The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics with one half to Roger Penrose and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez.

Roger Penrose is the first theorist to win for work in gravitational physics. Even Einstein won for quantized light, not general relativity. The observations of the BH in our galaxy are obviously amazing, said Sean Carroll. He is a well known theoretical physicist specializing in quantum mechanics, gravity, and cosmology in the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the California Institute of Technology.

Penrose has gone on to do many other cool things, as this excerpt from his Wikipedia page shows. One of the most creative mathematical physicists of the last century.

When Einstein wrote down his famous equation for General theory of Relativity over a century ago, he didn’t know it would correctly describe black holes, gravitational waves, and the first few minutes of the universe. Our best scientific theories are smarter than we are.

Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez shared the other half of the prize for their conclusive experimental evidence of a supermassive black hole with the mass of four million suns residing at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.