Reva Kay Williams PH.D
Astrophysicist
First African-American female astrophysicist
Reva-Kay Williams’ research is the first to prove the Penrose mechanism, a 35-year-old theory named for its author, Oxford University mathematics and physics professor Roger Penrose. It also provides a new, physical explanation for the odd appearance of many of the jets, which some astronomers believe was merely the result of an optical illusion.
As stated by Pofessor Reva-Kay Williams taken from Cornell University Library Archives.
In 1991 Professor Williams 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.