Talk:Jacob Bekenstein

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What does Polak Professor mean? --Kpalion 20:01, 19 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I think it is a scholarship or a cathedra chair. MathKnight 09:46, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It means that he occupies a department seat which was endowed (i.e., provided with funding by the returns on an investment placed in trust) by an individual named Polak --Aminorex 17:07, 9 Feb 2006 (UTC)

Contents 1 Please cleanup quoted abstract 2 This is not a stub 3 Is this misquoted? 4 Peter Emo

[edit] Please cleanup quoted abstract

Hi, User:Vald, you added citation and abstract into the body of the article. Can you move to the citation to the end, with the other citations, and describe Bekenstein's contribs in your own words? I think articles here should have some value-added nature, not just be collections of quotations from linked documents. TIA---CH (talk) 01:37, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] This is not a stub

I think this is more than adequate as a treatment of Jakob Bekenstein. He is a relatively minor contemporary physicist and all of his most significant work is described at the appropriate level of discourse. Further expansions will necessarily be quite technical in their content. --Aminorex 17:11, 9 Feb 2006 (UTC)

I definitely wouldn't call him minor, but I suppose the article is sufficient. 129.12.228.161 00:35, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I wouldn't say the article is sufficient. There is no mention of Prof. Bekenstein's latest work with MOND. Dkronst 22:36, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Is this misquoted?

The article contains the statement:

• He has also demonstrated that there is a maximum quantity of information that could be stored in any volume and this value is proportional to the area of the space that stores the volume and NOT to the volume itself.

I'm not a physicist, but this statement appears absurd. Consider a cubical space one foot on an edge. That has a volume of one cubic foot, and a surface area of 6 square feet, and we are to suppose the amount of information that can be stored in the volume is proportional to that surface area. Now imagine slicing up the cube into eight smaller cubes, with 3 slices (like a loaf of bread, through each of the 6 faces to the opposite faces). Now the total volume is the same but the surface area of the small cubes, together, is 9 square feet (if coincident faces only count once for surface area) so the total amount of information that can be enclosed in the original space seems to be larger (if the information pertaining to a volume contains the information within sub-volumes). I suspect that it would be helpful if a physicist explained this a little more, or perhaps a reference to which paper describes this could be made. Thanks. Pete St.John 21:46, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

I was about to post something similar. I cannot make sense of this. Can someone fix it or at lest point to where this is shown? Myrkkyhammas 20:51, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

It is correct, see: Bekenstein bound. In daily life, this Bekenstein bound has no practical consequences whatsoever. It merely states that in a volume bounded by an area of A square meters, one can store no more than 1.4 x 10^69 x A bits of information.... JocK 22:16, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the repsonse. I don't think the quoted sentence above accurately represents anything in that article. The Black Hole extreme case, for example, is particularly a spherical region, not an arbitrary shape. The formula which relates information to radius would make no sense in the example I gave of cutting up a cube, as there is no single radius. I think the sentence we're talking about is a misleading overgeneralization. But i'm not sure:-) Pete St.John 17:21, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

It occurs to me (just now) that "the surface of the sphere that circumsribes the volume" could be meant. Or instead of "sphere", something like "simply connected, compact, star-shaped...". Such a thing might be very naturally simplified to the given sentence (but not by a toplogist :-) Pete St.John 17:23, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the sentence is not very precise. However, generalising the Bekenstein bound to more generalised (so-called covariant) shapes constitutes an active subject of research. For the purpose of this biographic article, I would not be too bothered about slight imperfections in the explanation of the Bekenstein bound (after all, there the article contains a clear link to the more detailed article on the Bekenstein bound). Having said that, I did slightly rephrased the sentence that is subject of this discussion. JocK 15:42, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

thanks; I think that was worthwhile. Anywy now I feel better :-) Pete St.John 20:32, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Peter Emo

I reverted the link to Peter Emo on two grounds: first, that the inclusion, substantially altering attribution of Bekenstein's work, was misleadingly labelled as a spelling correction; but more importantly, that the Emo link is unsourced (and riddled with typos). The Emo material should be fixed up before the link is added to other articles. Pete St.John 17:18, 23 October 2007 (UTC)