Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking earned many prizes and awards in his field from his associates for possessing one of the most brilliant minds of all time in the arena of science, but he could never win a Nobel Prize due to the fact that anybody has not yet proved his ideas and the Nobel committee wants to witness proof rather than hearing big ideas. One of his fellow scientists said that Stephen Hawking was indeed a deep thinker, a renowned theorist, and his musings regarding cosmology and the black holes are still there to get the lockdown evidence that backs the physics prizes.
Sean Carroll, a physicist at California Institute of Technology, stated that the Nobel Prize is not given to the smartest person or the one who makes the most significant contribution to science instead it is given to discovery. Carroll further said that Hawking had not won a Nobel Prize as the best theories of his have not yet been experimentally tested. Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer, announced that Stephen Hawking was often compared to the Nobel laureate scientist Albert Einstein, and he breathed his last on the 139th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s birth. Einstein’s Nobel was for defining the photoelectric effect which was verified by Robert Millikan.
The Einstein suggested theory behind gravitational waves did not win the highest honor of science till there were direct scrutinies of the faint ripples in time and space. The method of Peter Higgs theorizing the ‘God particle’ known as the Higgs boson did not earn a Nobel Prize until and unless a substantial European particle collider discovered the actual particle. Avi Loeb said that in all of the cases there was an experimentally monitored prediction.
Stephen Hawking’s most significant contribution to science that everything is not sucked into a black hole somewhat some radiation known as ‘Hawking radiation’ (after the theorist’s name) escapes out could be proven to the world only if the astronomers discover the black holes of the correct size. Loeb explained that black holes of smaller size, those weighing an asteroid are likely to produce much more Hawking radiation than the larger ones. According to Hawking’s statement in a lecture of the year 2016, people have searched for mini black holes of that mass, but have not found any so far. He had further added that that was a pity because if they had, the theorist would have got a Nobel Prize.
He lost another chance of winning the Nobel when an experiment initially seemed to detect waves from inflation in the early universe that would also have confirmed the Hawking radiation but the observation did not quite hold up. John Mather, the NASA astronomer, and Nobel laureate said that he doubted it would have changed the life of Hawking. He further noted that all loved Stephen’s work. A spokesman for Sweden’s Royal Academy of Sciences said in a statement that Hawking was indeed a great scientist who made many contributions to the field of science.
Spokesman Goran Hansson stated that the death of Hawking, 76, early on Wednesday was a loss for the entire world of science. He further did not comment on if Hawking should have been given the Noble Prize. Loeb said that according to him, Hawking’s life journey depicts that there is much more than the Nobel Prize.
