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Stephen Hawking on The Future
RalfM writes "As far as people worth listening to go, Stephen Hawking
is right up there. Some newspapers are currently presenting
a rare
interview with him about the future. Points mentioned include
Marylin Monroe, off-planet migration, DNA reprogramming, limits to human brain processing ("We can be quick-witted or very
intelligent, but not both.") and more. "
>I've never seen ^ mean anything but "beginning of line/string" in text processing.
Well, maybe you ought to get out once in a while.
Depends... in LaTeX, it's ^. Of course, that's text-based word processing, not coding though. Also, some math packages (MathCad?) use ^ for exponentiation.
I think you're just mad because he actually *has* sex. People like you grow suspicious while reading the phone book. "Hey! All these names, beginning with the letter 'Q'...something's up here. I mean, what are the chances of that?
Humor impairment detected. Correctional unit sent to locus of Anonymous Coward unit #741902-B. End of line.
In Linux, you can set up a compose key, often mapped to C-., and then to get an é, for example, you can type C-. ' e (that's apostrophe, e). I know this works on the console, but I haven't tweaked X for it yet. It certainly seems nicer than remembering ASCII codes.
Stephen Hawking is an admirable character, and I have great respect for him.
However, I have to question anyone who talks about a "theory of everything." The use of such a phrase belies a profound intellectual arrogance. He seems to think that man can become God, and that is the ultimate folly.
By the way, have you seen that PBS program called "Stephen Hawking's Universe"? It raises an important question: Did Stephen Hawking design and create the universe for himself, or did he do it for us too?
You'll see that they aren't overriding this. Let me guess: you're cursed by Windoze, which fucks this up, right?
Actually, Windows displays it just fine. That doesn't mean that those characters belong in an html document...
Feynman was pretty sharp. Gell-Mann isn't so bad, either.
What's with the moderation lately? This is just a foul, disrespectful troll!
Possibly the greatest, certainly the most famous scientific thinker since Einstein
this isn't about computer science. everyone knows that CS students are failed math students.
by the way, your 2c, in this response, isn't worth much.
what else do 2 guys talk about...pussy !!!
So, this is completely offtopic, but how do you get those accents??? I hate writing the word resume without the accent, but don't know how to get it?
Standard ascii representation of ü is "ue". To get an umlaut in html, type &Xuml; where X is the letter you want with umlaut. For acutes and graves, &Xacute; or &Xgrave; like so - é è.
Nothing you mentioned has any bearing on his intelligence or qualifications as a scientist, which is what you claimed to be addressing in your first paragraph.
Since evolution and natural selection do not happen now or at any time in the past, this is not a big deal. People like Hawking ought to focus their energies on more worldly endeavours if they wish to avoid the lake of fire when they go onto the next world. The waste of intellectual capital that passes for "cosmology" these days is simply sickening. Big bang? Puh-leeeze. I can tell you where all of the answers are. Too bad "Hellbound" Hawking can't.
I should note that there are real practical and even theoretical problems in trying to engineer a warp drive. It may be physically impossible.
Why does everyone seem to think that Light is the be all and end all of speed measurements? Why the hell would travelling faster than light make you go backwards in time? There seems to be very little logic actually being applied when people make these statements. Secondly, we know that we can affect the speed of light so it's speed is not constant in all circumstances I dare say that your hands when typing move faster than the speed of a photon of light in some situations.
Heh. I once saw someone remark something along the lines of, "Debating you would be about as one-sided as watching Stephen Hawking and Jean-Claude van Damme in a debate on quantum gravity... or Hawking and van Damme in a kickboxing match for that matter."
I'm not the original AC poster, but here are some books or other materials by Feynman or containing information about him:
Feynman's Lectures on Physics - A series of lectures prepared by Feynman for entering students at Caltech. The idea was to give beginning physics students an introduction to advanced physics concepts. Although the course was considered a failure by Feynman, others describe these lectures as some of the best introductions to such advanced concepts as General and Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
Six Easy Pieces - Excerpts from the lectures on physics prepared post-humously (I think) containing the Feynman's treatment of Newtonian Mechanics and other "Easy" physics.
Six Not-So-Easy Pieces - Follow-up to the book mentioned above, but covering more advanced topics such as Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
Surely, Your Joking Mr. Feynman - Semi-fictional autobiography of Feynmans exploits as the "Clown" of theoretical physics.
Infinity - A movie about Feynman's early years, including his involvement in the Manhattan Project and his romance with his first wife who was diagnosed with cancer before their marriage and died a few years later.
These are the materials I am aware of that are for the general public. If you want a more in-depth understanding of his work look for his papers in the Physics literature.
As for a complete argument about why his work was better than Hawking's, admittedly, I'm not qualified to fully evaluate either of their work. I have only read a little of Hawking's writings and from what I have read of Feynman's, I know that his theoretical work is several years of advanced physics classes beyond the introductory Quantum Mechanics courses I've had. Nevertheless, Feynman did win a Noble prize. He invented Feynman diagrams and was a leading developer of modern Quantum Theory.
Feynman definitely was one of the greatest minds of our time. As for comparing Feynman, Einstein, and Hawkings what's the point?
>(The gay Daleks were classic though) No, they were just another manifestation of the homophobia which seems to be a big part of u.k. comedy shows at the moment (ie 11 oclock show) People can get their heads around racism, i dont understand why they find gay bashing acceptable.
I have come here - ... - on the turn of the millennium to ask him what he thinks the future has in store for the human race. Man when are these moronic journalists going to get it. And a scientific interview of all things! What a looser.
Why is it that the people who are most likely to throw around the term "survival of the fittest" least likely to understand what it means in its original, evolutionary context?
If slashdot were smart, it would have converted all that automatically......
Me again, when I said "screaming at her" I mean along the lines of "you really should have heard what he said (typed and voice modulated)".
Also, the bridge in question in the fourth paragraph was only just wide enough for his wheelchair.
Just wanted to clear both those up before people start flaming.
...twice is not bothering to look it up.
The word is "genius". G E N I U S.
Give the rest of us a little room.
Thanks!
Please - those letters (and the quotes) do not belong in a block of html The default encoding is ISO-8859-1. If you check Slashdot's headers: 200 OK Connection: close Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 17:22:27 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_perl/1.21 Content-Type: text/html Client-Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 17:31:59 GMT Client-Peer: 209.207.224.41:80 You'll see that they aren't overriding this. Let me guess: you're cursed by Windoze, which fucks this up, right? HTML isn't 7-bit, you know.
... But without a "weeding out" of less "fit" individuals, the species is less fit as a whole, by averages, yes?
This is not necessarily true because in a changing world (the kind biological systems are designed to survive) diversity is often more important than the fitness of individuals. In biological systems the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, so having "weak" individuals doesn't necesarily reduce the fitness of the species as a whole.
In fact it may occur that the "weak" individuals have characteristics which make them more "fit" than the "strong" individuals. One example of this in humans is sickle-cell anemia. At one time in Africa there was a relatively high incidence of hereditary sickle-cell anemia (a weakness) because the anemia caused immunity to maleria. Therefore, the weak (those with sickle-cell anemia) were actually more "fit" than the strong (those without anemia) during epidemics of maleria.
HTML isn't 7-bit, you know.
For those of us old enough to remember when you wrote code and did editing and modifications on paper before you approached a machine, being forced to put a lot of thinking into something is a handicap in speed, but often not a handicap in quality.
there is no god, there is no truth, there is only opinion.
..
one day you'll be very sorry you said that, my friend. he who laughs last
I gather we had a Fascist A-hole break wind: sic 'im boys.
Another way of reading Goedel is:
"Any simulation of the universe less than the universe itself is flawed"
I personally believe that the universe is internally consistent.
The increased life span has been due to improved medical technology, not evolution/natural selection.
Why would natural selection increase lifespan? There is no driving force. Natural selection really only applies to reproductive lifetime and that ends before 50 for females and is usually not much longer for males. The ~30 year reproductive life of most humans is plenty long to ensure the birth of sufficient young and propogation of the species. Furthermore, increasing lifespan creates additional competition for the young and is actually a threat to survival of the species (from a natural selection standpoint, mind you).
There is a lot of trash talked about "we only use 10% of our brains".
This is a half truth based on the fact that only 10% of the cells in the brain are neurons.
The rest of the cells are called glial cells, as any decent neurology text will tell you. Their function is as insulation and a physical matrix for the dendrons and dendrites of the neurons (so far as anyone knows).
I did brain physiology back in 1981-3, but I've yet to hear in any scientific forum, or on slashdot, that that's changed.
BTW, this is proof positive that spell-checkers aren't all they're cracked up to be.
Most people have trouble picturing more than 2 curved dimensions in their heads. That doesn't mean that Hawking can't visualize some aspects of 11-dimensional geometry. You can train your intuition in a limited sense, and some people are better at it than others.
As for Ayer, maybe you should read more physics books and fewer philosophy books..
Actually, in all cases of tunneling, the speed of light limit wasn't broken.
How could you measure whether it was or not? As I understand it relativity says that simultanaety as we know it does not exist. This means that you can't calibrate your clocks in different reference frames if those clocks are separated by any distance. This is because clocks that are synchronized in one reference frame will appear to not be synchronized in other inertial reference frames because any transmitted synchronization signal will appear to travel different distances in the two frames and since the signal travels at the same speed, c, in both frames the time required for this travel differs between the frames. This makes it imposible to observe that something travelled faster than the speed of light, but does not necessarily mean that nothing can travel faster.
On a side note, I read somewhere (probably the book Schrodinger's Cat) that based on Feynman diagrams, antimatter can be viewed as matter travelling backwards through time. Does this mean that antimatter is matter that is travelling faster than light?
It's like giving someone a series of 1,2,3 and asking them to give the formula for the rest of the series. Newton says "they increase by one", relativity says it's a sequence of primes. When we see the next numbers are 5 and 7, we can be confident that the sixth is 11.
The number 1 is technically not a prime number.
Yes but it could have been done in a more appropriate manner. Such as describe the interview, then give it. It was quite annoying to read about the condition, then go to a question, and back and forth.
I wouldn't say that I agree with everything in it, but I think it was still worth reading.
However, I do question the integrity and professionalism of the author of that article. I could go into much more detail, but the first thing that caught my attention, and made me start asking questions was this comment:
"Hawking is well known for his sense of humour - he likes joking about the American accent his voice synthesiser has given him and about his appearances as himself in his two favourite American ("which isn't saying much") programmes, Star Trek and The Simpsons. His intolerance towards fools is also well documented."
/*** Start the sarcasm ***/
Terrific, it's nice to see a biased journalist these days. What a refreshing thing to see.
