Jacob Bekenstein: Blackness

Jacob Bekenstein was Mexican-Israeli physicist. Explore interesting quotes on blackness.
Jacob Bekenstein: 12 quotes0 likes

“In a previous paper we showed that a static (nonrotating) black hole cannot be endowed with exterior scalar-meson or massive vector-meson fields. Here we show that the same is true for massive spin-2 meson fields. We also extend the above results to the case of a rotating stationary black hole. We conclude from our results that a black hole in its final (static or stationary) state cannot interact with the exterior world via the strong interactions which are mediated by meson fields such as the π (scalar), ρ (vector), and ƒ (spin-2). A direct consequence of this is the impossibility of determining the baryon number of the black hole by means of exterior measurements alone. This results in the transcendence of the law of baryon-number conservation as originally predicted by Wheeler.”

Jacob Bekenstein

[Nonexistence of baryon number for black holes. II, Physical Review D, 5, 10, 15 May 1972, 2403–2412, 10.1103/PhysRevD.5.2403]

“Black holes set a limitation on the number of species of elementary particles—quarks, leptons, neutrinos—which may exist. And black holes lead to a fundamental limitation on the rate at which information can be transferred for given message energy by any communication system.”

Jacob Bekenstein

[Black holes and everyday physics, General relativity and gravitation, 14, 4, April 1982, 355–359, 10.1007/BF00756269]

“We show that it is natural to introduce the concept of black-hole entropy as the measure of information about a black-hole interior which is inaccessible to an exterior observer. Considerations of simplicity and consistency, and dimensional arguments indicate that the black-hole entropy is equal to the ratio of the black-hole area to the square of the Planck length times a dimensionless constant of order unity. A different approach making use of the specific properties of Kerr black holes and of concepts from information theory leads to the same conclusion, and suggests a definite value for the constant.”

Jacob Bekenstein

[Black Holes and Entropy, Phys. Rev. D, 7, 8, 2333–2346, 15 April 1973, 10.1103/PhysRevD.7.2333]