Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who is best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from special relativity, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect
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A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole. The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon. A black hole has a great effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, but has no locally detectable features according to general relativity. In many ways, a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light. Quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is of the order of billionths of a kelvin for stellar black holes, making it essentially impossible to observe directly.
Sir Roger Penrose is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and University College London.
The following is a timeline of gravitational physics and general relativity.
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes is a book on theoretical cosmology by the physicist Stephen Hawking. It was first published in 1988. Hawking wrote the book for readers who had no prior knowledge of physics.
Kip Stephen Thorne is an American theoretical physicist and writer known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. Along with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.
Peter Ware Higgs was a British theoretical physicist, professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.
In astrophysics, the gravastar is an object hypothesized in a 2006 paper by Pawel O. Mazur and Emil Mottola as an alternative to the black hole theory. It has the usual black hole metric outside of the horizon, but de Sitter metric inside. On the horizon there is a thin shell of matter. This solution to the Einstein equations is stable and has no singularities. Further theoretical considerations of gravastars include the notion of a nestar.
Fellowship of the Royal Society is an award granted by the Fellows of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science, and medical science".
Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He is the fifteenth Astronomer Royal, appointed in 1995, and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 2004 to 2012 and President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010. He has received various physics awards including the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2024 for fundamental contributions to high-energy astrophysics, galaxies and structure formation, and cosmology.
The Royal Society Science Books Prize is an annual £25,000 prize awarded by the Royal Society to celebrate outstanding popular science books from around the world. It is open to authors of science books written for a non-specialist audience, and since it was established in 1988 has championed writers such as Stephen Hawking, Jared Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould and Bill Bryson. In 2015 The Guardian described the prize as "the most prestigious science book prize in Britain".
Peter V. Coveney is a British chemist who is Professor of Physical Chemistry, Honorary Professor of Computer Science, and the Director of the Centre for Computational Science (CCS) and Associate Director of the Advanced Research Computing Centre at University College London (UCL). He is also a Professor of Applied High Performance Computing at University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Professor Adjunct at the Yale School of Medicine, Yale University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Member of Academia Europaea. Coveney is active in a broad area of interdisciplinary research including condensed matter physics and chemistry, materials science, as well as life and medical sciences in all of which high performance computing plays a major role. The citation about Coveney on his election as a FREng says: Coveney "has made outstanding contributions across a wide range of scientific and engineering fields, including physics, chemistry, chemical engineering, materials, computer science, high performance computing and biomedicine, much of it harnessing the power of supercomputing to conduct original research at unprecedented space and time scales. He has shown outstanding leadership across these fields, manifested through running multiple initiatives and multi-partner interdisciplinary grants, in the UK, Europe and the US. His achievements at national and international level in advocacy and enablement are exceptional".
Werner Israel, was a theoretical physicist known for his contributions to gravitational theory, and especially to the understanding of black holes.
Jameel Sadik "Jim" Al-Khalili is an Iraqi-British theoretical physicist and science populariser. He is professor of theoretical physics and chair in the public engagement in science at the University of Surrey. He is a regular broadcaster and presenter of science programmes on BBC radio and television, and a frequent commentator about science in other British media.
Stephen William Hawking was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Between 1979 and 2009, he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, widely viewed as one of the most prestigious academic posts in the world.
Patricia Mary Greenhalgh is a British professor of primary health care at the University of Oxford, and retired general practitioner.
Katherine J. Mack is a theoretical cosmologist who holds the Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication at the Perimeter Institute. Her academic research investigates dark matter, vacuum decay, and the Epoch of Reionization. Mack is also a popular science communicator who participates in social media and regularly writes for Scientific American, Slate, Sky & Telescope, Time, and Cosmos.
Time's Arrow and Archimedes Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time is a 1996 book by Huw Price, on the physics and philosophy of the arrow of time. It explores the problem of the direction of time, looking at issues in thermodynamics, cosmology, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics. Price argues that it is fruitful to think about time from a hypothetical Archimedean point – a viewpoint outside of time. In later chapters, Price argues that retrocausality can resolve many of the philosophical issues facing quantum mechanics and along these lines proposes an interpretation involving what he calls 'advanced action'.
Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein is a biography of Albert Einstein written by Abraham Pais. First published in 1982 by Oxford University Press, the book is one of the most acclaimed biographies of the scientist. This was not the first popular biography of Einstein, but it was the first to focus on his scientific research as opposed to his life as a popular figure. Pais, renowned for his work in theoretical particle physics, was a friend of Einstein's at the Institute for Advanced Study in his early career. Originally published in English in the United States and the United Kingdom, the book has translations in over a dozen languages. Pais later released a sequel to the book in 1994 titled Einstein Lived Here and, after his death in 2000, the University Press released a posthumous reprint of the biography in 2005, with a new foreword by Roger Penrose. Considered very popular for a science book, the biography sold tens of thousands of copies of both paperback and hardcover versions in its first year. The book has received many reviews and, the year after its initial publication, it won both the 1983 National Book Award for Nonfiction, in Science (Hardcover), and the 1983 Science Writing Award.