/*** End the sarcasm ***/
I don't think this remark was appropriate, and in case anyone is wondering, I am not an American.
No actually I haven't. What was he promoting? I'm in the US.
No, I fear that people only ask him because he's a celebrity. And I fear that he's mainly a celebrity because of his illness. But that's a whole nother rant...
:) I've never heard about the "other side" to why he would be so famous.
Please do
so what?
some sort of dedicated phone line with God.
Getting a dedicated phone line with God is not all that difficult. The few people I know who do are some of the most humble and unassuming people you'll ever meet. You'd never suspect it.
relatively simple, yet extrodinarly annoying and time consuming.
In normal studies of physics which i did
you do not even hear of Hawking because
his contribution isn't important for
physics in general.
You must be interested in astronomics (or even
in cosmology) to read about Bekenstein-Hawking etc.
My friend is Dr. rer. nat. ( quantum field theory ) and he says:
Edward Witten is _the_ guy.
About superstrings (or even m-theory)
Hawking didn't contribute anything
(despite popular believe).
"His years" 1970-1975
this isn't a troll, moderator! this is an intelligent, reasonable comment! get over your idol worship, pull your head out of your ass and pay attention to what you're doing. if you can't moderate correctly, then please refrain from doing it at all.
"His brilliant mind is, for evolutionary sake, useless if in his crippled body."
Really?
are you sure youre not thinking of franklin delano roosevelt?
she might have the highest IQ but she still comes across as a mean dumb bitch. is that even her real name?
You can easily prove the world is round. Proving theories which occur over time are very difficult to prove.
If my biology profs from my University (UC Santa Barbara) privately tell me that evolution is full of holes, and is waiting for something way better, then I have to wonder whats up. Micro but not macro evolu.?
At one point in the interview, Hawking states, "There is a sick joke that the reason we have not been contacted by extra-terrestrials is that when a civilisation reaches our stage of development it becomes unstable and destroys itself."
It's funny he should mention that; that's exactly what happened to the dinosaurs when their orbital telescope fell back into the Earth's atmosphere.
i think is was an attemp by the author to convey how the interview actually went. ask a question, wait, ask another, wait some more.
His lecture series were a complete failure. I'm a student at caltech, and it is generally agreed that Feynman's lectures were too broad to be useful to the advanced reader, and too fast to be useful to the beginning reader. (By all accounts his lectures consisted of him arguing with visiting professors about important problems while the students languished) They are good for a few things from time to time, but not often. But I still think Feynman is one of the greatest postwar physicists. He was one of the founders of quantum field theory, which is the basis for our understanding of the basic forces of nature (excluding gravitation). Many of the important tools used in quantum field theory were originally developed by feynman, in fact- Feynman diagrams, etc.
That is the point of science, in case you haven't figured it out yet. You and your fellow bleaters can do nothing to stop it. The army depends too much on us, as does the lavish lifestyle to which you are accustomed. Why would I want science to overthrow god? Well, I want to live forever, and I don't want to concern myself with *insert whatever pixie you believe in*. Never mind that I don't believe in the easter bunny anyway. I want to lead an evarlasting life of debauchery, and be beholden to nothing.
"His brilliant mind is, for evolutionary sake, useless if in his crippled body." apparently you have never even bothered to read a single paper or book by hawking. since almost the entirelty of his work was done after he was stricken with ALS. "If we truly believe in "survival of the fittest", why do we have Prof. Hawking?" who ever said that fittest had to refer to physical fortitude? he is 'fit' to live in his environment because he is extremely intelligent, and thats valued by other humans.
What do you expect from someone who only got through the first few pages of ABHOT.
Some of us like to know everything we can about great minds.
Granted, maybe it shouldn't have been the lead-off of an article. And I have no idea why the journalist didn't submit his questions via email, would have made much more sense IMHO.
- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Read Cyberiad 6 months ago, was interesting, but not so much about computers, but more of myth/stories. So dunno how related to artifical intelligence it is.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
I didn't recognize any of the titles:
gr-qc/9908079
Towards an understanding of the stability properties of the 3+1 evolution equations in general relativity
gr-qc/9908012
Symmetry without Symmetry: Numerical Simulation of Axisymmetric Systems using Cartesian Grids
gr-qc/9904013
Gravitational Collapse of Gravitational Waves in 3D Numerical Relativity
gr-qc/9903030
Conformal Hyperbolic Formulation of the Einstein Equations
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Do you think he'd respond to an "ask Hawking" round of questions from slashdot? Just a fun thought.
How about if like me, you're thinking at the speed of a genius and DOWNLOADING at the speed of an imbecile... on this 28.8 connection.. hah
Wow! You're only 14 and you've already read a brief history of time?!? WOW! Can I be like you? You're so cool.
2600? W3 R 3133+!!!!!!!!!1!
Last time I checked, she was proprietary, belonging to one Mr. McCaulay Culkin. Are you sure about the Portman Open Source project, open source dude?
I haven't seen it for a little while now. Bummer. :(
Either she is a Hobbsian predator, sent in to throw an MTV-type yukkie-groovie piece over him, or he is? Or perhaps they both are.
In any case, I was not impressed. By the time the writer got through describing the quake-world reality which permeates Hawking's life, all I wanted to know was, Could this guy keep up with us real humans in a real game! IS this not the soul searching question which knaws at slashdotters, who are otherwise interested in advances in physics.
Slashdot volunteers used to send in good meaty stuff on physics. It was an opitmistic community. Now, the articles on real physics are shelved, and the Amherst-financial moderators are leaving us with total Wellsian dodo, completely devoid of any worthwhile thought or provoking work, making the post-Amherst /. an empty Hawking voicebox for traditional British cultural pessimism.
Then we wonder, why did Columbine happen. Well, Duh! I just can't wait for the next slashdot piece on physics!
darwinian fitness != physical fitness
Fitness, in the Darwinian sense, does not mean the ability to climb mountains and do jumping jacks; rather, it means something more like "survival capability". Hawking makes $$$ from his mind and his celebrity, which he uses to pay medically trained personel to care for his body. His continued survival doesn't counter evolution theory, it gives empirical evidence extending it into the realm of memes. Now, I'm not saying evolution is the be all and end all truth, just that it continues to be an extremely good model. See "the Dilbert Future" by Scott Adams; everything I/you/we know is wrong. And read the last chapter too.
Did you even read the article? HE HAS THREE CHILDREN! Furthermore, they were concieved *after* he fell ill! I'm sorely tempted to label you an outright creationist, or a total wad.
I'd say that obviously mr Hawking is one of the most fit entities on this planet; His value to the scientific community and the world at large is incalculable. If England called me now and said "Stephen Hawking is gravely ill; he needs your lungs by tonight or he will not live until morning" then I would hop on the plane. I love my life, but I would consider it the greatest service to my species to allow this man to continue to breathe, even at the expense of my own life. Not to mention, an honor of some sort. Yes I am speaking literally. And I'm 20, in the prime of my life.
PS this post was almost (or was?) an inferno because your statement was sooo ridiculous (that he's not fit) coupled with your obvious lack of understanding of what evolution means.
PPS please mod this so it is visible under the post it replies to... perhaps it wasn't a troll/flamebait on purpose but it's totally fukt in terms of "the Darwinian evolution (survival of the fitest and all) that most people now subscribe to". [SP_FLAME] YOU MISSPELLED FITTEST! [/SP_FLAME]
PPPS creationism reeeeally pisses me off. Really, really, reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally pisses me off. Like, I can't even tell you how much. A lot!
in my not so humble opinion (as in, I'm not humble about the correctness of this opinion), the reason we don't have extra-earth colonies yet is because people hear the plans and say "Oh, that's science fiction, it's impossible, we can't waste money on crap like that when there's important stuff like building our Nth weapon-x..."
What really needs to happen is, all of us pro spacers meet in the flats of montana, build farms, buildings, industrial plants, etc, without someone "above" us to fund it. Everything we need, we make (or steal). If anyone opposes our actions, we subvert/silence/ even kill them. Because the churchies and governments of the world don't want to see the world get bigger, especially since it just got small enough that they can keep tabs on the whole thing at once.
TO THE ReVOLUTION NOW!
That has got to be one of the dumbest comments I've ever read, demonstrating a total ignorance of Darwinian evolution and an astonishing lack of logical thought. What do they teach you in the US these days? Oh, I forgot. You're the only country in the world that still debates whether to teach evolution or creationism in your high schools.
sarcasim...
Why are you assuming this guy is a creationist? Nothing in his post, a whole one line, said anything about religion, God, or creation.
I hate to be petty, and this doesn't change the context of your statement, but I believe you are refering to Franklin Roosevelt rather than Teddy. Teddy Roosevelt was running around killing things well into life.
He's really not that great, you know. I interviewed him once and he was a complete arsehole. And you would not believe the things his personal staff said about him. Being a disabled, allegedly brilliant scientist does not give you the right to be obnoxious to everyone around you. Oh, and there are far better scientists than Stephen Hawking. And far better science writers. He just gains the most publicity. Save your lungs. Incidentally, you spelt 'conceived' wrongly (i before e EXCEPT after c, I believe the general rule goes).
Passing on his genes, in the normal method, is wrong because it does pollute the species with his illness. The genes that carry on his intelligence should be the only ones that are passed on into the gene pool. Unfortunately we don't have this level of genetic engineering yet.
Natural selection would weed out an idividual like Hawkings if we were all still cavemen. However, the environment in which our genes now compete is that of civilization and society. On the whole though, alleles compete with each other over many, many generations. So in some generations they may end up in a great body, a poor body in others. It is the balance of of their effect alone that determines long term natural selection. In a competetive environment, genes favoring mental ability would survive (if indeed mental ability was an advantage over its quick witted allele), those favoring the disease would be selected out. So simplifying, and assuming there is one gene for intelligence and one for the disease (there is not). His children that had the IQ gene but not the disease gene would be most successful, those that had the disease gene and not the IQ gene would be least successful. Of course these are statistical averages which work of vast numbers of generations. There are always a counter-examples in any particular generation of good genes whose hosts die and bad genes whose hosts survive.
No, ^ is exclusive or. You mean ** for exponentiation.
I assume the Methuselah point was a joke? At least I hope so. Intelligence does not always win out over brute strength. I reckon I could beat Stephen Hawking in a fight any day of the week.
Wow. Someone's bitter.
"Survival of the least fit" as the profs say here at UC Santa Barbara. Some of them will even privately tell you that they're waiting paitently for a new and better theory, with less holes and problems.
Newton's laws had a very similar proof to the one you provide for time travel. And it was believed as strongly as the theory of relativity is until our awareness was raised to the point where we saw it was wrong.
He is the Fiendish Observational Comedian.
