{"id":477469,"date":"2025-12-29T11:12:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-29T11:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/477469\/"},"modified":"2025-12-29T11:12:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T11:12:09","slug":"reinhard-genzel-nobel-laureate-in-physics-one-minute-videos-will-never-give-you-the-truth-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/477469\/","title":{"rendered":"Reinhard Genzel, Nobel laureate in physics: \u2018One-minute videos will never give you the truth\u2019 | Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel<\/a>, 73, takes the stage. He then begins his lecture in the most unexpected way: \u201cWhat\u2019s the point of talking about black holes if all the Hollywood producers already know what they are? Going into them is easy, but once you do\u2026 ooooh.\u201d The audience \u2014 made up of a couple of hundred professors and students from 20 countries \u2014 is taken aback. <\/p>\n

Genzel \u2014 who was born in the town of Bad Homburg \u2014 acts like a friendly guy who just happens to be passing by. But he\u2019s actually one of the scientists who discovered the central object of our galaxy: Sagittarius A*<\/a>, a colossal black hole, with a mass equivalent to four million stars like the Sun. The director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics speaks with passion and a sense of humor about his discoveries, for which he shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with theorist Roger Penrose and experimental astronomer Andrea Ghez. <\/p>\n

In early November, Genzel attended the Hong Kong Laureate Forum, which awards the Shaw Prize (often described as the Chinese Nobel Prize). He was delivering a vibrant lecture at the city\u2019s Science Park, as a guest of the same forum that recognized his discovery 12 years before the Swedish Academy did. After his talk, he answered some questions from EL PA\u00cdS.<\/p>\n

Question. <\/b>What\u2019s the biggest implication of discovering something like Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way?<\/p>\n

Answer.<\/b> Many people are used to understanding the universe as a realm of surprise and wonder that borders on the irrational. Things happen, [such as] explosions that leave you in a state of amazement. What I do, on the other hand, is use astronomical techniques to do physics remotely. It would be much better to fly to a black hole and do the studies there, although we would have to consider the safety risks of getting too close. In any case, this is impossible. So, what we do instead is good theoretical physics and good experimental physics. We combine them to arrive at the truth. <\/p>\n

I think humanity has lost a bit of its appreciation for the truth. And I think that\u2019s partly because of social media.<\/p>\n

Q. <\/b>Why?<\/p>\n

A.<\/b> There are truths that can\u2019t be explained in three seconds. Understanding them, even minimally, can take an hour. And if you don\u2019t want to accept what I tell you as the truth, but instead wish to form your own opinion, you need six months of study. This also applies to politics: understanding the war between Hamas and Israel requires an investment of time. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure young people can find it stimulating to dedicate time to understanding something that interests them, so that no one comes along and tells them a three-minute, simplified version.<\/p>\n

Q. <\/b>Do you really think they\u2019ll do this?<\/p>\n

A.<\/b> I\u2019m sure of it. One-minute videos will never give you the truth. It has taken humanity 4,000 years to understand the solar system<\/a>, and we\u2019ve achieved this thanks to the contributions of many cultures and civilizations. Isn\u2019t that a wonderful accomplishment?<\/p>\n

Q. <\/b>You\u2019ve said that you don\u2019t care to know what\u2019s inside a black hole, because it\u2019s impossible to find out. Even so, do you never ask yourself that question?<\/p>\n

A.<\/b> In my life, I\u2019ve learned not to be interested in \u2014 and not to ask questions about \u2014 things that I know there are no answers to. I would love to know what happens inside a black hole<\/a>, what happens when you cross its boundary, but I know I\u2019ll never get the answer. So, let\u2019s not worry about what we can\u2019t know. That\u2019s been a bit of a motto for me in life.<\/p>\n

Q.<\/b> Does that way of thinking still leave room for unexpected discoveries?<\/p>\n

A. <\/b>Of course it does. For that reason, after a major discovery, you must continue refining it. And often what you thought was one thing turns out to be something else entirely. Now, can science provide the ultimate truth? That\u2019s a question for philosophers. My answer is that, if you\u2019ve been able to build a car or an airplane with what you know, then there\u2019s some truth to it.<\/p>\n

Q. <\/b>What do we still need to know?<\/p>\n

A.<\/b> Just five years ago, we thought we knew how black holes formed<\/a>. We know, for example, that their mass doubles every 400 million years. But then, we launched the James Webb Space Telescope. And it turns out that there are, in fact, enormous black holes that appeared relatively soon after the birth of the universe, following the Big Bang. [That\u2019s] something we haven\u2019t understood and solving it won\u2019t take us years, but decades.<\/p>\n

Q.<\/b> The forum you\u2019re attending here in Hong Kong is more focused on geopolitics than science. How do you see the global situation?<\/p>\n

A.<\/b> I think Europe is wise enough to know that, if we stick together, we can survive, and we can even continue doing science at the highest level. [But] if we\u2019re unlucky enough to have the Russians defeat Ukraine and invade Poland or the Baltic states<\/a>, then there will be another world war. <\/p>\n

Q.<\/b> Does the United States under Donald Trump further strain the situation?<\/p>\n

A. <\/b>This president and his cronies are destroying everything that made America great. My eldest daughter still lives in the United States, where I spent a good part of my career. I had a green card, but it was revoked shortly after Trump won the election. I can still visit her as a tourist, but I think that, if I keep saying things like this, one day they\u2019ll stop me at the border and throw me in jail. But we mustn\u2019t stay silent. This is something that I learned from the history of Germany, my country, after World War II. Why didn\u2019t we say something when we still had the chance?<\/p>\n

Q. <\/b>What role does China play in the current geopolitical context?<\/p>\n

A.<\/b> I have very good Chinese friends who tell me that their country will never reach Gleichschaltung \u2014 the German term that defines the control of the individual [that took place] under Nazism. If this is the case, if China allows some freedom, I think it\u2019s legitimate to collaborate with them. I say, let\u2019s try it, let\u2019s give them the benefit of the doubt, since they seem to respect thought and culture, to the extent that they don\u2019t turn their backs on people who come from different political systems.<\/p>\n

Q.<\/b> In your lecture, you said that curiosity is the greatest human quality. What do you think is the greatest question we should direct that curiosity toward?<\/p>\n

A.<\/b> Impossible to know; we\u2019ll discover it along the way. Right now, I\u2019m thinking about my second grandson, who is a year-and-a-half-old. He sits down to play and inspects the pieces of a puzzle, turning them over until he sees how they fit together. And that\u2019s how it happens; that\u2019s how we apes became more intelligent than the rest. We weren\u2019t stronger than them, but we thought more and better<\/p>\n

Today, our ability to reason also depends on certain skills, such as mathematics. Obviously, the question now is how important artificial intelligence<\/a> will be. I\u2019m cautiously pessimistic that it can make discoveries at a human level, but the best thing is to see where it takes us. Let\u2019s be positive.<\/p>\n

Sign up for our weekly newsletter<\/a> to get more English-language news coverage from EL PA\u00cdS USA Edition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel, 73, takes the stage. He then begins his lecture in the most unexpected way:…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":477470,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[74,69,916,492,5165,159,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-477469","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-china","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-nasa","11":"tag-physics","12":"tag-reinhard-genzel","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115802560767683538","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477469\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/477470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}