Physics Nobel laureate receives diploma in Germany

German scientist Reinhard Genzel, one of the three recipients of the Nobel award for Physics, received his medal and diploma at the Bavarian State Chancellery in Munich on Tuesday.

The pomp and ceremony of the Nobel prize ceremonies have been reined in this year amid measures to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

There were no glitzy banquet honouring winners in Stockholm or Oslo.

Instead, their achievements were recognised and rewarded at low-key ceremonies where they live and work in Europe and the United States.

In October, Genzel shared the physics prize with Roger Penrose of Britain and Andrea Ghez of the United States for their breakthroughs in understanding black holes.

Penrose, an 89-year-old at the University of Oxford, received half of the prize for proving with mathematics in 1964 that Einstein's general theory of relativity predicted the formation of black holes.

Genzel, who is at both the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the University of California, Berkeley, and Ghez, of the University of California, Los Angeles, received the other half of the prize for discovering in the 1990s a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.