The Black Hole 25 Years After

This is a most important review volume providing a summary of black hole physics in the last 25 years. It contains a series of lectures presented to celebrate John Archibald Wheeler's invention of the term “black hole” a quarter of a century ago. In 11 lucid articles, a distinguished group of world experts discuss current issues in black hole physics, ranging from epistemological considerations to recent developments connecting black hole thermodynamics and string theory. Contents:The Path Integral Formulation of Gravitational Thermodynamics (J D Brown & J W York)Self-Dual Solutions of 2+1 Einstein Gravity with a Negative Cosmological Constant (O Coussaert & M Henneaux)String Black Holes (J Ellis)The Vacuum Fluctuation Problem in Black Hole Radiance (F Englert)“Absurd and Ridiculous”: The Collapse of Solidity (W Israel)Descent into the Maelstrom: The Black Hole Interior (W Israel)Some Speculations About Black Hole Entropy in String Theory (L Susskind)Action and Entropy of Black Holes (C Teitelboim)Horizon Operator Approach to Black Hole Quantization (G 't Hooft)The Black Hole, 25 Years Later (J A Wheeler)Lectures on Black Hole Quantum Mechanics: Lectures 1 & 2 (F Wilczek)Lectures on Black Hole Quantum Mechanics: Lectures 3 & 4 (F Wilczek) Readership: Astrophysicists. Keywords:Black Hole;Thermodynamics;String Theory;Astrophysics;Quantum Mechanics

This volume contains a series of lectures presented at the Centro de Estudios Cientificos de Santiago to celebrate John Archibald Wheeler's invention of the term black hole in the early 1970s. The articles discuss current issues in black hole physics, ranging from epistemological considerations to recent developments connecting black hole thermodynamics and string theory.

Black holes, once considered to be of purely theoretical interest, play an important role in observational astronomy and a range of astrophysical phenomena. This volume is based on a meeting held at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which explored the many aspects of black hole astrophysics. Written by world experts in areas of stellar-mass, intermediate-mass and supermassive black holes, these review papers provide an up-to-date overview of developments in this field. Topics discussed range from black hole entropy and the fate of information to supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, and from the possibility of producing black holes in collider experiments to the measurements of black hole spins. This is an invaluable resource for researchers currently working in the field, and for graduate students interested in this active and growing area of research.

Frank Wilczek is one of the foremost theoretical physicists of the past half-century. He has made several fundamental contributions that shape our understanding of high energy physics, cosmology, condensed matter physics, and statistical physics. In all these fields his many discoveries continue to play a key role in shaping the direction of modern theoretical physics.Among Wilczek's major achievements is the discovery of asymptotic freedom, which predicts and explains the ultraviolet behavior of non-abelian gauge theories. The axion, which he co-discovered and named, has emerged as the prevalent candidate for explaining the origin of dark matter in the Universe. His invention of color-flavor locking explains chiral symmetry breaking in high density quantum chromodynamics. His introduction of fractional statistics and anyons are pivotal to our understanding of the fractional quantum Hall effect and form the building blocks of topological quantum computing. His invention of the time crystal concept has catalyzed extensive investigations of dynamical phases of physical systems.Frank Wilczek received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of asymptotic freedom. He is also the recipient of several Prizes and honorary awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Lorentz Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society, and the King Faisal International Prize for Science of the King Faisal Foundation. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is also a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Sweden.He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He also holds a professorship at Stockholm University, is a Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University, and is the founding director of the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute and Chief Scientist of the Wilczek Quantum Center at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.This volume serves as a tribute to Frank Wilczek's legendary scientific contributions, commemorating his 70th birthday and the first 50 years of his career as a theoretical physicist. The contributors include several of his PhD students, close collaborators, and both past and present colleagues.

Black Holes are still considered to be among the most mysterious and fascinating objects in our universe. Awaiting the era of gravitational astronomy, much progress in theoretical modeling and understanding of classical and quantum black holes has already been achieved. The present volume serves as a tutorial, high-level guided tour through the black-hole landscape: information paradox and blackhole thermodynamics, numerical simulations of black-hole formation and collisions, braneworld scenarios and stability of black holes with respect to perturbations are treated in great detail, as is their possible occurrence at the LHC. An outgrowth of a topical and tutorial summer school, this extensive set of carefully edited notes has been set up with the aim of constituting an advanced-level, multi-authored textbook which meets the needs of both postgraduate students and young researchers in the fields of modern cosmology, astrophysics and (quantum) field theory.

This book discusses many of the recent theoretical and observational developments that have significant implications for astronomy and astrophysics. The main themes are (i) cosmology, (ii) gravitational wave astronomy and gravitational physics, (iii) stellar astrophysics, and (iv) active galactic nuclei and disk accretion. There are also contributions on the solar system.