INTRODUCING THE EVENT-HORIZON AND INITIATED BLACK HOLE RESEARCH

FINKELSTEIN, DAVID.

Past-Future Asymmetry of the Gravitational Field of a Point Particle.

Lancaster PA, American Physical Society, 1958. Royal8vo. In the original blue printed wrappers. In "The Physical Review", Volume 110, Second Series, Number 4, May 15. Previous owner's stamp to front wrapper, otherwise a very fine and clean copy. Pp. 965-967. [Entire issue: Pp. 793-997].

First printing of Finkelstein's landmark paper in which he identified the Schwarzschild surface as an event horizon, "a perfect unidirectional membrane: causal influences can cross it in only one direction". This did not strictly contradict Oppenheimer's results, but extended them to include the point of view of infalling observers. Finkelstein's solution extended the Schwarzschild solution for the future of observers falling into a black hole. This paper influenced Penrose and Landau and essentially triggered the black-hole research.

"Many prominent doubting physicists were reluctant to accept the concept of a black hole, in large measurement because of the anomaly that the implosion of a star cannot be observed. Yet a particle inexorably falls into the center at r = 0 just as time marches on - because in general relativity time and space exchange roles inside a black hole (which has the making of another paradox). One solution, or at least reconciliation, of the observational black hole paradox was achieved only in the last decades. David Finkelstein (in the present paper) ascertained a new reference frame of framework for Schwarzschild space-time. Finkelstein's reference frame simultaneously covered all regions of space-time from the imploding star to distant reaches of space. This all-embracing reference frame is now called the Eddington-Finkelstein frame" (Kreitler, Trends in Black Hole research, P. 6).

Order-nr.: 48939