William H. Press coauthored a quantitative treatment of physical processes around rotating black holes. With James M. Bardeen and Saul Teukolsky, he organized measurements using locally nonrotating frames in the Kerr metric.
Their applications distinguished a permitted energy-extraction process from an efficient astrophysical mechanism. Studying the required local particle velocities and orbits exposed restrictions that an energy-conservation argument alone would miss.[ref]
Rotating Black Holes: Locally Nonrotating Frames, Energy Extraction, and Scalar Synchrotron Radiation by James M. Bardeen and others. p. 347, abstract: local frames, energy extraction and orbital restrictions
Portrait of William H. Press
. The White House, PCAST portrait, 2021; existing crop by Clay. Public domain in the United States: official-duty work of an Executive Office of the President employee. Source usage terms, via Wikimedia Commons. Source. Articles by others on the same topic
William H. Press is a prominent American astrophysicist and computational scientist known for his contributions to a variety of fields including astrophysics, science policy, and computer science. He is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and has authored significant works in numerical methods, scientific computing, and the use of supercomputers in research. One of his notable contributions is to the development of algorithms and software for scientific simulations.