1. The name of the gravitational singularity was popularized by John A. Wheeler. According to Bekenstein, Of Gravity, Black Holes and Information (Rome: Di Renzo Editore, 2006), 24, in a lecture before a large audience. Wheeler was looking for a shorthand version of “completely gravitationally collapsed object,” and picked up the name as a suggestion from “a voice in the audience.” Wheeler gave an account of the first printed use of “black hole” in the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in New York, speaking in front of the Society of Sigma Xi; John Archibald Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (New York: Norton, 1999), 296. Tired of using the long aforementioned phrase, Wheeler took up the suggested “black hole” from the audience. The term was reported even earlier by Ann Ewing in “‘Black Holes’ in Space,” Science News Letter, January 18, 1964, 39. The combination “black hole” was famously used in reference to “The Black Hole of Calcutta,” a dungeon in Fort William, where numerous English and Anglo-Indian soldiers and civilians were held and many died. Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (New York: Little, Brown, 2008), 288–289, describes meeting a fellow “Black Hole Expert” in an English bar, who turned out to be speaking not of his specialty but of the one in India. Also cf. Tom Siegfried, “50 Years Later, It’s Hard to Say Who Named Black Holes,” Science News Letter, December 23, 2013, http://ln.is/www.sciencenews.org/R71Q , accessed January 2, 2014.
2. The Bekensteins moved to Mexico with other families escaping Nazi oppression to a country with relatively lax immigration laws and possibilities of prolonged temporary visits; cf. Adina Cimet, Ashkenazi Jews in Mexico: Ideologies in the Structuring of a Community (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 13, 22, 112. The Bekensteins and many other families found a temporary haven there, though their final destination was New York. This was reached, however, with great effort. Jacob’s father made his way to the US first illegally—and was even arrested—eventually securing passage for the rest of the family.
3. The Unified Honors Program (still in place) condensed the required courses in a way that forced Bekenstein to take the second part of the electromagnetic theory course, given by David Stoler, before the first. This made his first acquaintance with Green’s functions very challenging.
4. This shift has a linear and a quadratic element, first derived for the hydrogen atom by Paul Epstein and Karl Schwarzschild. Bekenstein was able to derive the fourth order term. Jacob D. Bekenstein and Joseph B. Krieger, “Stark Effect in Hydrogenic Atoms: Comparison of Fourth-Order Perturbation Theory with WKB Approximation,” Physical Review 188 (1969), 130–9; “Stark Effect in Hydrogen Atoms for Nonuniform Fields,” Journal of Mathematical Physics 11 (1970), 2721–7.
5. Bekenstein, Of Gravity (ref. 1), 10.