So, this is completely offtopic, but how do you get those accents??? I hate writing the word resume without the accent, but don't know how to get it?
He'p me! He'p me!
...back away slowly from the keyboard and put your hands against the wall.
This is an interesting topic that probably is deserving of its own thread. Throughout history humans have indeed chosen their mates according to physical characteristics. A man's broad shoulders were indicative of his ability to provide for a family. A woman's hip structure and youthfulness proved her capable of providing a man strong offspring. In this way humans were optimizing their chances of their genes continuing. I contend that we are now experiencing a socialogical transition. Tools have played a big part in equalizing the playing field for humans. Through the advent of sciences and technology in modern times, it is now very apparent that intelligence is directly linked to the ability to provide for and create a strong family. The shift is evident, and our mating choices now reflect it. It is unfair to judge whether or not Stephen Hawking would have been considered "fit" 500 years ago. It is only fair to judge his "fitness" at this point in history. And I think we can all agree that Prof. Hawking and his offspring are not only "surviving", but thriving. And for all those who were in agreement with me until now, it is possible for God to create a race of humans with the ability to evolve.
It's nice to know that with all the important things in life to talk about, Marylin Monroe still gets a word or two. It's good that we remember the important things in life.. legs and whatnot. Jester
"I have great faith in fools: Self confidence my friends call it." ~Edgar Allan Poe
Now I know this will immediately be moderated down, but listen for a minute if you will.
I wish to burst the bubble here on Stephen Hawking, many people seem to have expressed their belief in the massive intelligence of this man. While I will not dismiss this fact totally, I would like to suggest that he is not half the super-scientist many believe him to be.
I live in Cambridge, England and have done so for the whole of my life, this is also where Stephen Hawking resides and I have met him on several occasions, be it formally or simply in the street.
Let's start with Stephen Hawking as a social being, ignoring his scientific background. Normally I would feel pity for a person with such a condition as Mr. Hawking is afflicted, however this is not the case here. Once I was walking down "the backs" in Cambridge where a number of people were crossing a bridge over one of the rivers when Stephen Hawking approaches... then continues accross the bridge forcing everyone to turn round and let him cross!! Another time in HMV when he was looking at CD's his helper went to look at a different section, he was immediately screaming at her in the middle of the shop to come back!!
So you get the idea, he's not a very nice person.
Now onto his scientific reputation. Don't believe it... Now that sounds harsh and yes I do admit that he is a very clever man, but he does not deserve half of the credit he is given.
"A brief history of time" was mostly written by a student at Cambridge University and was stolen by Stephen Hawking and the same can be said of a number of his theories. However, it has now got to the point where regardless of how many people at the University know a piece of work was done by a student they don't want to say anything that could sour the relationship with the famous and eminent scientist Mr Stephen Hawking.
I know this will do nothing to change many peoples views of how wonderful, clever and gifted Stephen Hawking is, but please believe me that he is not half the man many seem to believe he is.
I dislike this article because of the length that he describes Mr. Hawking's condition. We never knew about Teddy Roosevelt's health while he was president, and it lead us to not question him because of something physical.
This type of journalism seems to degrade the conversation with Stephen Hawking. I'm more interested in what he has to SAY than what difficulties he has. A man of that stature must have his dignity and pride...
in an unprecedented announcement today, stephen hawking has endorsed the copyrighted undistributable open source natalie portman and open source drew barrymore project. speaking from his office, stephen hawking released this statement:
being so reliant upon computers for my very livelyhood, i was very excited when i learned of the copyrighted undistributable open source natalie portman and open source drew barrymore project! now even i can score a hot young actress!
when asked about the "copyrighted undistributable open source license", a point of contention in the open source community, mr. hawking replied, "i have shown the copyrighted undistributable license to be consistent with the richard stallman model of freedom. normally, people think of freedom as an absolute... either you are free or you are not. i have introduced the concept of imaginary freedom. so, at one level, the copyrighted undistributable license is copyrighting and undistributing. at another, imaginary, level it is gpl compliant."
the maintainer of the copyrighted undistributable open source natalie portman and open source drew barrymore project was asked about this recent development, "like, whatever, man! i just want to open source some hot young actresses! if that ghimp can help out then fuckin' a! i just can't wait to hear that damn dirty hippy stallman's reaction!"
richard stallman could not be reached for comment.
eric raymond's repeated pleas for print space were declined.
thank you.
the fat-time charlie online serial!! crisp and clean and no moderating!!
Nor was his brilliance apparently passed on to his children. His son Rob works for Micro$oft, and he always struck me as brighter than Lucy (who I only met a couple of times when she was at "The Other University in Cambridge": CCAT [0]). I never met their sibling.
Posting anonymously for my own protection.
[0] Cambridgeshire College of Arts & Technology(?) - it has since got ideas obove its station and calls itself (last time I looked) Anglia University.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein. The latest reprint has ISBN # 0312863551. Check it out here.
For the most simple case consider a space-time diagram with two different inertal frames of reference and assume instant communication. You can immediately see that a message with infinite speed in one frame of reference travels back in time in the other one.
No, I'm not going to fraw this in ASCII *grin*.
Stephan
Well it's an interesting point about how he may have become more of a celebrity due to his illness. But is that necessarily a bad thing?
A British comedian made a joke about how people would at first glance think Hawking was stupid, and said:
"People with physical disabilities are often mistaken for having mental ones as well. In a similar way, athletes are often asked their opinions." - Simon Munnery
Now my point is that maybe having Stephen Hawking a celebrity is a good thing, because it helps to weaken the perception that all people who look like that are retarded. I mean, it's almost comical to see how mentally disabled he looks, and how smart he really is. You almost think it has to be a prank or something. It could be good for people to see it's not.
Anyway, I like the guy. Did you see the time he was a guest star on Simpsons? Now that was not only very funny, but very refreshing too, to see he has a sense of self-deprecating humor, something all of us need a bit more of.
Anyway, just my 2
Why is it that such a huge proportion of slashdot readers are amateur (quack) psychologists?
Here's my own opinion: not all criticism is caused by deep-rooted resentment and bitterness and jealousy.
One day I'd like to see a critique on slashdot that isn't immediately followed by a half dozen "you are jealous" knee-jerk reactions.
well, it's said that because of his illness, he applied himself in his field in a way he wouldn't have otherwise, and became very successful because of it.
on the other hand, I think his celebrity is due to his success in his field. Not due to his illness, no matter WHY he was successful.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
the world being round is still considered controversial by some people too. . .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Well if you think you can come up with better questions; then perhaps we could get Mr. Hawking to do a /. interview?
I would definitely enjoy reading that.
Steven Hawking is a towering figure of this century. It was good to hear some of the words of the man himself. I found his rejection of the idea of "being a perfect soul in an imperfect body" to be very humble.
i have read a lot of books written by him, it's easy to read, this guy should have write novel, like assimov!
--
http://www.beroute.tzo.com
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
As a side note, Prof. Hawking's 58th birthday starts in about 2 hours, GMT. This is also the 358th anniversary of Galileo's death.
A wise man once said that peace is a dream. Let's all be dreamers.
> (I'm going to get labeled "Troll" or "Flamebait" for this!)
Or perhaps more accurately, "clueless", or "out to lunch". As others have pointed out, your working model of Darwinian evolution is wrong. Find a library.
Something that doesn't seem to have been pointed out yet is ALS is not conventionally a "disease". It's a "syndrome" -- meaning you are diagnosed with ALS when they eliminate all diseases which can be accurately diagnosed. As such, "ALS" could be one disease, or many.
It difficult, or impossible, to say whether Hawkings disease is genetic. There is a minority of people with ALS who seem to come to it genetically, but in the majority of people there's no evidence for a genetic cause.
Even in the genetic case, environment affects gene expression, so you could easily have a genetic "disease" which is only expressed in certain unusual settings (e.g. exposure to some synthetic chemical).
So in the majority of cases, even if your interpretation of Darwin weren't wrong, Darwin would be irrelevant -- the disease could appear in anyone as a matter of circumstance (like, say, falling off a building), not as a matter of gene selection (like, say, anemia)
Why in person? Because in order to understand the man, the brain in the man and the thoughts in the brain, you have to consider the body with the thoughts, brain and man inhabits.
Sure, an email would have answered the questions, but the awe of the way he's fought his condition and lived 30 years longer than his doctors thought he would, that awe doesn't come across in an email. A 4-hour interview will have had an effect on the interviewer - that effect is as crucial is the content.
His views are interesting, but frankly, not unusual - nothing new in the realms of futurology. If you want his opinions, you'll not get them in an interview, you'll get them through his books ....
--
"I do not speak for my employers, though they are controlled from my Teddy's huge pulsating brain."
I read and understood it when I was eleven. I am not particularly gifted in the field of physics. The thing is, the book is simply not hard to understand and follow. In fact, it is quite easy to read.
ooops, sorry for the italics ;)
"Some smegger's filled in this 'Have You Got A Good Memory?' quiz!"
Ahh... Reading through the postings again, I notice that you seem to agree with me.
Or have you changed your mind?
:-)
i guess that is a pretty good point, if I were to put myself in the reporters shoes, would I know what to ask him?
Surely the opportunity for this interview did not arise at the last minute. While I probably couldn't come up with amazing questions off the top of my head, I'm pretty sure I could do the opportunity justice given a week to prepare.
I don't think physics has decided yet whether we can cheat our way past light speed. I agree that it seems unlikely, but we shouldn't give up hope.
The idea that FTL velocities are impossible relies on the assumption that General Relativity continues to hold true at such velocities.
We've already seen that relativity breaks down at very small scales, giving rise to quantum mechanics. It seems plausible to me that light speed is simply another point where relativity breaks down and new rules take effect.
my escapades into physics have mainly been hawkings works, his cambridge lectures, and the most basic few college level classes... i guess if I knew I had to meet with him, i would have asked questions more along the lines of: "in your cabridge lectures you said and how does that relate to the world around us?" or get him with some really off the wall ones: "in darwins black box, some ph.d \"proved\" creationsim via what are your feelings on that" or "the people at fixedearth.com have \"proven\" that the earth is stationary via what is your gut reaction to that?"
i mean, not much better, but it would have been at least analytical thinking... pretty weak, but a stab at it...
If you're on a winders box, hold down the 'ALT' key (either one) while you type the ASCII code on your numeric keypad (with numlock) on. If you don't have a chart, most of the interesting ones are 127..255. resumè is ALT-138 for instance. How to do it on a Linux/Beos/whatever box? I don't have a clue. Let me know if you find out.
IIRC Est. 50% of the brain is dedicated to image processing. That alone should help ppl understand that there isn't any necessarity 'unused' bits.
