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Did death cheat Stephen Hawking with the Nobel Prize?
When the iconic physicist died on March 14, 2018, data was already at hand that could confirm an ominous and far-reaching prediction he made more than four decades ago. Dr. Hawking had suggested that black holes, the maws of that gravitational apocalypse, could only grow, never shrink – they would increasingly swallow information, thereby threatening our ability to trace the history of the universe.
This data was obtained in 2015 when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, recorded signals from two massive black holes that collided and created an even larger black hole.
Dr. Hawking’s prediction was the first important step in a series of insights about black holes that are transforming modern physics. At issue is whether Einstein’s gravity, which shaped the larger universe, played by the same rules as quantum mechanics, the paradoxical rules that apply inside the atom.
Dr. A confirmation of Hawking’s prediction has been published in Physical Review Letters this summer. A team led by Maximiliano Isi, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his colleagues spent years digging through the details of the LIGO results, and in July finally Dr. They explained that Hawking was right, at least for this black man. hole collision
Researcher at Cornell University and Dr. “This is an exciting test because it’s a long-desired result that cannot be achieved in a lab on Earth,” Matthew Giesler, part of Isi’s team, said in an email. “This test required studying the merger of two black holes one billion light-years away and would not have been accomplished without LIGO and its unprecedented detectors.”
No one claims to know the idea of the Nobel Prize committee, and the names of the nominees are kept secret for another 50 years. Many scientists, however, like Dr. Isi’s Dr. Confirming Hawking’s prediction, Dr. He agrees that it could qualify Hawking and his co-authors, who prepared a definitive paper on the subject, for the Nobel Prize.
However, the Nobel Prize cannot be awarded posthumously. Dr. The result of Isi came too late.
Nobel Prize week is back on Monday, when some scientists are hoping to make a phone call to an ostentatious ceremony in Stockholm on December 10 to announce them as laureates. (This year, due to the pandemic, the awards are in the winners’ hometowns.)
Probably one of the most famous and honored researchers, Dr. Hawking never won the Nobel, and now he never will. Her story reminds us how the ultimate prestige award is subject to the indecision of fate.
The stupidity of the universe
The story began in 1970, when Dr. It begins as Hawking gets ready for bed one evening – a challenge for an already semi-paralyzed man with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
According to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, he was thinking about black holes – objects whose gravity is so strong that not even light can escape from them. They are the gates to eternity.
Each black hole is surrounded by an event horizon, an invisible bubble that marks the limit of no return; Whatever goes in cannot come out. Dr. Hawking realized that Einstein’s theory also meant that the event horizon of a black hole could never shrink. A black hole only gains mass, so the total surface area of its event horizon only grows.
It was a brave idea. Nature didn’t have to work that way. What if black holes could split in two or bounce off each other like soap bubbles and disappear?
Dr. Hawking’s insight became the cornerstone of a 1973 paper, “The Four Laws of Black Hole Mechanics,He wrote with James Bardeen, now at the University of Washington, and Brandon Carter, now at the French National Center for Scientific Research.
These laws also contained a disturbing consequence for physics called the “no hair” theorem. The surface area of an event horizon is a measure of all the information swallowed by a black hole. Whether it consumes matter or antimatter, Tesla or Volkswagen, ostrich or whale, it’s all the same for a black hole. Black holes have only three properties: mass, spin, and electric charge. No other details or “hair” records.
This theorem meant that the larger a black hole and the larger its event horizon, the larger the amount of information lost about what was inside. The universe would become more and more stupid, hiding more and more details of its past, perhaps including your very existence. This enigma was introduced in 1974 by Dr. It went deep with Hawking’s calculation that quantum effects would cause a black hole to slowly leak out and explode.
The quest to understand what happens to information in a black hole transformed basic physics and energized a generation of young theorists. The question is whether Einstein’s gravity, which governs the cosmos, and quantum mechanics, which governs the microcosm, play by the same rules.
Dr. “It all started with Hawking’s realization that the total horizon area of black holes can never go down,” Isi said.
But since there is no black hole to be experimented on, Dr. Hawking’s ideas could not be tested.
LIGO to the rescue
LIGO would change that. Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology and one of the founders of LIGO, in 2003 Dr. It was his promise to Hawking. He turned 70 in 2012.
