Jacob Bekenstein

person · earth

Mexican-born Israeli-American theoretical physicist who proposed, as a graduate student under John Wheeler, that a black hole must carry entropy proportional to the area of its horizon. The motivation was a thermodynamic embarrassment: if entropy could be thrown into a black hole and thereby removed from the universe, the second law would fail, so either the second law is not fundamental or the black hole has entropy of its own. Almost nobody believed him at first, Hawking included, because an object with entropy must have a temperature and an object with a temperature must radiate - which black holes were thought not to do. Hawking's 1974 calculation showed that they do, vindicating the proposal and fixing its numerical coefficient. The area law that resulted is now among the most-cited constraints in theoretical physics and is the origin of holographic reasoning about spacetime. Not a place.

A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.