Jacob Bekenstein. The conservative revolutionary

DOI10.1142/11373MaRDI QIDQ5236475zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Kok Khoo Phua, Lars Brink, Viatcheslav Mukhanov, E. Rabinovici

Publication date 8 October 2019

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.11140

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

History of mathematics in the 20th century (01A60) Biographies, obituaries, personalia, bibliographies (01A70) Black holes (83C57) Relativistic cosmology (83F05) Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to relativity and gravitational theory (83-02) History of relativity and gravitational theory (83-03)

Abstract: Jacob Bekenstein's pioneering contributions to the foundations of Gravity cover a broad range of scales, from Black Holes to the entire Universe. He is well known as the father of Black Hole Thermodynamics and the inventor of the TeVeS modified gravity theory. I reflect here on my interaction with him, from the time he supervised me for my MSc project at Ben-Gurion University in the early 1980s to his sabbatical visit at UCL in 2014, about a year before he passed away (sadly just a month before the first LIGO discovery of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole). His quote "I feel more comfortable in the world if I understand why things are happening" reflects the way he viewed the world as a Physicist as well as his personal belief. He also allegedly said "Sometimes theories are smarter than their inventors".

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