Why Hawking did not win the Nobel Prize

The most active period of scientific research of the famous American physicist Stephen Hawking was the 1970s. Together with Penrose, he deduced from Einstein's general theory of relativity that the universe must have a beginning, and possibly an end—beginning with the Big Bang and ending with black holes. For this, they jointly won the 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics. In 1974, Hawking discovered that black holes are not so black, they emit radiation like thermodynamic objects, and slowly become smaller because of radiation, but the temperature is getting higher and higher, ending in a final-minute explosion.

That year, he became the youngest member of the Royal Society. Another important achievement of Hawking was to work with Hart to propose an early model of the universe without boundaries. However, these important theoretical discoveries did not earn Hawking the Nobel Prize in Physics. According to Professor Deng Zugan of the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an important reason is that to win the Nobel Prize, theoretical discoveries must be confirmed by experiments, and the phenomena predicted in Hawking's theory are difficult to confirm observationally. His theory does not solve a fundamental problem of cosmology, which is to unify the gravitational field with quantum theory.

Perhaps it is more appropriate to say that Hawking was "one of the physicists who made outstanding contributions to the theory of gravity in the late 20th century after Einstein." Many physicists of the same era also made outstanding contributions, such as Li Zhengdao and Yang Zhenning, who proposed the law of non-conservation of cosmology. Of course, an important reason why Li Zhengdao and Yang Zhenning won the Nobel Prize in Physics was that Wu Jianxiong experimentally verified the law of non-conservation of cosmology. In some years, Hawking's work was mostly to write popular science books and give public speeches, although his contribution to scientific research was not as prominent as in his early years, but his popular science work built a bridge between science and the public.

(Li Hujun/Text)