The new array would be able to sort out the properties of black holes by the time Dr. This was the promise Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology and one of LIGO’s founders, made to Dr. Isi said.īut with no black holes to experiment on, Dr. “It all started with Hawking’s realization that the total horizon area of black holes can never go down,” Dr.
At stake is whether Einsteinian gravity, which governs the cosmos, and quantum mechanics, which governs the microcosm, play by the same rules. The quest to understand what happens to information in a black hole has transformed fundamental physics and energized a generation of young theorists. Black holes have only three properties: mass, spin and electric charge. It is all the same to a black hole whether it consumes matter or antimatter, a Tesla or a Volkswagen, an ostrich or a whale. The surface area of an event horizon is a measure of all the information swallowed by a black hole.
These laws also contained a troubling conclusion for physics called the “no hair” theorem. Hawking’s insight became a keystone of a 1973 paper, “ The Four Laws of Black Hole Mechanics,” that he wrote with James Bardeen, now at the University of Washington, and Brandon Carter, now at the French National Center for Scientific Research. What if black holes could split in two, or splatter off each other and disappear, like soap bubbles?ĭr. A black hole only gains mass, so the total surface area of its event horizon only grows. Hawking realized that Einstein’s theory also meant that a black hole’s event horizon could never decrease. They are portholes to infinity.Įvery black hole is surrounded by an event horizon, an invisible bubble marking the boundary of no return whatever enters will never exit. He had been thinking about black holes - objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape them, according to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. His story is a reminder of how the ultimate prestige award is subject to the fickleness of fate.
Hawking, arguably one of the most celebrated and honored researchers, never won a Nobel and now never will. (This year, because of the pandemic, the prizes will be handed out in the winners’ home countries.)ĭr. Nobel Prize week returned on Monday, when certain scientists hope for a phone call anointing them as laureates and summoning them to a lavish ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. Hawking - and his co-authors on a definitive paper about it - eligible for a Nobel Prize.īut the Nobel Prize cannot be awarded posthumously. Nobody claims to know the mind of the Nobel Prize committee, and the names of people nominated for the prize are held secret for another 50 years. “This test required studying the merger of two black holes over a billion light years away and simply could not be accomplished without LIGO and its unprecedented detectors.” “It’s an exciting test because it’s a long-desired result that cannot be achieved in a lab on Earth,” Matthew Giesler, a researcher at Cornell University and part of Dr.
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