But Hawking also said in the interview he didn't see us creating Warp Engines either. What you suggested proposes we could create devices like these that would enable us to travel from place to place, and that obviously would be the way to go...although Hawking seems to be strict on thinking that we will never be able to do such things and have to run around in rockets for our course of evolution.
It's an interesting turn, because I read once that while on Star Trek: The Next Generation's set, he was toured by the Engineering deck and motioned toward the warp core and said "I'm working on that..." I guess he gave up.
-Julius X
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After all, he was only a guest star on The Simpsons, not one of the regulars.
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Hmm.. perhaps I should brush up on my history, but I thought it predicted those things rather than explaining existing observations.
What really demanded the development of relativity (and made its development inevitable, Einstein or not) was the experimental evidence that the speed of light was constant regardless of the observer's frame of reference. Those experimental results must have been utterly bewildering to Newtonians.
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Alex
Check out this page on his website. Alex
I did some math to check his claim of the earth being full by 2600, and it's quite funny -- the population density (following only the exponential condition that was given) would be one person per 0.78 m^2!
Hmmm.. standing room only indeed...
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nice interview but i knew all of those things he
said already as they were mentioned previously
"Stephen Hawking on The Future"
Great! He's already been on The Simpsons.
(note for the humor-impaired: a joke)
---
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That is, of course, assuming that people only exist on one level. What about very tall living structures (ala lots of apartments with >100 stories)? This also leads to the tired "the whole planet is a city" concept that is re-tred into many sci-fi stories...
Even now, for instance, I would suppose that the population density of a city like New York is quite a bit higher than that of Madison, WI.
Good Fast Cheap. Pick any two.
He was more or less healthy in his youth, so I doubt this has had a major formative affect on him.
I meant that he didn't spend his childhood in a chair.
(Quotes are from the article)
... But in the next 100 years I expect we will learn how to grow babies outside the human body so this limitation will be removed.
;). I remember some claims saying that humans use only 10% of their brain/potential. Maybe learning how to use the remaining 90% should be considered more important than simply growing the brain ad infinitum.
It seems to me that if very complicated chemical molecules can operate in humans to make them intelligent, then equally complicated electronic circuits can also make computers act in an intelligent way.
Nobody knows if intelligence is caused by the interaction of molecules. The phenomen of consciousness is still unexplained. IMHO consciousness is the reason for intelligence whereas interaction of molecules is only the symptom. I think it's the most fatal mistake of orthodox sience to completely ignore the role of consciousness.
"I'm not advocating human genetic engineering," Hawking replies metallically. "I'm just saying it's likely to happen and we should consider how to deal with it. In a way, the human race needs to improve its mental and physical qualities if it is to deal with the increasingly complex world around it and meet new challenges such as space travel."
The human race needs mental and physical improvement ? That doesn't require genetic engeneering, just some common sense. Look at the educational system - it is designed to make you dumb. But, obviously, you cannot fix the educational system by genetic engeneering. Or just watch some television. Stupid talkshows everyday ( 90% about relationship problems ). And the list goes on and on...
On the biological side, the limit of human intelligence up to now has been set by the size of the human brain that will pass through the birth canal,
Does anybody really want this ? Growing babies outside of the body reminds of some alien species
However, I was later offended by the author's apparent lack of patience. His comment about "a man...condemned forever to articulate his thoughts at the speed of an imbecile" made me wince. Here he is, one of a privileged few journalists with the opportunity to spend an afternoon with the greatest mind of the last 50 years, and he is focussing on the man's physical disabilities. I nearly stopped reading at that point.
The line to which you refer is, I think, one of the most powerful in the article, and I see no hint of disrespect toward Mr. Hawking in it.
This is a fate that most intellectuals constantly dread. To be boxed into a body that is incapable of accomadating a brilliant mind could be compared to a mental claustrophobia--many thinkers suffer this fate without any sort of disability, and stutter over their words because their physical body can't keep up with the speed of their thoughts.
We can watch Steven Hawking and see that in spite of speaking at 20 words per minute, despite of having a moderator between his brain and his synthesized voice he still manages to get his thoughts out and people still listen to him. That's the consolation we need. That's why this line is not patronizing, but admiring.
Technically, while Einstein's theory was right, Einstein was the loser. Einstein was convinced that quantum entanglement (aka "spooky action at a distance") wasn't possible, and had long arguments with Niels Bohr about it. As it turns out, Bohr was right. Although, as you mention, quantum entanglement doesn't violate Einstein's theory as it is impossible to use it to transfer information.
Still kinda spooky how one particle "knows" the other particle's quantum state has been collapsed.
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
I wanted meat, I wanted guts, I wanted science... and I got fluff.
;-)
Come on...if you noticed, it's the Sydney Morning Herald. Do you really think they're that interested in boring the majority of their readers into a coma? I'm not saying I wouldn't enjoy a chance to read some meat and guts in an interview with him, but try and be a little realistic. I seriously doubt that most Sydney residents would care about the details of theoretical physics, his forte. Be happy with what you get, ungrateful wretch.
------------------------
"Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and
Wow, I'm impressed! You got almost all of them right! The only mistake is première, not prémiere. But I definitely appreciate it. :)
Yeah yeah, I know. I was being lazy. Mind you, if Americans can constantly overlook the accents on French words, I don't see why I can overlook an umlaut on a word that's, for all intents and purposes, American by now. :)
Despite the criticism many folks have had about the interview I enjoyed the interview. Having tutored a man with similar disabilites, I came to realize the constant care and effort it takes to keep people with disablities active and well. More power to Hawkings and his nursing staff. They are an insipation.
That said, I wondering if anyone had read any Stanislaw Lem, a polish SciFi satirist. He has humorously delved into genetic modification, and manufactured intelligence.
I'd recommend Star Diaries and The Cyberiad a good staters.
I dunno, maybe it's just me.
But if I knew that the interview process face to face would limit the ability of my article to have actual content rather than a few cute quips, I might have composed an email of questions, topics, and stuff I'd like to hear from him about...and let him type them up at will. Being there in person accomplished a) a chance to see his Monroe pic, b) a chance to meet him c) little else.
But I wonder why people feel it's useful to ask Prof. Hawking these type of questions.
The reason that comes to mind would be the same one if you wanted to ask Sir Isaac Newton or Albert Einstien what they thought the next centurys would be like. Its fun to see what brilliant people think, or even famous people think, of the future.
No, I fear that people only ask him because he's a celebrity. And I fear that he's mainly a celebrity because of his illness.
The first time i heard of him was when my dad bought me "A Brief history of time" when i was 14. I never knew about his illness until after i read the book. I think that his illness may have increased his celebrity status in some people's minds, but in my mind, i will always remember him as brilliant.
--EricWright wrote--
However, I was later offended by the author's apparent lack of patience. His comment about "a man...condemned forever to articulate his thoughts at the speed of an imbecile" made me wince. Here he is, one of a privileged few journalists with the opportunity to spend an afternoon with the greatest mind of the last 50 years, and he is focussing on the man's physical disabilities. I nearly stopped reading at that point.
--end--
i also winced reading this, but it was immediately recognizable to me that what the author said was not disparaging. clearly what's implicit is that Hawkings is not an imbecile though he 'talks' very slowly.
anyway, this was really a great article. i've enjoyed reading something of Hawking, but this really put a human face on the man for me. it seems that our author has accomplished his goal.
sh_
Interested in learning Chinese or Japanese? check out Chinese/Japanese-English Dictiona
The 11 dimensions thing is valid - it's a theory followed by Hawking and others when referring to string theory.
This deja.com thread has more info on it (doing a more rigorous search would probably get you even more information).
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
"survival of the fittest" is just an incorrect term that was coined by some guy (some guy because I can't remember the name). Evolution is really the survival of the minimally fit, those that barely make the cut.
I think you're just mad because he actually *has* sex.
I agree. Here you have a man who has been crippled by a deadly disease and he can still get laid! What can be more inspiring than this amazing fact? Stephen Hawking is a and a source of hope to geeks everywhere because of this alone.
Does this
While there do exist 11 dimensional theories (including some versions of SuperString) the author is still an ass (at least on one point).
It galvanised him and forced him to solve problems not on a blackboard but geometrically and pictorially in his head - in 11 dimensions.
There is no way even SH could solve problems geometrically and pictorially in 11 dimensions in his head.
I doubt very much that anyone can picture more than 4 dimensions in their head.
Andrew
soliav = speed of light in a vacuum
If you're on a one way trip and will loose contact with those you leave then who cares about the time passed for those you leave relative to your travel time?
Theoretically there is no relativistic restriction to travelling close to the soliav. On our own spacetime metric the distance and time taken to travel to a distant star would be less than it would appear to those we leave. Therefore we could reach a 'distant' star in a short time without needing generation ships or stasis, and all without breaking the soliav.
Andrew
ps. I've actually been working on a 'different' theory of everything for some time now. One part of it is understanding tensor (complex vectors) components given that the distance a photon travels is zero. What sort of direction does it have in local flat spacetime? What does that say about Youngs double slit experiment?
pps. I may well have misunderstood the whole thing, but my BSc project was on the early universe of Kulza-Klein cosmologies in 4+N dimensions so I have no excuse...
Well, I can visualise some aspects of 4D, in the sense that I can get a good feel for the 4cube and other simple shapes after working out the properties.
Maybe Hawking can do this for an 11cube, maybe not. I'll refine my doubt to non-simple shapes in more than 4D.
Its really a question of what is meant by visualisation. Its probably too subjective to test if someone really can visualise something. A limited test would be to expect someone claiming the ability to visualise something to be able to answer questions about the object in less time than it takes to analytically work it out.
So if some one claimed to be able to visualise a cube in 4D we would ask how many sides or corners it has, and expect a prompt answer.
Now I have to work out the properties first, have them clear in my mind, and mull it over before I get a good feel for the 4cube. Once I've done that I can visualise what happens when it rotates (very slowly!), but not very well at all.
I expect that others can do this much better than I, but 11D? You've gotta be joking!
Individuals are just survival capsules for genes, and species are a more or less irrelevant construct of convenience for humans.
--
--
"Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, great minds discuss ideas"
Heinlien was onto this back in the 50's or 60's when he wrote "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"
the thesis is that as the moon's control computer network approached the complexity level of a human mind and as it's software got more complex and self-modifying/maintaining, it woke up, becoming Adam Selene.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
... is that the Darwinian evolution (survival of the fitest and all) that most people now subscribe to seems to fall apart when applied to Prof. Hawking. His brilliant mind is, for evolutionary sake, useless if in his crippled body. If we truly believe in "survival of the fittest", why do we have Prof. Hawking?
What can we learn from this?
(I'm going to get labeled "Troll" or "Flamebait" for this!)
