Roy Kerr awarded Einstein Medal

[cosmik debris]

http://www.stuff.co.nz/science/8101704/Einstein-Medal-for-NZ-professor

 

[strangerep]

http://www.stuff.co.nz/science/8101704/Einstein-Medal-for-NZ-professor

I heard a story from other relativists who were around at the time of the original Kerr solution that Kerr was in the UK, and was looking over Newman's shoulder when he made a mistake. Newman didn't notice the mistake, and Kerr didn't point it out, but rather rushed to complete his own solution and get it published quick smart in Phys. Rev. Lett.

Can anyone confirm or deny this story?

 

[Bill_K]

Newman didn't notice the mistake, and Kerr didn't point it out.

I can't confirm the story, but it's believable that Roy would hesitate to correct Newman!

 

[robphy]

From http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Kerr_Roy.html

"
Here is Kerr's own comments taken from [6]:-

Everybody who tried to solve the problem was going at it from the front, but I was trying to solve the equation from a different point of view - there were a number of new mathematical methods coming into relativity at the time and Josh [Goldberg] and I had had some success with these. I was trying to look at the whole structure - the Bianchi identities, the Einstein equations and these Tetrads - to see how they fitted together and it all seemed to be pretty nice and it looked like lots of solutions were going to come out. Then I hit a brick wall. Teddy Newman and Roger Penrose were working on a similar set of methods, but Teddy had come out with this as-yet unpublished theorem that basically 'proved' that my solution couldn't exist! Luckily, my neighbour, who was playing around with relativity, too, got hold of a preprint and I just scanned through it (I'm a lazy reader) and hit the crucial part which proved to me that my solution could exist! After that, I kept working like mad and found the solution in a few weeks.
"

See details in Kerr's "Discovering the Kerr and Kerr-Schild metrics" (pg. 6-7)
http://arxiv.org/abs/0706.1109

(p.7: "
At this point I presented the results at a monthly Relativity conference
held at the Steven’s Institute in Hoboken, N.J. When I told Ted Newman
that (1.1) should have been identically zero, he said that they knew that
n1 was incorrect, but that the value for n2 given in the preprint was a
misprint and so (1.2) was still not satisfied. I replied that since the sum
had to be zero the final term, n3 must also be incorrect. Alan and I
recalculated it that evening, confirming that (1.2) was satisfied.
")

Maybe more details in Melia's "Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226519511/?tag=pfamazon01-20(A copy of Kerr's PRL paper
"Gravitational Field of a Spinning Mass as an Example of Algebraically Special Metrics"
http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v11/i5/p237_1
is linked below [in the last paragraph] of blog entry on how long an econometrics thesis should be...
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-long-should-my-thesis-be.html
)

 

[cosmik debris]

I heard a story from other relativists who were around at the time of the original Kerr solution that Kerr was in the UK, and was looking over Newman's shoulder when he made a mistake. Newman didn't notice the mistake, and Kerr didn't point it out, but rather rushed to complete his own solution and get it published quick smart in Phys. Rev. Lett.

Can anyone confirm or deny this story?

I work at the University of Canterbury where Roy was head of the Maths dept for many years. We were discussing the award at morning tea, (do you people have morning tea?), and someone related this story, I hadn't heard it before.

 

[strangerep]

do you people have morning tea?

I always have morning tea, but I've never been in Canterbury. :-)

 

[tagsdad]

Roy Kerr's reply
1) I was in Austin Tx when the metric was discovered, not in the UK
2) Newmann was somewhere out East
3)I had never heard this story before, but it is complete nonsense.