Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to 3 Scientists for Work on Black Holes

Born in 1931 into an intellectual family, Dr. Penrose is a professor at the University of Oxford. When he was a child, he recalled in a recent interview, his father and his brother would play mental chess on family hikes, and his job was to keep track of the board.

A talented mathematician, he invented a new way of portraying space-time, called a Penrose diagram, which bypassed most of the mathematical complexities of general relativity.

His diagrams are now the lingua franca of cosmology. He proved that if too much mass accumulated in too small a place, collapse into a black hole was inevitable. At the boundary of a black hole, called the event horizon, you would have to go faster than the speed of light — the acknowledged cosmic speed limit — to get away. So you could never escape. Inside the boundary, time and space would switch roles and so all directions would lead downward, to the center, where the density became infinite and the laws of physics, as we knew them, would break down.

He showed that the black hole would become a gateway to the end of time, the end of the universe.

He is also famous for discovering Penrose tiles, a way of tiling an infinite floor without ever repeating the pattern. He has also published iconoclastic views of artificial intelligence and the origins of consciousness in books like “The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics.”

The Monster of the Milky Way