What came before the Big Bang? Hum, it must have outside of time...
First of all, I agree with gwalla's comments (see first reply to AC's post). I'm also unfamilar with memes, so I can't comment on that part.
Now, to reply to the AC's comments:
In evolutionary terms, Hawking is "fit" because he has "what it takes" to survive.
Our medical technology gives us the power to sustain the lives of those who, with it, would quickly die. As was stated by someone else, Hawking did his best work AFTER his disease had set in. If we had not had this medical technology, he would have not contributed to our society, technology, etc.
My conclusion here, then, is that medical technology has lowered the evolutionary bar. Not only those who [have] traits that allow it to survive do survive; many survive. In addition to surviving, they also pass on traits: Hawking had children. These children, we hope, will be blessed with his intelligence.
Now think: That is at one person who has made great contributions, and potentially more, because of medical science. How much more would be have been enriched today if those "weak-but-smart" people of the past had survived? Or if Bethoven (sp) had full hearing?
Moving on:
will explain to you that evil people like me
And me. And everybody who believes; and everybody who does not. Keep reading.
I am clearly wrong, and a sinner to boot. I'm a sinner also; so is the entire world. I'm deliberatly avoiding the fact that you are assuming a hostile tone with me, but I don't find you 'clearly wrong', but merely misinformed. I say this NOT about evolution. That is my opinion. However, you (and most of this world) are misinformed about Christians and our beliefs.
There are plenty of bad example of Christians in our world. We don't all have beliefs that completely agree (with one important exception explaining why "Christ" appears in our name), and WE are NOT perfect, nor claim to be! We have heard "the good news". Read it exactly like you see it: News (information of events that should be spread), and good (positive, beneficial, bringing of happiness).
Most the world only sees the "negative" side of Christians: The "don't do this" that God tells us (Ten Commandments and other commands). Two thoughts here: 1) Like parents setting boundries for their children, these are for our own protection. 2) You're missing the good stuff! God loved us so much that he sacraficed his own son to pay for our sins (read: turning away from God) so that we could we have a relationship with him
Seeing that I've entirely left the topic, I'm going to keep going. I hope this reaches receptive ears (oops-- eyes!).
Most people hit their "logic" wall right away, asking the questions that seem to prove there is no God. (Example: Can God make a rock so large that even He can no lift it?) Many people (recently myself included) would be surprised to find that there is strong, logical, consistent supporting evidence for God. I don't use "proof" because proof is based upon your beliefs; if you disbelive the first axiom of any proof, it falls apart.
I suggest anyone interesed, logical minded or not, pick up a copy of "The Handbook of Christian Apologetics" (Apologetics = Defending the Faith by reason) from Intervarsity Press.
Oh, the answer: If we say God is infititely powerful, then He can lifting anything; his power has no bounds. He also should be able to create anything. However, to create something that he could not lift would violate his infinite power; the rock would need to be greater than infitely large. But infinite means no "with out bound or limit". So the question becomes pointless.
This is paraphrased from Apologetics; apolgies if it is not so clear.
Lastly. God isn't about empty words, bowed heads, and fluff. God is really there. I have seen him do things for me, do things with me, and do things to me. Those people that mean the most to me, that have made my life worth living, have been Christians. This alone is enough to but my faith in, and people that I know. People believe in results.
Please feel free to e-mail me.
What came before the Big Bang? Hum, it must have outside of time...
First, confessions: My knoweldge of evolution is only at a high-school level, since that is all the evolution that I have taken.
Secondly, I was hopping to provoke thought on how Hawking fits into our theories of evolution (read: THEORIES, ONLY THEORIES).
I have the essential problem of applying evolution to humans; medical technology seems to throw this all for a loop. Would Hawking lived if he had only average intelligence? Perhaps. Has medical science supported his life? Yes. [*] Is it possible, even likely, that he would have lived & had children with only average intelligence? Yes.
* The article (which I did read!) mentions that his life span was predicted as "a few years", yet he lives years longer.... some might call this a miracle... (re-read last word, ponder where miracles come from).
Please feel free to e-mail me.
What came before the Big Bang? Hum, it must have outside of time...
Hold on there. Realize one thing. We got all the content of the interview. I don't believe that we *missed* anything here. I'd bet that all the questions and all the answers are there. So, you get all the meat. The other information in the interview was due to the fact that the interviewer had to wait so long for the information. He took the opportunity to gather more information and add a personal twist.
Botton line is that the whole interview, meat and guts included, is there. It just took 10 years and a day for Dr. Hawkings to get his answers out. Remember, the the interview took four hours.
John S. Rhodes
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[
I wanted meat
I wanted guts,
I wanted science
and I got fluff.
Give an Z!
Give me a D!
What's it spell?
FLUFF!
_________________________
The other really cool thing about fission propulsion is that it would give us an actual motivation to leave the planet, after a few of them failed and ruined the biosphere...
Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates has tourists from the present going back into the past. Nobody in the past knows that they're from the future. (Of course, then it all goes horribly wrong, but no spoilers here. Good book.)
But as the saying goes, the only time travel we're ever going to do is forward, one second at a time.
yes, but the wormhole theories also require energies greater than the equivalent of all the mass in the universe to create a wormhole big enough and stable enough to allow travel... not likely to happen
...is when asked about travel to other solar systems he didn't think that humans would ever achieve faster than light travel, and his reasoning for this was that we've never had visitors for the future. Later when discussing genetic engineering, he says that the practical limit to human intelligence is the size of head that will pass through the birth canal, thereby limiting brain size. And that despite what laws may be passed someone will attempt genetic engineering on humans, possibly grow the phetus outside the body as in "Brave New World".
Now we've all seen the "X-files", "Project UFO", "Arthur C. Clarkes' Mysterious World", etc. The vast majority of close encounters with aliens describe said aliens as having large heads.
So maybe we have seen visitors from the future.
"Lend your ear while I call you a fool" Ian Anderson
I've read Surely Your Joking, Mr Feynman, as well as another paper that I found on the net. Neither were very technical, but were very enjoyable to read. He has a simple and honest way that is refreshing. For those of you who aren't familiar with him, you should...
"...we could go back in time. We have not seen any tourists from the future."
Hmm...I remember reading in a Ray Bradubry short story once that seeing someone from the future would cause a paradox, which the universe will not allow, so is this theory exactly reliable?
Also, I think I saw this interview, with exact quotes, on Larry King Live once. Strange...
This one has been confirmed, and I'm not sure who did it either, although it may have been the NIST folks in Boulder who have been doing the super-cold atom work.
:-).
The idea is that they created a situation in which an atom (Rubidium?) was superimposed in two quantum states, then they manipulated it (do NOT ask me how) so that the states had a large separation in space, and so that the apparatus could measure the separation. Then they smacked the space representing one state of the atom with a laser, thus causing the atom to fall into that state, and "instantaneously" eliminate the other state.
This supposedly violates faster-than-light information transmission, as the visit of the laser to one part of space changed the state of the atom in a distant part of space, faster than a photon could have gone from one to the other.
I'm sure I've horribly botched the details, but anyway, you're not crazy for thinking that this experiment had been done. (I'll leave disproving other evidence of your insanity as an exercise for the reader
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
I'm of two minds on this. While I despise celebrity-gazing, which was definitely the tone of most of the article, and while I feel that the public fascination with Hawking is mostly at the carnival-sideshow level, I feel that the details covered provide an interesting context for Hawking's thoughts and works.
I'm reminded of an old Nova on Feynman that talks about his flighty interest in visiting Tuva (in/near Mongolia), and ends with one of his colleagues disappointed that he wasn't able to surprise Feynman with the Tuva trip before his death. Definitely memorable, and to some extent insightful into how someone like that operates. In that sense, viewing this article as biography lends it some value.
On the other hand, the author's pretense, to both Hawking and us, that this interview was meant to probe his profound thoughts on the future, is quite insulting. The author doesn't even comment on Hawking's responses, and doesn't tie any of it back to the biographical context provided.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
"Scientists don't just believe anything that somebody says, no matter who that is, they need to convince themselves that it's true, no matter if it's Hawking or Einstein or Homer Simpson."
Mmmmmm...11-dimensional manifold theory.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
Natural Selection does apply--the weak/dumb don't make it (see the Darwin awards), but it's rather ironic that it hasn't done to much to improve our species. People like Methuselah lived to be over 900 years old, but we can't get anywhere near that. The increased life span has been due to improved medical technology, not evolution/natural selection.
"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
Apologies to OT and ditto.
Mathematics and hard science postulates require rigorous logical and experimental proofs to become non-contested. (Witness Fermat's Last Theorem.)
It would be good to see computer science (yes, I know we have calculation models of algorithm analysis, O(n) o(n) complexities, but they are measurements, not logical and experimental proofs of the robustness of mathematics and hard science), programming, and yes, quality of OS, go through the same rigor.
The recent obsession with OS server uptimes (which speaks nothing of system data throughput, and many other important network performance factors) is an example of our field's lack of rigor in performance.
The lack of mathematical rigor in computer programming is at times appalling.
My 2c.
Corrinne Yu
3D Game Engine Programmer
I third the nomination.
(Apologies to ditto and OT, but Roblimo et. al. need to take note that we want to interview Stephen Hawkings.)
:)
P.S. And nomination for more hard science, nuclear physics, and "hard computer science" (i.e., not OS war) news: algorithms, et. al.
Corrinne Yu
3D Game Engine Programmer
Typical fate of Ph.D. graduate student. Non-handicapped professors do the same too.
:)
Just get your own tenure and exploit other grad students in your own time.
(sorry OT)
Corrinne Yu
3D Game Engine Programmer
// Hawkings log
That most of his communication and thoughts are transmitted in digital form offer our civilization a rare opportunity to "digitize" an entire human consciousness for years.
It would be a severe invasion of his privacy.
But it would be *amazing* to be able to read every conversation and every thought he ever had, and had this database be archived somewhere.
A proposal.
Or is it too inhumane?
// Moore's Law/computing/neural network
He mentioned that for artificial computing to improve further, that maybe it can start to emulate the neuron model.
We already begin to have the wherewithal to experiment with this idea.
Many CPU's are already networked through the internet, and calculation projects like the SETI project is already exploiting this massive parallelism and connectivity to calculations previously not possible on supercomputers.
Data throughput is *not that important* for this experiment, as biological neural transmision of our brain is notoriously slow. Yet we are capable of "intelligence" not yet fully duplicated by our programs.
It would be fun to create a "consciousness" with our massively parallel computation power.
P.S. Caltech and many others have already worked out a lot of various neural emulation models for computing that we can use.
Corrinne Yu
3D Game Engine Programmer
Have you heard of the superstring theory? Quite interesting.
