Werner Israel, OC FRSC FRS (October 4, 1931 – May 18, 2022) was a theoretical physicist known for his contributions to gravitational theory, and especially to the understanding of black holes.
In 1958, Israel accepted a faculty position at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where he remained as professor until his retirement in 1996.
[1] Partly because many interesting examples can be constructed using such thin shells, this has become Israel's most cited paper (thousands of citations).
[4] It was soon shown by Carter that similar statements hold for black hole solutions that are stationary (not necessarily static).
The hypothesis that gravitational collapse in the real world always leads to a Kerr-Newman black hole (which requires an assumption about cosmic censorship in addition to the theorems of Israel and Carter about stationary solutions) is sometimes called the Carter-Israel conjecture.
[7] It was later found that, in a large class of supergravity theories, all supersymmetric black hole solutions are of the Israel-Wilson-Perjés form,[8] generalized to include scalar fields.
What was perhaps Israel's deepest work, published in 1976, concerned a black hole in equilibrium with the Hawking radiation that it emits.
Standard formulations of dissipative thermodynamics are inconsistent with relativity theory as they predict instantaneous propagation of thermal and viscous effects.