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

Abstract

This Letter is written to clear up a situation, and hopefully we will learn something 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 in four-dimensions (three-space momenta and energy). Before working out a solution to the Penrose mechanism: to extract energy from a rotating black hole, the Penrose mechanism (since first proposed by Roger Penrose in 1969) had been attempted by scientists over the world for nearly two decades, with little success, although making some progress. In the Penrose analysis of Williams (1991, 1995) details of the behavior of efficient Penrose relativistic scattering processes in the ergosphere are described. The reason a solution eluded other scientists before me is that there was very little known about orbits inside the ergosphere, where space and time are no longer separable, as measured 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 and azimuthal angular momentum of particle orbits not confined to the equatorial plane allowed me to succeed where others, whose ``shoulders'' I stood on, had failed. Also, I will mention some well known scientists in the astrophysics community by name, as I discuss their involvement, and outline the facts behind an author feeling the need to set the record straight.