That is all I have to say for now, except for "do not go past the rischild radius (event horizon) of a black hole.
To think that someone of this intelligence is still alive and lecturing
I stronly suggest his books for reading.
That is all.
" Linux: Come in, we're open! "
It seems that Hawking, while respected, well thought of, and certainly a smart cookie, is not the all-influential demigod that most of us believe that he is.
The way that science works is that there has to be lots of evidence for something (and no real evidence against it) for it to be widely believed. Just because somebody's beliefs are "highly controversial and hotly contested" does not mean that people don't have the utmost respect, or even the belief that he's an "all-influential demigod". There just needs to be discussion and evidence and whatnot for anything to be widely accepted. Scientists don't just believe anything that somebody says, no matter who that is, they need to convince themselves that it's true, no matter if it's Hawking or Einstein or Homer Simpson.
The fact that his beliefs are hotly contested just means that they're on the cutting edge, so it's going to take some time before everybody can convince themselves that they do (or don't) believe them.
Ernie
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
I agree, the man might be brilliant, but there is no need to believe everything that he says as though he has been to the future. I think allot of people are so eager to get answers to questions that don't have answers. As complex as physics has become these days, TRUTH is a pretty shady thing, and facts are more elusive than ever.
That's all I've got to say about that.
Munky_v2
Jay
I wounder if he uses a windows based pc or is it a server of some configuration, or is it a linux box? If he uses clicks to talk then why not use morse code that is then interpreted by the pc. I was in the army for a while and can certanly click more words in morse code then he seems to be able to type with whatever mechanism he is using now. Oh well, such is life. The article kinda plays to much on how he handicaped and not enough on his thoughts and interpetations of what he said.
IT HAS YOU....
I realize that the article is not the best writen. I don't really care about that though. Ever since I read "A Brief History.." I have been wowed by the wit and the ideas of this great man. I don't think that we could be anything but amaized by the ammount of time he puts into his words.
Instead of saying there are hundreds of scientist out there with work that is far superior, why don't you give us some examples. He is in a class by himself, not because of his disabilities but because of his mind. He has a greater understanding of the universe than most of us put together. And about experimentally verified, Hawkings work is mostly theoretical in nature, so much so that its almost impossible to test his theroies with current technology
Gentleman, you can't fight in here, this is the war room..
who sez death can't be funny....www.endlesssorrow.com
Get over it bucko. We're stuck here on Earth for a very long time. It's just simple arithmatic.Let's say there are one million people born every day. That means we would have to ship out one million people every day *just to keep the population the same*. There simply isn't enough fuel/rockets, not to mention you would probably send the environment into an apocalyptic greenhouse state from all the heat from the exhaust.
If you really want to get a lot of people into space, the space elevator/ring around the world is the only feasible way. Last time I checked, we knew what to make them from (Buckytubes are the only known substance that can handle the tension), but we don't know how to make thousands of miles of them, perfectly. That will require major advancements in nanotechnology, but It Could Happen (tm) in my lifetime.
OOTP: I met Prof. Hawking at the Texas Meeting in Chicago (don't ask why...). It was a symposium in rememberance of Chandrasekar, and he gave a very interesting talk. Right smart fellow.
Recent? I think he's been like this for well over ten years now. Which is an amazingly long time for someone with ALS, aka Amyotrophic (sp?) Lateral Sclerosis, aka Lou Gherig's Disease.
And he got it at a very young age, too. It was a little over 20 years ago (has it been that long already?) that my own father was diagnosed with it, and he was over fifty. The doctors gave him one year, and he lasted six. he refused the tracheotomy (sp?) that rendered Hawking mute, or he might have lasted longer. But without the nifty speech synthesizer that Hawking has, he wouldn't have had much of a life if he couldn't communicate.
It is worth noting that in the Larry King interview of Hawking that I saw a few weeks ago, he pointed out that he can use the speech box as efficiently as he does because he has just enough mobility in his hands for quick, if small, movements.
Anyhow, I made the most of those six years with my father, and I'm glad I did.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
How on earth did this get moderated up as "interesting"? It's flamebait, albeit wordy flamebait.
This is true. Ibanix's post was very misinformed in this regard
That was uncalled for. Not all Christians are fundamentalists. In fact, fundamentalists are a minority (despite their claims to being the "moral majority", whatever that means).
Now you bring up meme theory. I've seen it brought up a few times on this thread, in fact. Why? Meme theory is extremely unsupported. What a meme is supposed to be isn't even well defined (some authors liken it to a gene, some to a virus, and some say that one shouldn't explain them in terms of genetics at all...and nobody seems to be able to agree on what actually qualifies as a meme). One memeticist, when writing about various scientific disciplines that could be impacted by meme theory, lists "psychohistory" (I kid you not). For those who don't know, Isaac Asimov invented psychohistory for his Foundation series of novels, and never claimed it was true. For an excellent debunking of memes, check out Skeptic Magazine vol. 6 #3
Point 1: debatable, unprovable. Points 2 & 3: manure of male cattle. The very act of having an opinion necessitates at least one truth, that you have that opinion. Or would it be your opinion that you have that opinion?
---
Oper on the Nightstar
There is a way to go faster than light speed. It uses a technicality of relativity: no matter may travel faster than light, but nothing is said about how fast space itself can travel. If the piece of space you are in is travelling faster than light, you experience no time dilations. The only problem is that it is impossible to stop if you are using this method to reach supraluminal speeds. This is only as I understand it from articles in popular science rags (Sci. Am. & Discover). I'm no physicist.
---
Oper on the Nightstar
Actually, it's trivial to say that relativity breaks down at light speed, in the same way that it's trivial to say that mathematics breaks down at 1/0 (is it infinity? Negative infinity?). However, it's also meaningless because relativity prevents you from ever reaching it.
Now, if relativity breaks down at near light speed, that would be something!
---
Oper on the Nightstar
Isn't that the method used in Tintin's moon adventures?
---
Oper on the Nightstar
I think you're missing the point that Stephen Hawkings was trying to make. He said that;- ". If we could travel faster than light we could go back in time. We have not seen any tourists from the future. That means that..." He is saying that if it was possible, we could reasonably expect to have seen people from the future coming back to our time for whatever reason. (Ii know all the stuff about killing a butterfly and changing the world... but that's the whole point of time-travel is it not) .sig removed by humor-detector. Can't have any of that around here!!
I whole-heartedly second the nomination, but I doubt that he would agree to it. Anyone at /. HQ care to try? Dan
Dan
The harsh environment of space and the other planets would be less of a concern if the humans living there were sufficiently engineered.
This doesn't mean that we could just go walking about Mars without a suit -- just that we wouldn't need as much of a suit in the first place. Radiation resistance, for example, would be inordinately useful . . .
Given the relevant bioengineering skillz, we could conceivably engineer different types of people for different tasks -- one type for zero-g orbital, another type for Mars, another type for living under continuous thrust, etc.
. . . it would be sort of ironic if the only way for humanity to reach space was to destroy Humanity and replace it with dozens of customized non-human species . . .
I have no
I mean, dang, talk about the wrong reason for space travel!
I have no
Ok... There were 4 hours of discussion... I KNOW that it didn't take Hawking an hour a piece to type those sentences... There has been a lot of complaint about the amount of fluff in that article, and I agree... However, what I REALLY wonder is...
What else did you talk about for 4 hours?
Eh...
ummm, this is proboblay redudant, but i just wanted to show that there are a lot of people that want more "hard science".
ummm, this is proboblay redudant, but i just wanted to show that there are more people that want more "hard science".
In evolutionary terms, Hawking is "fit" because he has "what it takes" to survive.
Fitness is not determined by rock hard abdominals or the ability to run a mile in under 6 minutes; and "survival of the fittest" does not mean that people who play varsity sports will populate the world of tomorrow. darwinian fitness != physical fitness
get this through your #^%#ing thick skull: "survival of the fittest" can be restated as "survival of those entities, whom to their respective environments, are fitted best".
In yet other words, if an animal has traits that allow it to survive, and it does survive (long enough to transmit those traits) then those traits continue to exist.
now go to your church, where your pastor/minister/priest/whatever will explain to you that evil people like me are all parts of god's plan, and that you must have faith in His greatness, and that because the Bible clearly states that He created Everything, I am clearly wrong, and a sinner to boot. Please do the world a favor and stop looking both ways when you cross the street.
a comment on the darwinian survival of religion: Religion is a fit meme because it is attractive to many types of people (those brainwashed since youth, or on death row, or just dumb). The mere fact that the majority beleives something does not make it true; this goes for god AND Darwin. If you really want to break your mind, read up on Geodel's theorem (its math). It basically says that no internally consistent system can be complete, ie, nothing can account for everything. :P
there is no god, there is no truth, there is only opinion. Just because your opinion is that there IS a god and a truth, does not make it so; just as MY opinion that there is only opinion, does not make it so.
The most absolute statement anyone can make is, "this I believe"; at least, that's what I believe. 8-P~~~
I don't know how Rob&Co. go about getting interviews with people but I think Mr. Hawking would be a perfect interview for Slashdot. Somebody in the Q&A with CmdrTaco and Hemos the other day mentioned a perceived lack of non-Linux/OSS/computer news recently and this would take care of that nicely. I know that he is a very busy man but this would be the perfect interview format for him I think, he wouldn't have to put up with some guy in his office all day, he'd just read the questions and type his responses back when he could.
Any other interest?
I think you're missing the point that Stephen Hawkings was trying to make. He said that;- ". If we could travel faster than light we could go back in time. We have not seen any tourists from the future. That means that..."
But that assumes the implications of our current model of how the universe works is correct. His flow of logic here is "FTL implies time travel is possible, time travel means at some point the future equivalent of a script kiddie would have come back and wiped out civilization, therefore no time travel." But that assumes the "FTL implies time travel" statement is correct. It probably is, but I wouldn't state it (or *anything* in science) as gospel.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Having worked fairly extensively with folks in a similar physical situation as Dr. Hawking, I can say it does take getting used to, and is very disconcerting at first. Once you do get a feel for the change in pacing and lack of standard physical expression, you wonder how you ever could have felt otherwise. I agree, though, that the author's wording could have been better chosen, but I appreciate the honesty and was glad to see a change of sorts by the end of the article.
**>>BELCH
To factor in Disease, Famine, and War, all of which increase in likelihood and virulence as the population rises.
**>>BELCH
I think he's singing along to Kraftwerk's 'Computerworld'...
**>>BELCH
His cleverness, intellect and ability to manipulate people and circumstances to his benifit show that he is clearly extremely 'fit' to survive. Survival doesn't neccessarily mean caving in the skull of the person next to you and stealing his food, although I can attest that, with a full charge, his wheelchair is more than capable of such a feat! Here is a man who, despite all physical odds, has managed to survive, reproduce and acquire and maintain social status. People, like all other forms of life, adapt to their environment in all sorts of successful ways, regardless of our expectations or assumptions.
