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Steven Hawking Loses Bet On Black Holes?
st1d writes "Looks like Steven Hawking might have to pay up on an old bet regarding black holes - seems his idea about them destroying information wasn't quite living up to his expectations: 'The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997. More importantly, it might solve one of the long-standing puzzles in modern physics.' He's due to make a formal announcement July 21."
...against Hawking would be something to tell the grandchildren about. Hell, it would be an honor to lose a bet to him.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
Woot! he figured out the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
all i can think of is not the scientific importance of this, but of the Dilbert were Hawking's pushed Dilbert into a black hole.
It shows the character of the man - not only is he prepared to admit he was wrong, but will present detailed scientific proof of why he was wrong.
I recall a bet he made involving a subscription to Penthouse.
Hawking to streak naked through the Cambridge campus while screaming "I know nothing about physics!" might be a bit more problematic.
we are still guessing, we still have no real idea how the universe works
and anything is possible, just because we dont know how to do it doesnt mean its impossible, but we wont learn much from peering through the glass of this fishbowl we are living in and proclaiming we know how it all works
here's to improving guesswork for the next million years
"Hawking's black holes, unlike classic black holes, do not have a well-defined event horizon that hides everything within them from the outside world".
I wish he'd called them 'Fry Holes'.
I doubt there are few if any other scientists who could so influence his peers.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
""Since Stephen has changed his view and now believes that black holes do not destroy information, I expect him [and Kip] to concede the bet," Preskill told New Scientist. The duo are expected to present Preskill with an encyclopaedia of his choice "from which information can be recovered at will"."
I like the sense of humor of these guys. Its comforting to know that there is something shared between some of the spectalcular minds and the rest of us that we can relate to.
I wonder about the transform that must happen with the information when it gos into a black hole. For example radio waves. Or maybe light or matter. How is that all preserved if it is only turned into the one kind of radiation? is it just transformed and maybe its original form lost? or say something else? If a spaceship were to fall into a black hole would not the information of that matter ever being a spaceship and say maybe occupants be obliterated?
The largest adult anime collection on the net
For a scientist of his stature to admint he was wrong is a credit to the man and the profession. Especially since he went and did the additional leg work (no pun) to validate the theory himself.
That is what good scientists do in these situations. I hope others take note.
..the odds get longer the nearer you get to it.
:)
WTF is "Steven" Hawking? His name is Stephen
He rolled away with the nurse that took care of him, or so I heard. On another note, check out www.mchawking.com - apparently he's had a second career as a gangsta rapper. A good 'nine will leave a few black holes in anyone, eh?
We are a long way from "proving" anything about black holes. All we are doing is producing theories that don't conflict too badly with the observed evidence. We're in the same position as 'scientists' in the middle ages describing planetary motion. They had a theory that accurately predicted the motion of the planets but that didn't mean that they understood the underlying process (ie. that the sun was the center of the solar system).
except black holes which are nothing
Join Team Mozilla #38050 Folding@home
Besides, finding a set of bound encyclopedias that are up to date might prove difficult. The web has just about ruined the encyclopedia business.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I love how these astrophysicists actually believe that they can prove things about stuff they have never even seen or measured. You can't lose a bet based on a THEORY. And it's all just theory. The truth is that we have absolutely no idea about black holes. For all we know there is a Tootsie Roll at the center of every black hole.
I heard that this bet was settled a while ago (although, maybe not officially), and it was for a subscription to Playboy, not Encyclopedias.
.. although I don't have it handy to confirm the anty of the bet.
I remember first reading about this bet in his book "A Brief History of Time"
"Whereas Stephen Hawking has such a large investment in general relativity and black holes and desires an insurance policy, and wheras Kip Thorne likes to live dangerously without an insurance policy.
Therefore be it resolved that Stephen Hawking bets one years subscription to PENTHOUSE as against Kip Thorne's wager of a 4-year subscription to PRIVATE EYE, that Cygnus X-1 does not contain a black hole of mass above Chandrasekhar limit."
It was signed by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne.
for those not of these shores Penthouse is a top shelf soft porn mag and Private eye is a current affairs/political satyrical publication.
the question stands....
