Werner Israel

Werner Israel (born 4 October 1931 in Berlin ) is a Canadian physicist.

Life and work

Werner Israel is in Berlin, Germany, born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, grew up. There he studied at the University of Cape Town ( B.Sc. 1951, M.Sc. 1954). In 1960 he received his doctorate at Trinity College in Dublin.

1967 proved Werner Israel first a so-called no- hair theorem. This uniqueness theorem states that black holes are completely determined by their mass, electrical charge and their angular momentum.

Other important works done in the framework of general relativity, such as on the relativistic Boltzmann equation.

In 1990 he returned with Eric Poisson pioneering work in the study of the interior of black holes. Then - following a suggestion by Roger Penrose - he discovered the mass inflation, which should not be confused with the inflationary cosmology.

He is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Cosmology Program. Until his retirement in 1996 he was Professor in the Department of Physics of the University of Alberta in. He was appointed adjunct professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Victoria in 1996. Together with Stephen Hawking, he gave two important anniversary volumes out ( on the 100th birthday of Albert Einstein in 1979 and 1987 on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia ).

Awards

Publications

• Werner Israel: The interior structure of black holes. In: Robert M. Wald ( ed. ): Black Holes and Relativistic Stars. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, pp. 1237-154, ISBN 0-226-87034-0.
• W. Israel and E. Poisson: Internal structure of black holes. In: Physical Review D. Volume 41, 1990, pp. 1796-1809.
• SW Hawking and W. Israel (ed.): Three Hundred Years of Gravitation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, ISBN 0-521-34312-7.
• SW Hawking and W. Israel (ed.): General Relativity. An Einstein Centenary Survey. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1979, ISBN 0-521-22285-0
• W. Israel, Event Horizons in static vacuum space -times. In: Physical Review. Volume 164, 1967, pp. 1776-1779.