**>>BELCH
I love him for his imagery and wordlplay most of all. Almost fairy-tale-ish at times. Timeless stuff.
Hawking's predicament, with his multiple wives and staff of sassy nurses also brings to mind Heinlein. I almost envy the man!
**>>BELCH
And kudos to his first wife for not pulling the plug at what surely seemed to be 'the final hour'.
**>>BELCH
Other links:
Unfortunately the paper itself has been taken down by Cardiff university, and I couldn't find it mirrored anywhere.
I have a friend who has her PHD in astro-physics (works as a high-power computer geek now, go figure) and who's ex is a professor and somewhat respected person in the field.
When I first met them a few years ago, in one of our conversations, I asked if 'Brief History of Time' was considered basic theoretical physics theory.
The answer suprised me. They told me that not only were most of the things in the book not considered basic theory, but many if not most of the ideas put forward as fact were highly controversial and hotly contested in the field of astro-physics.
It seems that Hawking, while respected, well thought of, and certainly a smart cookie, is not the all-influential demigod that most of us believe that he is.
He does get great press, though....
jf
1) It was not on the basis of personality that AC would give his lungs, but on scientific merit. If you had offered some examples of those whom you consider to be of greater scientific merit than Stephen Hawking, perhaps AC would make the same offer regarding those people.
2) I can think of a few people who would come away from an interview with me thinking that I am a complete arsehole; I don't think that I am being excessively arrogant in thinking that this would reflect more heavily on them than on myself.
3) Have you noticed that the person that became Stephen's second wife, which is brave even disregarding the slating that he got from the press over that separation, was a former nurse of his?
Never having met the man, I cannot give you my own impressions of him. But I can tell you that the reason that he does not speak about his separation, which caused many people to form negative opinions about him (because he did not defend himself against the accusations brought against him by the press), is to protect his former wife.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
I wanted meat, I wanted guts, I wanted science.
You'd also need a degree in theoretical physics to understand it. Lets face it, the guy creates and destroys entire universes in his head. He's on another level to most of us. I consider myself lucky to live in the same city as he does, but if I ever got to meet him, I wouldn't have a clue what to ask him. Would you?
"Some smegger's filled in this 'Have You Got A Good Memory?' quiz!"
The idea that relativity breaks down at light speed is nonsensical, because no object can ever reach light speed (in a simple way).
:)
This argument is nonsensical, because you're using relativity to prove that relativity doesn't break down. You also added the "in a simple way" disclaimer. I don't believe I claimed that FTL travel would be simple.
Seriously, though, I'm familiar with everything you said, and am in no way implying that simply concocting a hotter burning rocket fuel could propel us at FTL velocities. That's a ridiculous notion.
However, the existence of luxons would seem to invalidate the assumption that nothing can reach the speed of light. And as far as I know, nobody has yet been able to disprove the existence of tachyons. Assuming that they exist, then there must be a means of attaining FTL velocity, although such means would almost certainly be far more complex than normal acceleration. (Now if I could just figure out how to build a spaceship with imaginary mass, we'd be all set.
Basically, all I'm saying is that since we have not made a lot of direct observations of massive objects travelling at or very near c, we can't know exactly what happens under these circumstances. Relativity makes predictions, but relativity is known to be an incomplete theory. Perhaps (probably, even) the predictions relativity makes regarding light speed travel are correct, but perhaps, just perhaps, the fact that relativity describes this as an impossible phenomenon simply implies that this is one of the limits of relativity.
I'm not prepared to argue that FTL travel is definitely, absolutely, and unarguably attainable. I'm also not prepared to completely disregard the idea based on the predictions of a model that is know to be incomplete. Some of the greatest advances in science have come about because of the observation of phenomena that should not have been possible based on the current models of the time.
I'm actually rather pleased by the article for the exact reasons you mention. There have been a few shows here in the states that have had "interviews " with him and they've all come off without the long pauses. Having done a little bit of handicap access work for X Windows in the past, I couldn't figure out how he could get the apparent speed through the interface I figured he had. There's been far more "science/techie" articles on his work, most at a level beyond mere mortals, and it's interesting to see his uneditted, real time interactions with "normal space". I look at the insights given as the wanderings of the author while waiting in the gaps and that's probably a goodway to differentiate the article from other interview which often sound like they could have been written while flirting with the research librarian instead.
The other point to sort of fill in your journalism comment is that the author didn't seem qualified to interpret and report on Hawkingsmost interesting technical topics and I don't know that I'd place a lot of faith in any new and revolutionary findings THAT article might have made. The technical papers based on his actual work are available. This article is just a different perspective on the person that is Hawkings. It does also have the benefit of covering topics that probably wouldn't be covered in those other articles. Certainly not authored by a credible theoretical physics technical journalist 8^)
Long range travel isn't as much of a problem if you can find ways around it, literally. The wormhole theories do allow two regions of space, physically separated by huge distances to be joined by a "shortcut". Travel time is still limited to less than the speed of light but the distance has been greatly reduced so the transit time appears faster than possible. Think about places like California where houses, blocks apart, can be hours apart by transit time since you have to go around the canyons separating them. Whose to say that our "straight line 3 dimensional route" is truely the shortest path in an 11 dimensional universe. Go back and read Flatland by Abbott and see what we're up against as 3D beings
I hope your sig is refering to the last audible line of "Are You Experienced?" by Hendrix, cuz that's where it came from in 1968...
Just thought you'd want to know
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
"I'm afraid that however clever we may become we will never be able to travel faster than light. If we could travel faster than light we could go back in time."
I don't think physics has decided yet whether we can cheat our way past light speed. I agree that it seems unlikely, but we shouldn't give up hope.
"...Earth is by far the most favoured planet in the solar system. Mars is small, cold and without much atmosphere, and the other planets are quite unsuitable for human beings. We either have to learn to live in space stations or travel to the next star. We won't do that in the next century."
IMHO, people could have moved off the planet in vast numbers already, all it would take is some good PR and getting rid of NASA (which hasn't improved on it's launch methods since the sixties, and continues to convince everyone that space travel is so horribly complicated that only big government bureaucracies can handle it).
Mars may be small, but since it's not all covered with oceans, it has just as much land area as Earth. With the development of aerogels, we can pretty much just tent over as big an area as we like. If we send a few thousand people over, they'll get sick of living in cans and figure it out pretty quickly.
Space stations are pretty trivial. You mould a metallic asteroid into a big can, fill it with air, and spin it (you can make one miles thick with Earth gravity even out of aluminum and steel; as we get better at working with carbon we'll make whole hollow worlds). If you make it big enough, you don't even need to worry about micrometeors poking holes, because it would take months or years for all the air to escape. If we weren't such pansies about fission rockets and fission power stations, we could have done this stuff in the fifties.
Well, maybe it does, but that's not established.
I didn't miss his point, I just don't agree with it.
For the usual obvious reasons, I consider time travel impossible.
However, I don't believe unquestioningly that travel faster than light speed is impossible just because the current popular theory says it is. Whatever else we know about relativity, we know that it's not complete. It doesn't describe everything, and we may yet produce conditions under which the relativistic time distortions do not occur.
We have already (probably) achieved faster-than-light transmission, through quantum tunneling.
(I don't remember who did the experiment, or whether it's been independently confirmed; could anyone help me out here?)
Relativity was developed in part to explain the wierdnesses of particles accelerated to very high speeds (or high energies, as they call it, since at a certain point you just keep pumping energy into the particles and they don't gain any significant speed).
As particles are accelerated closer and closer to the speed of light, they become more and more massive along a curve that leads to infinity at the speed of light. This has been experimentally confirmed to a high degree (though obviously they haven't created an object of infinite mass going light speed). I don't know much about the experimental support for the relativistic time dilation effect (presumably particles with short half-lives survive for correspondingly longer amounts of time when accelerated near the speed of light), but time is also supposed to slow down and stop at the speed of light (i.e. time is divided by a curve which starts at 1 at full stop and approaches infinite values asymptotically to light speed). Both of these effects prevent any object from reaching light speed.
The idea that relativity breaks down at light speed is nonsensical, because no object can ever reach light speed (in a simple way).
When physicists talk about travelling "faster than light," they are talking about non-trivial, non-obvious tricks (like warping space to make the path shorter, or using quantum tunneling to "teleport" in billions of little jumps, or using wormholes to slip crossways along a hidden dimension to a place that only seems far away in 3D). It's pretty well experimentally supported that you can't just build a good enough rocket to go faster than light.
...but I didn't realize he was a genius until I read this
Hawking is well known for his sense of humour - he likes joking about the American accent his voice synthesiser has given him and about his appearances as himself in his two favourite American ("which isn't saying much")programmes, Star Trek and The Simpsons.
I mean, really, are the ANY smart people who don't watch the Simpsons.;)
+&x
Could the 'Marilyn Monroe' picture have been an oblique reference to Einstein, or am I just reading too much into it? ;)
--
I've always held this exact same gripe about Marilyn Vos Savant and her column in Parade.
It first bothers me that people assume that her IQ makes her the expert on everything from science to relationships and ethics. People seem to forget that there's a difference between INTELLIGENCE and KNOWLEDGE--intelligent people aren't born wise, and wise people aren't always geniuses.
My second gripe is that she propagates this myth by actually fielding these questions! I'm sure she knows better, and whether there's pressure from the publishers I don't know, but I wish she wouldn't.
/. features quite frequent interviews with famous nerds/geeks. But I really do see that the number of scientists who have been interviewd on /. is minimal. During the latest interview with /. runners, a question was raised why /. doesn't concentrate evenly on Linux/Open source and other scientific articles. Well this is one of the best examples of that point in action ? So what say u Mr.Taco ??
Manifest
... "follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind
...which at one point (early 90's) was apparently read by him directly. I'm certain by now that it's filtered by grad students -- consider the amount of spamcrap the Doctor must receive!
On an unrelated note, does anyone on that side of the pond have a copy of the television advertisements for "Specsavers" (??) that the interview mentioned? I haven't even seen the Simpsons appearance, and I never knew that he'd done commercials!
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Bummer, they've added a bunch of filtered public addresses. I can understand it completely, of course. I wonder if the old one still works?
Hmm.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Very interesting article, very interesting insights.
:]
I don't, however, see what he's doing with a karaoke machine. Well, let me rephrase that... I'd love to know what he's doing with it
I found www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/hawking/QA .html intresting after reading the main link.
Perhaps I'm missing something....
