Born in New York City, Finkelstein obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953 and taught at Stevens Institute of Technology through 1960, while he also held a Ford Foundation Fellowship at the European Centre for Nuclear Research from 1959-1960.
From 1964 to 1976, he was professor of physics at Yeshiva University. In 1958, Finkelstein and Charles West. Misner found the gravitational kink, a topological defect in the gravitational metric, whose quantum theory could exhibit spin 1/2. The simplest kink exhibited an easily understood event horizon that led him to recognize the one in the Schwarzschild metric and eliminate its coordinate singularity.
In essence, Finkelstein determined that whatever falls past the Schwarzschild radius into a black hole cannot escape lieutenant
The membrane is one-directional. This important work influenced the decisions of Roger Penrose and John Archibald Wheeler to accept the physical existence of event horizons and black holes.
Most of Finkelstein"s work is directed toward a quantum theory of space-time structure. He early on accepted the conclusion of John von Neumann that anomalies of quantum mechanical measurement are anomalies of the logic of quantum mechanical systems
Therefore, he formed quantum analogues of set theory, the standard language for classical space-time structures, and proposed that space-time is a quantum set of space-time quanta dubbed "chronons", a form of quantum computer with spins for quantum bits, as a quantum version of the cellular automaton of von Neumann.
His early quantum space-times proving unphysical, he later studied chronons with a regularized form of Bose–Einstein statistics due to Tchavdar Doctorate. Palev. He investigated ball lightning with Julio Rubinstein and James R. Powell. They concluded that ball lightning is most likely a wandering Saint Elmo"s fire, a low-temperature soliton in the atmospheric electric current flow.
He also put forward an in-depth interpretation of the engraving Melencolia I of Albrecht Dürer.
He died in Atlanta on January 24, 2016, aged 86.
Books David Ritz Finkelstein: Quantum relativity: a synthesis of the ideas of Einstein and Heisenberg, Springer, 1996 David Ritz Finkelstein, J. M. Jauch: Notes on quaternion quantum mechanics, CERN, 1959 Charles Maisonnier, David Ritz Finkelstein: Beam intensity limitation in neutralized space charge betatrons, CERN, 1959 David Ritz Finkelstein: Non-linear meson theory of nuclear forces, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Physics, 1952.
He became a member of the faculty at Georgia Technical in 1980.
