Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹The only mathematics is contained in a couple of pages from Kerr's notebooks (pp. 72–73), which give the rotation solution. For readers able to follow the formalism, the solution is very elegant; for readers not intimately acquainted with the intricacies of GRT, understanding the formalism is not essential for following the overall story. I say a bit about the difficulties Kerr had to surmount later in the text.

²See Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), pp. 286, 288.

³David L. Wiltshire, Matt Visser, and Susan M. Scott, editors, The Kerr Spacetime: Rotating Black Holes in General Relativity (Cambridge University Press, 2009).