Stephen Hawking Penrose

Martin Rees is perhaps Britain's most renowned cosmologist. He was master of Trinity College, Cambridge, president of both the Royal Astronomical Society and the Institute of Physics, and has led the nation's foremost science institution, the Royal Society. Now, about to celebrate his eightieth birthday, Lord Rees talks to Chris Lintott about his career in science.

Black holes have turned out to be the cornerstone of both physics and popular belief. But what if we were to realize that exact black holes cannot exist, even though their existence is apparently suggested by exact general relativistic solutions, and Roger Penrose won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics 'for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity'? While it might seem far-fetched to claim so, it will be worth remembering that the finest theoretical physicists like Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac did not believe in black holes, and Stephen Hawking finally thought that there are no exact black holes.