Key Takeaways:
- Penrose won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on black holes, including proposing their existence based on general relativity.
- He believes there is evidence for Hawking Points, leftover traces of Hawking radiation from a previous universe, which would support a cyclical model of the universe.
- Penrose’s idea about Hawking Points is controversial but builds on the concept of black holes which were once doubted as well.
- He shared the Nobel Prize with researchers who confirmed the existence of a supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center.
- Some believe Penrose and Hawking’s work on black holes is the most significant contribution to gravity since Einstein.
Sir Roger Penrose, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, stated that there is evidence of an earlier universe that predates the Big Bang and is still visible today.
The 89-year-old Sir Roger, who received the award for his groundbreaking research demonstrating the existence of black holes, announced that he had discovered six “warm” spots in the sky, known as “Hawking Points,” that are about eight times the diameter of the Moon.
They bear the name of Professor Stephen Hawking, who proposed the theory that black holes “leak” radiation before completely disappearing. Black holes are impossible to detect because their complete evaporation takes a very long time—possibly longer than the age of the universe.
In 1988, Sir Roger and Professor Hawking split the World Physics Prize for their research on black holes. Speaking from his home in Oxford, Sir Roger said: “I claim that there is observation of Hawking radiation. The Big Bang was not the beginning. There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future. We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon.
“There would have been similar black holes evaporating away via Hawking evaporation, and they would have produced these points in the sky, that I call Hawking Points. So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon. We are seeing them. These points are about eight times the diameter of the Moon and are slightly warmed up regions. There is pretty good evidence for at least six of these points.”
In the most recent issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Sir Roger published his theory of “Hawking Points.”
The idea is controversial, although many scientists do believe that the universe operates in a perpetual cycle in which it expands, before contracting back in a ‘Big Crunch’ followed by a new Big Bang. Sir Roger said that black holes had also once been controversial. They were first proposed in 1783 by English country parson John Mitchell, who hypothesized that an object’s strong gravitational pull would prevent even light from escaping if it became extremely dense.
However, rather than accepting them as a physical fact, even Albert Einstein dismissed them as mathematical curiosity. It was not until 1964, nine years after Einstein’s death, that Sir Roger proposed that black holes are an inevitable consequence of general relativity. Sir Roger demonstrated that objects experience gravitational collapse at an infinite mass point known as the singularity, where all known laws of nature come to an end.
His groundbreaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the theory of relativity since Einstein, and increased evidence for the Big Bang. When Sir Roger first had the idea, he was in his mid-thirties and strolling through London to a tube station on his way to Birkbeck College. It is now, 56 years later, that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has acknowledged his achievements.
“I think it’s a bad thing to get a Nobel prize too early. I know scientists who got their prize too early and it spoiled their science. 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 is still something to do, that’s my advice. This dates back to 1964, but the significance of black holes took a long long time to realise, so it’s not surprising, and I think I’m just about old enough now.”
Together with Professors Andrea Ghez of the University of California and Reinhard Gerzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, who demonstrated the existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way by examining its effects on nearby stars, Sir Roger received this honor.
Commenting on the prize, Prof Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, said it was sad that Prof Hawking had not been alive to share the prize.
“Penrose is amazingly original and inventive, and has contributed creative insights for more than 60 years. I believe there is general agreement that Penrose and Hawking have contributed more to our understanding of gravity than any other person since Einstein. Sadly, this award was too much delayed to allow Hawking to share the credit with Penrose.”
Prof Hawking answered some of the biggest questions facing mankind back in 2018, below:
Announcing the prize, Prof Göran Hansson, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said this year’s award was about ‘the darkest secrets in the universe.’
Prof Toby Wiseman, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London, said: “Penrose showed that if you believe Einstein, then black holes form under very general conditions, such as when certain stars die. They must be a physical reality.”