In an election where our choices are a man who believes God is telling him how to run the country and a man who abandoned his fellow soldiers calls himself a war hero, we could gain a lot from a little integrity.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
From the article:
;-)
The duo are expected to present Preskill with an encyclopaedia of his choice "from which information can be recovered at will".
The bet was about an encyclopaedia. The time when the bet was made that was still a lot of books. Later it became some discs. Now it is Wikipedia or even the Internet, if you like.
So is he going to give a way an AOL CD?
Seriously, I wonder what he(or you) now sees as an encyclopaedia or something "from which information can be recovered at will".
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
now I look at it in more detail, never mind though. Here is a link to the original bet.
A number of years ago I saw a show where Hawking had mad a different bet with Kip Thorne concering the nature of black holes.
IIRC, the loser had to buy the winner a copy of Penthouse.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Indeed - there isn't a Cambridge campus.
Black holes might not destroy information, but the /. effect, on the other hand, has rendered this server into a smoldering pile of silicon.
I was actually at his Cambridge seminar when he first reported the result, and it should be said that many people were fairly skeptical.
From the article:
"It's possible that what he presented in the seminar is a solution," says Gibbons. "But I think you have to say the jury is still out.
Steven Hawking fallible.
Bush wrong on the weapons of mass destruction.
I don't know who to believe in anymore.
So it is safe to store my data in a black hole?
Great!
How long before we use them to compress CD rips?
I think mp3 has finally met its match!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Of course, there is no Cambridge campus. Or, rather, Cambridge university is inextricably intermingled with Cambridge city.
I speak American English you insensitive clod!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This is not a dupe! The story from March was a group of scientists at Ohio State University which disputed Hawking's position. This story is about Hawking himself giving a paper at a conference in Ireland, where he will presumably give his latest views on the topic.
I'm a little surprised that the parent poster got moderated up for this. It's not "informative" (IMO of course) to just call something a dupe without checking.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
i think he's referring more to the fact that the story about Hawking losing the bet and having to pay encyclopedias is the dupe, not necessarily the article being linked this time.
Cambridge isn't that big. Easy enough to streak through all of it in a day or two...
He already lost a bet related to the existance of black holes. Now this. No surprise.
He may be a genius, but I wouldn't want to be with him at a casino.
wow, aren't we the high roller...
Steve Hawkins is an interesting and cool guy (Actually so is Kip Thorne)
I wish I could tell my grandkids I won a bet against Steven Hawkins (or for that matter lost it)
I wonder if the encyclopedias will be on CD?
I like the sense of humor of these guys.
What a reputation! To be granted time to speak, without prior notice as to topic and specific content.
Wasn't he on Conan?
42
It's scary so many people think like me!
No I will not comment on donkeys or toner cartridges!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Not too big, but cold enough in winter to give extra meaning to the phrase "vanishing black hole".
'streak'....
Doubt it.. He is somewhat mechanically disabled...
Did John Titor submit these? ;)
And I'll hear it again when finally when the day comes where he announces he "lost" the bet. And it will be on slashdot again.
And I guess I'll hear it again when finally it is confirmed by some observation or math.
I think the other bet mentioned involving a penthouse magazine subscription is this one about the existance of black holes
What are laws good for if the universe doesn't obey them ?
So personally I think the information is still somewhere, though I don't think in any useful, accesible or detectable form. I have this quasi-religious belief that the universe keeps track of everything.
Also, if a quantum entangled pair of atomic or subatomic particles gets divided by the appearance of the hole, there is still a connection between them. I guess that would be a rare event though and only happen during black hole formation, and it would be really unlikely to stay unchanged and unobserved.
I would have read the NYT article, but it seems /.ed and I didn't fint it witg google cache.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
'physically disabled' sounded too weird for the greates physic in the world today...
