The Engelbert Experience: Pathways from the Past

Abstract

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For me, that is. This was in the year 1969. I was working at the Institute for Space Studies in New York on a National Research Council Fellowship. I was studying the scattering of gravitational waves by black holes through computer simulation in order to find out whether the black hole left its imprint in some way on the scattered wave. This was done by bombarding the black hole with Gaussian wave packets. When the width of the Gaussian was comparable to or less than the radius of the black hole, there emerged a decaying wave pattern, later to be called the quasinormal mode of the black hole [1]. As is well known, a lot of work has been done on the black hole quasinormal modes since then. Today they are considered to be a means of detecting both black holes and gravitational waves. My original work on the quasinormal modes was terribly exciting—to me. And that is the best-of-times part of the story.