'Roger Penrose was announced as one of this year’s winners at a news conference in Stockholm this month.' Photo: by Biswarup Ganguly on Wikimedia Commons.
Quaker-linked scientist wins Nobel Prize
Roger Penrose, born into a polymathic Quaker family, announced as one of this year's winners.
Roger Penrose, a descendant from the famous Quaker Penrose family, is one of three scientists to have been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for work to understand black holes.
The father of the Colchester-born mathematical physicist from the University of Oxford was born into a polymathic Quaker family, which included artist Roland Penrose who attended the Quaker Leighton Park School.
Roger Penrose was announced as one of this year’s winners at a news conference in Stockholm this month. Despite describing himself as an atheist in 2010, he has spoken about the influence of his Quaker father. ‘The important thing about my father was that there wasn’t any boundary between his work and what he did for fun,’ he said in Discover magazine in 2005. In the 1991 film A Brief History of Time, he said, ‘I think I would say that the universe has a purpose.’
He will share the prize money of ten million krona (£864,200) with the two other winners Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, the fourth woman to win the physics prize, out of more than 200 laureates since 1901.
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