Speaker:

Yu Hongwei obtained his PhD from Tufts University in the US. He is a professor at Hunan Normal University, a leader of the innovative research team supported by the Ministry of Education's Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University, and an expert enjoying special government allowances from the State Council. He has long been committed to the research on relativity and gravity, black holes and cosmology, and fundamental issues of quantum mechanics. He has presided over a number of national scientific research programs, including major programs (topics), key programs and general programs of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. In 2008, he won the first prize of the Hunan Provincial Science and Technology Progress Award (as the first contributor), and in 2018, he won the first prize of the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Award (as the first contributor). His students' dissertations have been selected into the 100 China National Excellent Doctoral Dissertations once, nominated for the title once, and selected into the Hunan Provincial Excellent Doctoral Dissertations five times.

Introduction to the lecture:

On October 6 local time, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 was divided, one half awarded to Roger Penrose "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity", the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy."

Roger Penrose used ingenious mathematical methods in his proof that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. He proved that black holes really can form and described them in detail. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez has each led a research group since the early 1990s. They found a compact object that is about four million times the mass of the Sun, providing a convincing evidence of a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. In the past four years, the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded three times to gravity and astrophysics research. Starting with the stories of Galileo, Newton and Einstein, the report reviews the past and present of gravity, introduces the long and tortuous process of our understanding of black holes, how we discovered the objects at the center of the galaxy and how we took the first photo of a black hole, and looks into the future development of gravity theories.