The Physics Prize Committee has unanimously chosen the following two candidates to equally share the 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics:
Roger Penrose
University of Oxford
Oxford, United Kingdom
Stephen W. Hawking
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, United Kingdom
for their brilliant development of the theory of general relativity, in which they have shown the necessity for cosmological singularities and have elucidated the physics of black holes. In this work they have greatly enlarged our understanding of the origin and possible fate of the Universe.
Professor Roger Penrose has made remarkable seminal contributions to the development of the general theory of relativity as well as to many other subjects in mathematical physics. He initiated the greatest discoveries in classical general relativity since its founding over seventy years ago by finding those conditions which must necessarily lead to 'singularities' in any universe. These were applied to our own Universe to show that it must have began in a 'big bang' and may end in a corresponding 'crunch'. Related applications include the description of configurations in nature which lead inexorably to the formation of black holes. Penrose also showed how various natural processes may be extracting energy from the spin of such black holes. He has greatly enlarged our understanding of space - time by powerful analyses of its possible structure and by the invention of mathematical tools designed to allow an entirely new framework for the description of physical phenomena.
The main work of Professor Stephen W. Hawking is in general relativity and cosmology. Following the earlier work of Roger Penrose on collapsing stars, Hawking was the first to show that according to general relativity, without using quantum mechanics, the origin of the universe had to be singular. This means that the laws of physics break down at the origin of the universe and this created a major intellectual crisis for physics. The solution to this crisis is still unknown.
His next major work concerned the properties of black holes and general relativity. In the early 70’s he made major discoveries about the classical properties of black holes. However, in 1974 he astonished the scientific world by showing that when the surroundings of a black hole are´ treated quantum mechanically then the black hole turns out to have a temperature and an entropy, and to satisfy the laws of thermodynamics. In particular, a black hole would radiate as if it were a black body with a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. The final stages of this process would be violently explosive.
This work represents a new branch of physics in which general relativity, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics are combined.