Occupation Physicist Role Physicist | Name Wolfgang Rindler Title Professor | |
 | ||
Born May 18, 1924 (age 100) ( 1924-05-18 ) Vienna, Austria Known for Coining phrase "event horizon", physics text books Employer University of Texas at Dallas Books Relativity, Essential Relativity, Introduction to special relativity, Gravitation and Geometry, Special Relativity | ||
Education Imperial College London | ||
Wolfgang Rindler: "Vienna, Hans Thirring, and Gravity Probe B"
Wolfgang Rindler (born 18 May 1924, Vienna) is a physicist working in the field of General Relativity where he is known for introducing the term "event horizon", Rindler coordinates, and (in collaboration with Roger Penrose) for popularizing the use of spinors in general relativity. He is also a prolific textbook author.
Contents
Life and career
Rindler is the son of a lawyer. Because of his Jewish ancestry, he fled before the Nazis to England in the course of the so-called Kindertransport in 1938. Rindler gained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Liverpool and his PhD. from Imperial College London. In 1956 he was at the Cornell University.
In 1960 Oliver & Boyd and InterScience published his first book on special relativity. Reviewer Alfred Schild said it was an "excellent, clear and concise account" and "provided a sound balance between physical ideas, analytical formulae and space-time geometry". (1966, second edition)
In 1961 Rindler used the Fitzgerald contraction as the premise of his article "Length contraction paradox". The thought experiment is now called the ladder paradox.
Starting in 1963 he began teaching at the newly-founded Southwest Center for Advanced Studies, later called University of Texas at Dallas, where he is Professor Emeritus. He was visiting scholar at King's College London (1961/62), at the University La Sapienza in Rome (1968/69),
In 1969 Springer published the first edition of his Essential Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological. The undergraduate textbook was lauded as a "refreshingly modern approach to the critical problem of teaching relativity theory." Another reviewer said it is "simply the best introduction" and is "filled with fabulous insights." When the second edition appeared in 1977 a reviewer noted its treatment "reminiscent of Mach's celebrated examination of the foundations of classical mechanics". On the other hand the second edition "gives the barest hints of new developments" (models of neutron stars, in X-ray astronomy, supernova explosions, and quasars). Later, another reviewer criticized it for the paucity of diagrams, but lauded the chapter on cosmology as "lyrical, philosophical, yet technical."
Rindler was visiting scholar at the University of Vienna (1975, 1987) and at the Cambridge University (Churchill College, 1990).
In 1982 Oxford University Press published Introduction to Special Relativity, with the second edition in 1991. A reviewer noted that other books provide a better introduction and intuitive understanding, but that it "should provide a useful reference for most applications of special relativity: kinematics, optics, particle mechanics, electromagnetism and mechanics of continua."
In 1984 Roger Penrose and Rinder published Spinors and Spacetime, volume 1, on "two-spinor calculus and relativistic fields". Michał Heller wrote that Spinors and Spacetime "is both elementary and highly advanced. It begins on an almost graduate level but soon, step by step, reaches the highest standards of modern mathematical physics."
In 2001 Oxford University Press published Relativity: Special, General and Cosmological, with a second edition in 2006. A reviewer noted "His writing is elegant, yet compact and logically precise." He was impressed with the "discussion of the internal structure of black holes analyzed first in Schwarzschild coordinates, and then in a masterful treatment of the Kruskal extension."
Articles
Rindler has published several articles in The American Journal of Physics (AJP):