David Ritz Finkelstein was an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Finkelstein obtained his PhD in Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Finkelstein was educated at City College of New York and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and did early work on quantum logic, black holes, gravitational skyrmeons, the electroweak unification, and quantum-computer models of space-time. He suspected that the universe is a kind of quantum cellular neural network, and hunted the chronon, the quantum of time, since college. His book Quantum Relativity described this work up to 1996.