Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez bag the Nobel Prize for Physics

[John Upham]

Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez bag the Nobel Prize for Physics

See https://physicsworld.com/a/roger-penros ... r-physics/

This should make Jonathan Penrose's 87th birthday tomorrow even sweeter.

Is this Colchester's first Nobel laureate ? Answers on a postcard please...

"The Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences has been awarded to University of Essex graduate Professor Christopher Pissarides." which is some kind of Colchester connection.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Really glad to see Roger Penrose get this honour. I did wonder if Hawking was still alive, would he have been honoured as well?

Apparently it was quite difficult to get in touch with Penrose (who is 89 after all), see account here (including hair cut while on the phone!):

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physi ... interview/

There will probably be more biographical information about the Penroses emerging in other interviews and the lecture the laureates are expected to deliver when receiving their award (though whether there will be an in-person event or virtual one in the current pandemic era is another matter).

This prompted me to look again at the biographical accounts of Lionel (father) and Oliver and Joonathan (brothers). Jonathan gets mentioned on here a lot (and in more recent threads). We don't hear so much about Oliver and their sister Shirley (who to be fair is 15 or so years younger than her brothers).

Some of the Penrose family:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Penrose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Penrose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Penrose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Hodgson

Previous generations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Beresford_Leathes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Mordaunt_Leathes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Doyle_Penrose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Penrose

More distant relatives:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Penrose

[AustinElliott]

Yes, the Penrose joke could be that Roger may have the Nobel, but he isn't even the senior Professor of mathematical physics in the remarkable Penrose family - that honour belongs to brother Oliver, who is two years older.

Fortunately (from a Nobel perspective) British theoretical physicists seem to be a long-lived lot - see also Peter Higgs, born the same year as Oliver Penrose (1929) and still with us, who got the Nobel in 2013 aged 84. Like Roger Penrose, he was apparently a bit difficult to find to tell him he'd won.

Yet another distinguished British astrophysicist to reach his 90th birthday was Leon Mestel (1927-2017), father of Jon.