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Black holes are among the strangest denizens of the physicist’s world. Jacob Bekenstein tells here the story of how the thermodynamics of a black hole was discovered by him and Stephen Hawking, following John A. Wheeler’s question about what would happen if a cup of hot tea were dumped into a black hole. He further describes ramifications of these thermodynamics, such as the mysterious information paradox and the holographic bound, which have deeply influenced theoretical physics in the last twenty years. These subjects are just some of the many adventures in physics which the author has witnessed and participated in. He describes the genesis and development of some of them in this book.
Jacob David Bekenstein (1947-2015) was born in Mexico City. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1972 and then was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, and a faculty member and Arnow Professor of Astrophysics at the Ben-Gurion University, Israel before moving in 1990 to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he has been the Polak Professor of Theoretical Physics. Bekenstein has been a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and of the World Jewish Academy of Sciences. He received the first prize of the Gravity Foundation of the USA in 1981, the Rothschild Prize in 1988 and the Israel Prize in 2005. Some of his 100 publications: Black Holes and Entropy (1972); The Energy Cost of Information Transfer (1981); The Fine Structure Constant: Is it Really Constant? (1982); Spectroscopy of the Quantum Black Hole (1995), and Relativistic Gravitation Theory for the Modified Newtonian Dynamics Paradigm (2004). |
