Incubator escapee wiki

Jacob Bekenstein

Article Discussion

Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox scientist

Jacob David Bekenstein (Template:Langx; May 1, 1947 – August 16, 2015) was a Mexican-born American-Israeli theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to the foundation of black hole thermodynamics and to other aspects of the connections between information and gravitation.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Early life and educationEdit

Jacob Bekenstein was born in Mexico City to Joseph and Esther (née Vladaslavotsky), Polish Jews who immigrated to Mexico.<ref name="nytimesobit">Template:Cite news</ref> He moved to the United States during his early life, gaining U.S. citizenship in 1968.<ref name="jspace">Template:Cite news</ref> He was also a citizen of Israel.<ref name="cv">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Bekenstein attended the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, now known as the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, obtaining both an undergraduate degree and a Master of Science degree in 1969. He went on to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Princeton University, working under the direction of John Archibald Wheeler, in 1972.<ref name="physics">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Bekenstein had three children with his wife, Bilha. All three children, Yehonadav,Template:Efn Uriya and Rivka Bekenstein, became scientists.<ref name="nytimesobit"/> Bekenstein was known as a religious man and a believer, being quoted as saying: "I look at the world as a product of God, He set very specific laws and we delight in discovering them through scientific work."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Scientific careerEdit

By 1972, Bekenstein had published three influential papers about the black hole stellar phenomenon, postulating the no-hair theorem and presenting a theory on black hole thermodynamics. In the years to come, Bekenstein continued his exploration of black holes, publishing papers on their entropy and quantum mass.<ref name="cv"/>

Bekenstein was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin from 1972 to 1974. He then immigrated to Israel to lecture and teach at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. In 1978, he became a full professor and in 1983, head of the astrophysics department.

In 1990, he became a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was appointed head of its theoretical physics department three years later.<ref name="cv"/> He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1997.<ref name="aps">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2009 and 2010.<ref>Institute for Advanced Study: A Community of Scholars Template:Webarchive</ref>

In addition to lectures and residencies around the world,<ref name="physics"/> Bekenstein continued to serve as Polak professor of theoretical physics at the Hebrew University until his death at the age of 68, in Helsinki, Finland.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> He died unexpectedly on August 16, 2015, just months after receiving the American Physical Society's Einstein Prize "for his ground-breaking work on black hole entropy, which launched the field of black hole thermodynamics and transformed the long effort to unify quantum mechanics and gravitation".<ref name="jspace"/><ref name="aps"/><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Contributions to physicsEdit

In 1972, Bekenstein was the first to suggest that black holes should have a well-defined entropy. He wrote that a black hole's entropy was proportional to the area of its (the black hole's) event horizon. Bekenstein also formulated the generalized second law of thermodynamics, black hole thermodynamics, for systems including black holes. Both contributions were affirmed when Stephen Hawking (and, independently, Zeldovich and others) proposed the existence of Hawking radiation two years later. Hawking had initially opposed Bekenstein's idea on the grounds that a black hole could not radiate energy and therefore could not have entropy.<ref>Overbye, Dennis, Jacob Bekenstein, Physicist, dies at 68; revolutionized the study of black holes, New York Times, August 22, 2015, p.B7</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> However, in 1974, Hawking performed a lengthy calculation that convinced him that particles can indeed be emitted from black holes. Today this is known as Hawking radiation. Bekenstein's doctoral adviser, John Archibald Wheeler, also worked with him to develop the no-hair theorem, a reference to Wheeler's saying that "black holes have no hair," in the early 1970s.<ref>The Big Bang: A View from the 21st Century (2003) by David M. Harland, pp. 227–8, Template:ISBN</ref> Bekenstein's suggestion was proven unstable, but it was influential in the development of the field.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Citation</ref>

Based on his black-hole thermodynamics work, Bekenstein also demonstrated the Bekenstein bound: there is a maximum to the amount of information that can potentially be stored in a given finite region of space which has a finite amount of energy (which is similar to the holographic principle).<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

In 1982, Bekenstein developed a rigorous framework to generalize the laws of electromagnetism to handle inconstant physical constants. His framework replaces the fine-structure constant by a scalar field. However, this framework for changing constants did not incorporate gravity.<ref>Possibilities in Parallel: Seeking the Multiverse (2013) by the editors of Scientific American, Template:ISBN</ref>

In 2004, Bekenstein boosted Mordehai Milgrom's theory of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) by developing a relativistic version. It is known as TeVeS for Tensor/Vector/Scalar and it introduces three different fields in space time to replace the one gravitational field.<ref name=Bekenstein2004>Template:Citation</ref>

Awards and recognitionEdit

|CitationClass=web }}Template:Dead link</ref>

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

  • Weizmann Prize in the Exact Sciences (Tel Aviv, Israel) in 2011<ref name="awards"/>
  • Wolf Prize in Physics in 2012<ref name=prizeWolf>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}</ref>

  • Einstein Prize of the American Physical Society in 2015<ref name="aps"/>

Published worksEdit

NotesEdit

Template:Notelist

ReferencesEdit

Template:Reflist

External linksEdit

Template:Sister project

Template:Wolf Prize in Physics Template:Authority control

Retrieved from "https://zalansite.site/mediawiki/index.php?title=Jacob_Bekenstein&oldid=342330"