Dr. “Your gift is that our gravitational wave detectors – LIGO, GEO, Virgo and LISA – will test your Golden Age black hole predictions and will start doing very well before your 70th birthday,” Thorne had told him recently. .
It took longer than that for LIGO to observe its first groundbreaking event – until September 14, 2015 – two colliding black holes. By matching the detected wave patterns with computer simulations, the LIGO team concluded that one of the black holes is 36 times our sun and the other 29 times – equivalent to a total of 65 suns. The collision resulted in a new black hole about 62 solar masses. Three suns’ worth of energy was lost in gravitational waves that shook the universe.
The observation not only confirmed the existence of gravitational waves, as Einstein predicted 100 years ago, but also provided the first direct evidence of black holes.
A leaked copy of the discovery document was released by Dr. Reached Hawking. He was surprised to find that he made no mention of the four laws of black hole mechanics or the possibility that the discovery might test them. The author of the article is Dr. Spoke with Thorne on Skype.
Dr. “Steven was quite surprised,” Thorne wrote to his colleagues.
No one had thought of checking the laws of black hole mechanics, and it was too late to add anything to the paper. Moreover, Dr. As Thorne recently explained, the data includes the size of the newly formed black hole by Dr. It was too loud to quantify well enough to confirm Hawking’s theory.
In 2017, then a graduate student at Caltech, Dr. Giesler and colleagues used numerical simulations of colliding black holes to look deeper into the apocalyptic vortex.
It vibrates when a newly merged black hole forms. Like a drum, it produces a basic tone as well as harmonics – overtones or undertones. Dr. Giesler discovered early in the merger process that the implications were surprisingly high. Using these hues, he and his colleagues in 2019 proved the “no hair” theorem, which states that black holes can only be described by three parameters.
This summer, they were able to expand their analysis by taking advantage of a tonality of the new black hole to measure its size. Dr. They concluded that the area of the new black hole’s event horizon is increasing, as Hawking predicted not so long ago.
Nobel dreams
This is Dr. Would it have won Hawking a Nobel Prize if he were still alive?
Sharing the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for his role in the development of LIGO, Dr. “I don’t feel comfortable speculating,” Thorne said.
Dr. Andrew Strominger of Harvard, a longtime collaborator of Hawking, said: “I’m not particular about the deliberations of the Nobel committee, but if Hawking were still alive, he would have already been included in this award. Certainly these latest experiments will further strengthen the situation.”
As part of the LIGO collaboration, but Dr. Daniel Holz, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago who was not part of Isi’s team, described the result as “crazy cool”.
“Probably this is an observational confirmation of one of his predictions,” he said. “I hope the Nobel committee realizes that.”
The physics prize has always been directed towards practical and experimental discoveries; Even Einstein won the prize not for relativity but for explaining the photoelectric effect. The most recent breakthrough in theoretical astrophysics by the Nobel committee was in 2020 when Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford was awarded the prize for proving that black holes are possible in the universe.
But he shared the prize with two astronomers, reinhard genzelfrom the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and Andrea GhezBoth from the University of California, Los Angeles, studying the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
When the black hole field theorem was proven, Dr. Even if Hawking was still alive, it would be difficult to concoct him – the Nobel Prize can be awarded to a maximum of three people. What about Dr. Hawking’s co-authors Dr. Bardeen and Dr. Carter? Or Dr. Isi’s team?
Dr. Hawking would not be the first scientist to die too soon for a possible Nobel Prize.
“It was said that the Nobel committee regretted not awarding Hubble the prize,” wrote Michael Turner, a leading cosmologist now working for the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles, citing the astronomer Edwin Hubble, who discovered the expansion. of the universe. “But he died first.”
Robert Brout, a theoretical physicist at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, could have been included in the 2013 Nobel Prize for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson, along with his colleague François Englert and Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh. He died in 2011.
Ronald Drever of the University of Glasgow, co-founder of LIGO, would have awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize to Dr. He could have shared it with Thorne and Rainer Weiss. He was replaced by Barry C. Barish of Caltech. .
Dr. Hawking is resting next to Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin at Westminster Abbey. Maybe that’s better than spending a winter in Stockholm.
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