide fame, he had enemies in both Germany and academia because of his opposition to World War I, his radical ideas, including socialism, and because he was Jewish.
The prevailing rhetoric of physics, including the Nobel Committee, dismissed Einstein for all these reasons, arguing that his theories were mere theories, and lacked empirical evidence.
To conclude this argument, in 1919 the English astronomer Arthur Eddington proposed an experimental test of the theory of relativity. If a large object rotates around itself due to its mass, it is possible to observe this curve by measuring the stars closest to the Sun during an eclipse. Eddington did this during the 1919 solar eclipse and was able to show that the results closely agreed with Einstein’s predictions of the general theory of relativity.
The Times London revealed to London, “Science in Science: New Theory of the Universe,” while the headline of the New York Times said, “Lights all escape in heaven.”
Einstein became a rock star in physics, the size of which could not be matched by any scientist.
But even that did not win him the Nobel Prize in 1920 and 1921. Science historian Robert Friedman wrote in his book, Politics Excellence, that the Nobel Committee “would not tolerate political and intellectual fanaticism, as it was said – it did not behave. Experiments, crowned as the pinnacle of physics. ”
The 1920 prize went to the famous forgettable discovery of a passive nickel-steel alloy, and in 1921, the Nobel Prize was not awarded. Until then, it was possible for the committee to reject Einstein, even if he was not rewarding anyone.
Finally, in 1922, Einstein was awarded the 1921 hold-over Nobel Prize, not for the theory of relativity for which he was most famous, but for the discovery of the photoelectric effect – that discovery or light also acts as a particle – Einstein in 1905 Was scored. That same year he published his first papers on the special theory of relativity.
Penrose’s work laid a solid mathematical basis for black holes, and in the center of such a hole, for space-time isolation. Stephen Hawking developed the concept using the general theory of relativity to show that if we present time in the past, we discover that the whole universe began with the loneliness of time or the Big Bang.
Penrose and Hawking worked together in the 1960s, and their work was widely used to unravel the origins of the universe. Although Hawking attained the status of an antique, perhaps the most famous physicist since Einstein, he never received the Nobel Prize. Penrose’s Nobel Prize for Space-Time Loneliness is perhaps a shameful bow to Hawking for the Nobel Prize he never received.
Theories in physics open up possibilities for understanding our universe. But without experimental verification, there is still a suspicion in the minds of the Nobel Committee that some new phenomena may contradict the theory. The discovery for experimental testing is therefore seen as the considered golden standard of physics.
And when it comes to astrophysics, proving theories with experiments on stars is a difficult task that observes light years away. This is the reason why Chandrasekhar’s Nobel Prize took more than 50 years, Penrose’s 55-year-old award was given. And without being posthumously awarded the Nobel Prize, physicists like Hawking are never awarded for their significant contributions.
An observation that confirms the existence of a superhero object object that emits no energy will provide a verification of Penrose’s black hole predictions. Ganzel and Gaze achieved this, and discovered that the Milky Way, like most galaxies, has a huge black hole at its center.
D And. Andrea Gaz is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Gerching, Germany. Geez’s team used the Cake Observatory in Hawaii, while “Genzel’s group used a telescope in Chile operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).”
Both the teams have been in “competition” for some time and have won many honors jointly. In this position, he kept an eye on the stars near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Both teams found a similar star, called the S2 by Geez’s team and the S2 by Ganzel, which had a much shorter orbital time in the center of the galaxy of about 16 years than the Sun’s orbit of 200 million years.
The results of both teams, using different telescopes and data sets over the decades, show that they are in close agreement with a superhero object object, a mass of about 4 million suns, at the center of your galaxy. In the working language of the Nobel Committee, “the sharp interpretation of these observations is that the compact object at the center of the galaxy is consistent with having a supermassive black hole.”
We have come a long way since Einstein’s theory of relativity and the fall of Chandrasekhar’s stars. Let me end with Chandrasekhar’s Nobel speech, where he quotes Rabindranath Tagore, the only Nobel laureate in Indian literature:
“Where the mind is fearless and the head is held high;
“Where knowledge is free;
“Where words come from the depths of truth;
“Where relentless effort draws his hand to perfection; Where for obvious reasons the flow has not lost its way to the happy desert sand of dead habit;
“In the paradise of freedom, let me awaken.”
Often cited, perhaps overused, but nevertheless it is appropriate for our black time.
This article was created in partnership Newsclick And Globetrotter, Which was provided to the Asia Times.
Prabir is the founding editor of Purkayastha Digital Media Platform, Newsclick.n. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.
