A Word from a Black Female Relativistic Astrophysicist: Setting the Record Straight on Black Holes

摘要

This Letter is written to clear up a situation, and hopefully we will learnsomething from it: scientifically and morally. Herein is presented a true``historical'' scenario of events, that led to my being the first person(Williams 1991) to successfully work out the Penrose mechanism infour-dimensions (three-space momenta and energy). Before working out a solutionto the Penrose mechanism: to extract energy from a rotating black hole, thePenrose mechanism (since first proposed by Roger Penrose in 1969) had beenattempted by scientists over the world for nearly two decades, with littlesuccess, although making some progress. In the Penrose analysis of Williams(1991, 1995) details of the behavior of efficient Penrose relativisticscattering processes in the ergosphere are described. The reason a solutioneluded other scientists before me is that there was very little known aboutorbits inside the ergosphere, where space and time are no longer separable, asmeasured by an observer at infinity (i.e., far away from the Kerr black hole).In this Letter, I describe how analytic derivations of the conserved energy andazimuthal angular momentum of particle orbits not confined to the equatorialplane allowed me to succeed where others, whose ``shoulders'' I stood on, hadfailed. Also, I will mention some well known scientists in the astrophysicscommunity by name, as I discuss their involvement, and outline the facts behindan author feeling the need to set the record straight.