Werner Israel

Werner Israel was a theoretical physicist who made important discoveries about black holes. He was born on October 4, 1931, and passed away on May 18, 2022. Israel helped scientists understand more about how black holes work and their role in gravitational theory. His work has had a lasting impact on the field of physics.

Biography

Werner Israel was born in Berlin, Germany in 1931. His family moved away from Nazi Germany in 1936 and settled in Cape Town, South Africa, where he grew up. Even as a child, he was fascinated by astronomy and the study of the universe cosmology. For a period of four years, while his parents were unwell, he and his brother stayed in an orphanage.

Israel earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Cape Town, and later received his doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin. In 1958, he began teaching at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where he worked until retiring in 1996. After retiring, he continued his research as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia for many years. During his time in Dublin, he married Inge Margulies, and they had two children, a son named Mark and a daughter named Pia.

Scientific work

Werner Israel was well known for his work on general relativity, especially his studies about black holes.

In 1966, Israel studied how very thin layers of matter behave in the presence of gravity. This work became very important and is still read by many scientists today. In 1967, he showed that a certain solution describing a simple black hole is the only possible one for a type of equation in physics. Later, he and others showed similar results for more complex black holes. In 1976, Israel explored how a black hole can stay balanced while giving off energy, discovering an interesting way to describe this balance using a special kind of space connection. He also worked on making ideas about heat flow fit with the rules of relativity. In 1989, with a colleague, he studied the inner parts of black holes and found new ideas about what can happen there. Together with Stephen Hawking, he also helped put together books about the physics of gravity.

Honors

Werner Israel received many honors for his work. In 1972, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was a Sherman-Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at CALTECH from 1974 to 1975. In 1981, he won the Medal of Achievement in Physics from the Canadian Association of Physicists. He also received the University of Alberta Research Prize in Natural Sciences and Engineering in 1983 and the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize in 1984. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in London in 1986 and served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research from 1986 to 1991. In 1994, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.