Did death cheat Stephen Hawking of a Nobel Prize?

Hawking had posited that black holes, those maws of gravitational doom, could only grow larger, never smaller — swallowing information as they went and so threatening our ability to trace the history of the universe. That data was obtained in 2015 when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, recorded signals from two massive black holes that had collided and created an even more massive black hole.

Hawking’s prediction was a first crucial step in a series of insights about black holes that have transformed modern physics. At stake is whether Einsteinian gravity, which shapes the larger universe, plays by the same rules as quantum mechanics, the paradoxical rules that prevail inside the atom.

A confirmation of Hawking’s prediction was published this summer in Physical Review Letters. A team led by Maximiliano Isi, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his colleagues had spent years digging into the details of the LIGO results, and in July the scientists finally announced that Hawking was right, at least for this particular black hole collision.

“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 Isi’s team, said in an email. “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.” 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. But many scientists agree that Isi’s confirmation of Hawking’s prediction could have made Hawking — and his co-authors on a definitive paper about it — eligible for a Nobel Prize. But the Nobel Prize cannot be awarded posthumously. Isi’s result came too late.

The story begins in 1970, as Hawking was getting ready for bed one evening — an arduous task for a man already half paralysed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. 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. They are portholes to infinity.

Hawking would not be the first scientist to have died too soon for a possible Nobel Prize. “I have been told that the Nobel committee regretted not giving a prize to Hubble,” Michael Turner, a prominent cosmologist now working for the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles, wrote in an email, referring to astronomer Edwin Hubble, who discovered the expansion of the universe. “But he died first.” Hawking rests next to Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin in Westminster Abbey. Maybe that’s better than spending a winter in Stockholm.

Overbye is a journalist with NYT©2021

The New York Times