Jacob Bekenstein

Jacob David Bekenstein (Hebrew: יעקב בקנשטיין) (born May 1, 1947) is a Mexican-Israeli theoretical physicist who has contributed to the foundation of black hole thermodynamics and to other aspects of the connections between information and gravitation.

Biography

Bekenstein was born in Mexico City, Mexico. He has been Arnow Professor of Astrophysics at Ben-Gurion University and is now Polak Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and of The World Jewish Academy of Sciences.

Education

Bekenstein received his undergraduate education in the Polytechnic University (now the Polytechnic Institute of New York University) in Brooklyn, New York. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1972, supervised by John Wheeler. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2009-10.^[1]

Major contributions to physics

In 1972, Bekenstein was the first to suggest that black holes should have a well-defined entropy. Bekenstein also formulated the generalized second law of thermodynamics, black hole thermodynamics, for systems including black holes. Both contributions were affirmed when Stephen Hawking proposed the existence of Hawking radiation two years later. Hawking had initially opposed Bekenstein's idea.^[2]

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).

In 1982, Bekenstein was the first person to develop 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.

In 2004, Bekenstein greatly 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.

Awards

• The Bergmann Prize for Research (Israel) for 1977.
• The Landau Prize (Israel) for 1981.
• First prize of the Gravity Foundation Research Awards (USA) for 1981.
• The Rothschild Prize in Physics for 1988.
• Elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1997.
• Elected to the World Jewish Academy of Sciences in 2003.
• The Israel Prize in Physics for 2005.^[3]
• The Weizmann Prize in the Exact Sciences for 2011.
• The Wolf Prize in Physics for 2012.
• The Einstein Prize of the American Physical Society for 2015.

Works

• J. D. Bekenstein, Information in the Holographic Universe. Scientific American, Volume 289, Number 2, August 2003, p. 61.
• J. D. Bekenstein and M. Schiffer, "Quantum Limitations on the Storage and Transmission of Information", Int. J. of Modern Physics 1:355-422 (1990).
• J. D. Bekenstein, "Entropy content and information flow in systems with limited energy", Phys. Rev. D 30:1669–1679 (1984). [citeseer]
• J. D. Bekenstein, "Communication and energy", Phys. Rev A 37(9):3437-3449 (1988). [citeseer]
• J. D. Bekenstein, "Black holes and the second law", Nuovo Cimento Letters 4:737-740 (1972).
• J. D. Bekenstein, "Entropy bounds and the second law for black holes", Phys. Rev. D 27(10):2262–2270 (1983). [citeseer]
• J. D. Bekenstein, "Specific entropy and the sign of the energy", Phys. Rev. D 26(4):950-953 (1982). [citeseer]
• J. D. Bekenstein, "Black holes and everyday physics", General Relativity and Gravitation, 14(4):355-359 (1982). [citeseer]
• J. D. Bekenstein, "Universal upper bound to entropy-to-energy ratio for bounded systems", Phys. Rev. D 23:287-298 (1981). [citeseer]
• J. D. Bekenstein, "Energy cost of information transfer", Phys. Rev. Lett 46:623-626. (1981). [citeseer]
• J. D. Bekenstein, "Black-hole thermodynamics," Physics Today, 24-31 (Jan. 1980).
• J. D. Bekenstein, "Statistical black hole thermodynamics", Phys. Rev. D12:3077- (1975). [citeseer]
• J. D. Bekenstein, "Generalized second law of thermodynamics in black hole physics", Phys. Rev. D 9:3292-3300 (1974). [citeseer]
• J. D. Bekenstein, "Black holes and entropy", Phys. Rev. D 7:2333–2346 (1973). [citeseer]
• J. D. Bekenstein, "Nonexistence of baryon number of static black holes", ii. Phys. Rev. D 5:2403–2412 (1972). [citeseer]

References

External links

• Bekenstein's papers list at ArXiv with links to the full papers
• Israel Prize Official Site - CV of Jacob Bekenstein (in Hebrew)