Who won this year’s Nobel science prizes?

OCTOBER’S FIRST week is a nervous time for scientists with serious accomplishments under their belts—for this is when the phone might ring from Stockholm. Those who give out the Nobel science prizes (the Karolinska Institute for the physiology or medicine award, and Sweden’s Royal Academy of Science for the awards in physics and chemistry) are known neither for offering the winners more than an hour or two’s notice of the public announcement of their success, nor for respecting time zones. New laureates in North America receive the news in the dead of night. That, though, is normally reckoned a small price to pay for what is still seen as science’s most prestigious honour.

Britain being in a more convenient time zone from the Swedish point of view, Sir Roger Penrose, of Oxford University, was not actually asleep when his own phone rang. But he was, he says, in the shower. He was one of three winners of the physics prize, the others being Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel, of the University of California’s Los Angeles and Berkeley campuses respectively. Their prize was for the theoretical explanation and subsequent discovery of some of the strangest objects in the universe: black holes.