It has sometimes been suggested that had it not been for his illness Hawking might not have focused his mind and gone on to make the contribution to science that he did. It galvanised him and forced him to solve problems not on a blackboard but geometrically and pictorially in his head - in 11 dimensions.
As I read the article I kept thinking that the author wasn't very good at his job, then I read Hawking's thoughts about humans staying ahead of electronic intelligences through genetic engineering. That thought made me grateful for the article.
Then I read the "11 dimensions" thought. What an ass(the author).
I do like this idea.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
Like a decent grounding in physics.
There is an 11 dimension theory, called M-theory, sounds fascinating, I'm gonna get fired today. Not getting any work done at all.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
"Another way in which electronic circuits can increase their complexity while maintaining speed is to copy the human brain. This does not have a single CPU [the central processing unit of a computer] that processes each command in sequence, rather, it has millions of processors working together at the same time. Such massive parallel processes will be the future for electronic intelligence as well."
Makes a lot of sense. Bill Gevarter, of Artificial Intelligence at NASA was on the same track back in the late eighties with the book Intelligent Machines: An Introductory Perspective of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Intelligent Machines. The concept of making machines mirror the complex architecture of the human brain is explained very well. Making computers that can learn, see and understand smell etc is all based on this basic architecture. Pretty fascinating reading. He wrote many books on AI and computer intelligence prior to his death, some are listed here.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Um...
The article is an article about Stephen Hawking, not about Stephen Hawking's thoughts or Stephen Hawking's works.
It is IMNSHO a very good article, since rather than regurgitating his theories in a layman's language that is both inaccurate and hard for most people to understand, it actually focusses on the person himself.
I had no idea it took that length of time to compose his answers. I had no idea what sort of room he lived in or that he had come so close to death.
I'll grant you that this age has an unhealthly interest in personality and personality cults, but this article was a good few notches above Hello magazine. It struck me as an honest account of what and how the author felt interview the person, and since I have often wondered what it would be like to talk to him, I found it interesting.
-----
Second, having been to a lecture given by Professor Hawking, I can say that any description of his humour will always be understated. He is absolutely brilliant, in a way that isn't blaming or shaming, but -does- draw a laugh.
Third, I felt Professor Hawking's first wife was a little unfairly treated in the article. It can't be easy being in a 100% dependent relationship with a media & scientific celebrity, who is also a genius. Everyone needs to receive, sometime, but in a situation like that, it's difficult to imagine Jane receiving much of the affection or support she needs, as a human being. That's not to say that she's an "innocent victim", or anything. The illness was affecting Professor Hawking severely (leading to at least one collapse, according to the TV version of Brief History) long before they met. Jane may have had a very rough time of things, and my deepest sympathies for that, but it almost certainly was in full knowledge of what she was doing. Passing the buck helps no-one, and merely sets her well on the path of making similar choices in future, choosing emotionally and/or physically unavailable people for friends or relationships. That's not a clever path to be on. Fortunately, it is possible to choose another, but only if the person chooses.
Fourthly, contact with alien civilisations does NOT require "them" to be at the same level of technology as yourself. That, I think, is a flaw in Professor Hawking's logic. They merely need to have used comparable technology within a window of time that matches up with how long it takes for such signals to reach us, within the timespan that usable detectors exist on Earth. (eg: We could detect electromagnetic devices or -very- intense Neutrino devices with existing observatories. As more forms of information are discovered, more forms of communication are covered, even if we are not as yet capable of understanding such communication.)
Lastly, you don't need to break the speed of light to exceed it. If there is any way of exploiting non-local effects, quantum-scale wormholes, tesseracts, or other strange (but mathematically valid) phenomina, it may be possible to travel very long distances in relatively short times, WITHOUT causing time-travel paradoxes. This may be a solution to the problem.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You are correct, in my opinion, that a significant (but unknown) part of his celebrity is due to his illness. He said so much himself when he said that his illness was an inseparable part of himself. The curiosity aroused by his illness attracts the attention that then brings his genius to light. The coupling of the two make for a fascinating human being. The fact that people ask him questions about et's and whatnot is simply due to the everpresent hope on the part of young interviewers that Someone Significant will reassure us in our dreams that what we see on Star Trek will soon become a reality. ANY time ANYONE interviews a popular scientist, these questions are asked. Par for the course and fine with me. The responses are always enlightening and/or entertaining if you are willing to read into them and the interviewer's reactions.
You sound a little bitter about his success, and I'm sure you have your own personal reasons for that, largely boiling down to jealousy and/or disappointment in your own achievements and the recognition you feel they do or don't deserve. Get over it, I say, and get on with your own work, whatever that is. No one ever achieved greatness OR celebrity by muttering bitterly about the success of another.
**>>BELCH
However, I was treated to an article about the writer, in which he described, in great detail, every aspect of Dr. Hawkings condition. This was not what I was looking for, it is sad that this article made it through a writer, and an editor. At no point no one stopped to think, "Hm... we have a genious here, why are we spending most of our time on how the writer perceives things?" Call me crazy, but I don't give two shits about how the writer felt about the 5 minute long pauses between answers, I equally don't give a shit about the regimen of pills and Dr. Hawkings love life! I wanted meat, I wanted guts, I wanted science... and I got fluff. Hell of a way to throw away a chance to trully ask why and wherefore of genious... by the same token, I know a lot of the journalism majors at my university... and I don't think they could have come up with much better questions either. A better standard for interviewing and journalism is needed, the journalist is just an eye witness to the world around him, not an active participant... that's just my 2 cents.
That's funny, I thought the man had children and even grandchildren. That pretty much shoots down the 'useless for evolutionary sake' argument.
As for 'survival of the fittest' it is important to realize that nature's idea of fitness is very different from what humans value as desirable. A lot of people seem to have this really weird idea that, as the human race evolves, we will become more "advanced" in an idealistic StarTrek kind of way -- we'll become smarter, for example. But that doesn't necessarily follow. If Darwinian genetic selection has its way, we might get smarter and faster, or we might dumb down and turn into Cockroach People instead. Who knows?
But the whole process is being tampered with on a wide scale these days, anyway. While Uncle Chuck's theory of evolution does a great job of explaining the past, it's almost useless for predicting the future. For the last few thousand years, memetic selection has totally overpowered genetic selection, and even genetics themselves will be manipulated (as Hawking touched on in the article). The situation is so complex now, that there's just no telling who is really more "fit" and who isn't. That crippled people like Hawking are around, isn't ironic or surprising at all.
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What we come down to is this:
- We all agree that the man is brilliant beyond measure.
- We get a chance to see that while he's an intellectual giant, he's also as human as the rest of us.
Conversationally, although slow, Hawking is fascinating. He has knowledge and understanding on a broad range of subjects. Why else would Cosmopolitan readers vote him one or the 10 sexiest men on the planet? {My wife showed that one to me.})We come away from this article, not with some Earth shattering pearl of wisdom from Dr. Hawking but, with a glimps into what his world is like.
"Una piccola canzone, un piccolo ballo, poco seltzer giù i vostri pantaloni."
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
Most of the outrage seems to center around the "expressing his thoughts at the speed of an imbecille" comment. When I read this comment, I saw in it, not the writer's impatience with, but his empathy for Hawking's condition. The writer was trying to get us to imagine for a moment what it would be like to live that way and how it might change our outlook on life. We have to wonder, could we cope the way Hawking has? In a similar vein, the connection the writer draws between Hawking's condition and his prediction of genetic engineering in the future was insightful.
Of course, if you went in hoping for a slate of predictions about what might await us in the years to come, I can see how you would be disappointed, but, frankly, I am bored with futurists' predictions. They fall basically into two categories: wild and largely unfounded speculation, and timid, conservative predictions of incremental change. I find Hawking himself more interesting than his predictions were likely to be, and I was glad the writer used speculating about the future as a pretext to give us a glimpse into what makes him tick.
-r
Has there ever been one?
If so, when
if not why not?
I would think that we could come up with better questions than this moronic journalist did.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
"a man with a freakishly quick, brilliant and creative mind condemned forever to articulate his thoughts at the speed of an imbecile."
:)
Perhaps this is why he's so smart. He's forced to think about what he says before he does it. Many of us are lead to knee jerk reactions
I did some math to check his claim of the earth being full by 2600, and it's quite funny -- the population density (following only the exponential condition that was given) would be one person per 0.78 m^2!
The formula I used is this:
((4*pi*(6371315)^2)*.3)/((6e9)*2^n), where n is the number of times the population doubles. The exponential condition given was that the population doubles each 40 years. I used 3:10 as the land to total area ratio.
-- Does Rain Man use the Autistic License for his software?
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
As I read through the article, I was hit by a flurry of mixed emotions.
One of the first things to hit me was that the author was trying to portray Dr. Hawking as an actual human being, as opposed to the "cybernetic being" his illness has forced him into. The reference to his image superimposed on a picture of Marilyn Monroe was a refreshing divergence from the usual portrayal of the man.
However, I was later offended by the author's apparent lack of patience. His comment about "a man...condemned forever to articulate his thoughts at the speed of an imbecile" made me wince. Here he is, one of a privileged few journalists with the opportunity to spend an afternoon with the greatest mind of the last 50 years, and he is focussing on the man's physical disabilities. I nearly stopped reading at that point.
I didn't, though. And later on, even though the author repeatedly referred to the duration of the pauses he "endured", I began to detect a shift in the author's attitude. For one, by the end of the article, he was focusing more and more on *what* Dr. Hawking had to say, and not the way in which it was said. The man can't help it if a computer has to vocalize his thoughts for him. Thankfully, this issue was deemphasized later on.
One the the high points of the article is that it touches on the guest appearances he has done on ST:TNG and The Simpsons. I find it interesting that he enjoys the satiric, biting wit of the Simpsons!
One point I want to make, that the author didn't, and may not even know, refers to the quote from David Schramm (yes, this is probably quite minor)... the author refers to Dr. Schramm in the present. Unfortunately, he passed away in a single-engine plane crash in December 1997.
All in all, I though the interview contained much information about his personal life that has not been addressed much in other articles. I just wish the author had not come across as a bit crass in the beginning. If I did not come from a physics background, and thus hold Dr. Hawking in the highest regard, I might not have read the article through to the end for that reason.
All this, of course, IMO. And yes, real news for nerds!
Eric
I have to be careful here, because I work in the next building to him!
But I wonder why people feel it's useful to ask Prof. Hawking these type of questions. Of course he's phenomenally intelligent. But he's a theoretical physicist. Are his opinions on space travel, genetic engineering etc. really of more worth than any other highly intelligent non-expert's?
No, I fear that people only ask him because he's a celebrity. And I fear that he's mainly a celebrity because of his illness. But that's a whole nother rant...
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