David Finkelstein

Born in New York City, Finkelstein obtained his Ph.D. in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953 and taught at Stevens Institute of Technology through 1960, while he also held a Ford Foundation Fellowship at the European Organization for Nuclear Research from 1959 to 1960. From 1964 to 1976, he was professor of physics at Yeshiva University. He became a member of the faculty at Georgia Tech in 1980. David Finkelstein was the first, in 1958, who identified Schwarzschild's solution of the Einstein field equations as corresponding to a region in space from which nothing escapes. In 1959, Finkelstein and Charles W. Misner found the gravitational kink, a topological defect in the gravitational metric, whose quantum theory could exhibit spin 1/2. The simplest kink exhibited an easily understood event horizon that led him to recognize the one in the Schwarzschild metric and eliminate its coordinate singularity. In essence, Finkelstein determined that whatever falls past the Schwarzschild radius into a black hole cannot escape it; the membrane is one-directional. This important work influenced the decisions of Roger Penrose and John Archibald Wheeler to accept the physical existence of event horizons and black holes. Most of Finkelstein's work is directed toward a quantum theory of space-time structure.