“Black holes, because they are so hard to understand, is what makes them so appealing,” Ghez, 55, said after becoming the fourth woman ever to win a Nobel in physics. “I really think of science as a big, giant puzzle.”
Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for establishing the all-too-weird reality of black holes - the straight-out-of-science-fiction cosmic monsters that suck up light and time and will eventually swallow us, too.
Roger Penrose of Britain, Reinhard Genzel of Germany and Andrea Ghez of the United States explained to the world these dead ends of the cosmos that are still not completely understood but are deeply connected, somehow, to the creation of galaxies.
Penrose, an 89-year-old at the University of Oxford, received half of the prize for proving with mathematics in 1964 that Einstein's general theory of relativity predicted the formation of black holes, even though Einstein himself didn't think they existed.
Genzel, who is at both the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the University of California, Berkeley, and Ghez, of the University of California, Los Angeles, received the other half of the prize for discovering in the 1990s a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
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