Jacob Bekenstein facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Jacob Bekenstein
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Bekenstein in 2009
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| Born | May 1, 1947 Mexico City, Mexico
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| Died | August 16, 2015 (aged 68) Helsinki, Finland
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| Nationality | American Israeli |
| Alma mater | Princeton University Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn |
| Known for | Black hole thermodynamics |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Theoretical physics |
| Institutions | Hebrew University of Jerusalem Ben-Gurion University of the Negev |
| Doctoral advisor | John Wheeler |
Jacob David Bekenstein (Hebrew: יעקב בקנשטיין; May 1, 1947 – August 16, 2015) was a brilliant American and Israeli physicist. He studied the universe and its biggest mysteries. He is famous for his important ideas about black hole thermodynamics. This is a fancy way of saying he figured out how black holes might have "heat" and "information." He also explored how information and gravity are connected.
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About Jacob Bekenstein
Jacob Bekenstein was born in Mexico City on May 1, 1947. His parents, Joseph and Esther, were Polish Jews who moved to Mexico. Jacob moved to the United States when he was young and became a U.S. citizen in 1968. He was also a citizen of Israel.
His Education and Family
Jacob went to the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering. He earned two degrees there in 1969. Later, he got his PhD (a very high degree) from Princeton University in 1972. His teacher there was a famous scientist named John Archibald Wheeler.
Jacob Bekenstein had three children with his wife, Bilha. All three of his children, Yehonadav, Uriya, and Rivka, grew up to become scientists too! Jacob was a religious person. He once said that he saw the world as something created by God. He believed that God set up very specific rules, and scientists enjoy discovering these rules.
His Work in Israel
After his studies, Jacob Bekenstein worked at the University of Texas at Austin for two years. In 1974, he moved to Israel. He started teaching at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba. He became a full professor in 1978. In 1983, he became the head of the astrophysics department there.
In 1990, he joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Three years later, he became the head of their theoretical physics department. He was chosen to be part of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1997. He also visited the Institute for Advanced Study as a scholar in 2009 and 2010.
Jacob Bekenstein gave lectures all over the world. He continued to teach theoretical physics at the Hebrew University until he passed away. He died unexpectedly in Helsinki, Finland, on August 16, 2015, at age 68. This was just a few months after he received the American Physical Society's Einstein Prize. He earned this award for his amazing work on black hole entropy. His ideas started the whole field of black hole thermodynamics. They also changed how scientists tried to combine quantum mechanics and gravity.
Jacob Bekenstein's Big Ideas in Physics
Jacob Bekenstein made some truly groundbreaking discoveries about black holes. Black holes are super dense objects in space with such strong gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape.
Black Hole Entropy
In 1972, Bekenstein was the first to suggest that black holes have something called entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder or the amount of information in a system. He said that a black hole's entropy was related to the size of its "event horizon." The event horizon is the point of no return around a black hole.
Bekenstein also created the "generalized second law of thermodynamics." This law applies to systems that include black holes. It basically says that the total entropy of the universe, including black holes, can never decrease.
Hawking Radiation and the No-Hair Theorem
At first, another famous scientist, Stephen Hawking, disagreed with Bekenstein. Hawking thought black holes couldn't have entropy because they couldn't give off energy. But in 1974, Hawking did some complex calculations. He found that particles can escape from black holes. This is now known as Hawking radiation. This discovery actually proved Bekenstein's ideas about black hole entropy were correct!
Bekenstein also worked with his teacher, John Archibald Wheeler, on the "no-hair theorem." This idea suggests that black holes are very simple. They can only be described by their mass, spin, and electric charge. Wheeler famously said, "black holes have no hair," meaning they don't have other complex features.
The Bekenstein Bound
Based on his work with black hole thermodynamics, Bekenstein also came up with the "Bekenstein bound." This is a really cool idea! It says there's a limit to how much information can be stored in a certain amount of space and energy. Think of it like a maximum data storage limit for any region of the universe. This idea is similar to the holographic principle, which suggests our universe might be like a hologram.
Other Contributions
In 1982, Bekenstein developed a way to change the laws of electromagnetism. He explored what would happen if some basic numbers in physics, called physical constants, weren't always the same.
Later, in 2004, Bekenstein helped improve a theory called Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). This theory tries to explain how galaxies rotate without needing a lot of dark matter. Bekenstein created a version of MOND called TeVeS. It uses different fields in space to describe gravity.
Awards and Recognition
Jacob Bekenstein received many important awards for his amazing work:
- Ernst David Bergmann Prize for Science (Israel) in 1977
- Landau Prize for Research in Physics (Israel) in 1981
- First prize essay for the Gravity Research Foundation (United States) in 1981
- Rothschild Prize in the Physical Sciences in 1988
- Elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1997
- Second prize essay for the Gravity Research Foundation in 2001
- Elected to the World Jewish Academy of Sciences in 2003
- Israel Prize in Physics in 2005
- Weizmann Prize in the Exact Sciences (Tel Aviv, Israel) in 2011
- Wolf Prize in Physics in 2012
- Einstein Prize of the American Physical Society in 2015
See also
In Spanish: Jacob David Bekenstein para niños