He though that they did exist (about 90% sure), but if he was wrong, he wanted to get something to make up for it. He said this a long time ago. I can't remember if this was on TV or in A Brief History of Time though.
http://superstringtheory.com/ I'm a newb, so excuse the lack of a clickable link (unless slashdot does it automatically).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The article from back in March talked about Samir Mathur's approach to the "Information Problem" with black holes. He uses string theory to show that the information may always be available and may, in fact, affect the "Hawking radiation" (the radiation that comes from black holes which allows them to evaporate - guess who discovered it?).
Hawking seems to be taking a different approach that is not dependant upon any particular theory like strings. The approach is especially interesting because it involves uncertainty in the position of the event horizon. Back in the early 70s, physicists noted a parallel between black holes and thermodynamics. One could assign a black hole "entropy" based on it's diameter. But since nothing could escape from a black hole, the black hole would have a "temperature" of absolute zero. This would result in a violation of thermodynamics. Most physicists were willing to accept this, but thanks to clues provided by the ability to extract energy from a rotating black hole, Hawking figured out that black holes did evaporate, which gave them a very low but non-zero "temperature." His basic analysis involved pair production near the event horizon - one particle would escape, one wouldn't, and the "invented" mass would need to be given up by the black hole. An alternative way of looking at the problem involved how the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would make the exact location of the event horizon vary slightly.
Information theory has significant parallels with thermodynamics. One might argue that they are actually the same thing expressed differenntly, except that black holes have an "information temperature" of zero. This violates the equivalent law in information theory that black holes were thought to violate in thermodynamics.
Having learned from history, many folks thought that some way would be found to extract information from a black hole. Hawking made the bet against what he hoped was true. His thought was that, if he was wrong, at least he'd win something!
It's interesting that the solution to the information problem may actually involve the alternative path that solved the thermodynamic problems with black holes, and that the alternative way of looking at things (the string theory approach) involves the behavior of particles.
When physicists speak of "beauty" they are usually referring to some behavior that is symmetric. The solution to the information problem might be thought of as beautiful because of the symmetry with the solution to the thermodynamic problem.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
Hence the parent's statement "Might be difficult".
Here is your accordion, so goes the Far Side strip...
but at least now you know what the PREVIEW button is for.
C'mon people, we know this joke isn't funny; I agree, Windows sucks, but this just isn't funny: he's obviously whoring for karma.
And does he have any relation to Stephen Hawking?
dont you mean hour or two?
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
Slightly off topic, but it drives me nuts when people shorten "mathematics" to "maths" (like in the article). It is not a plural that needs to retain the "s", not even in middle english: From Middle English mathematik, from Old French mathematique, from Latin mathmatica, from Greek mathmatik (tekhn), mathematical (science), feminine of mathmatikos, mathematical. See mathematical.
The bet was made in 1972. Did You have an encyclopedia on CD back then? On diskette? Must have been awfully abridged. Project Gutenberg was started just the year before in 1971- I doubt you had a computerized dictionary, let alone an encyclopedia.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Directly from the article...
The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997.
I'm not going to profess I know what Hawking is talking about, but please...at least RTFA if you're going to be a smartass.
Imagine... a beowulf... of all this blackholes and all this information... Wheee.... ;)
The Sig, the sig
What happened to the abuse episode with his wife? His nursy wife has been breaking his bones and stuff, and she got arrested or something.
He would certainly be under intense scrutiny. In fact, when reading his book (The Universe in a Nutshell) I spotted a mistake that I've never seen mentioned. Unfortunately it was just a missing space between two words. I was still quite proud though...
Hawking is a better than average physicist, but he is far from the best... What he is very good at is explaining advanced concepts in a way that the educated (but not advanced degree in physics holding) crowd can understand.
He is also good at taking credit for work that is not his own. He has on 2 occasions had to apologize to professor Jimmy York for claiming Jimmies ideas as his own. Rumor has it that Jimmy says Hawking has done it again, but has not yet apologized this time.
He and his main collaborator (Roger Penrose) are widely regarded as ass holes (actually referred to as the twin ass holes) who capitalize greatly on other peoples work without doing much themselves in the cosmology community.
Posted AC to protect my fiancé (a cosmology PhD student), the source of most of my info on Hawking...
"I wonder about the transform that must happen with the information when it gos into a black hole. For example radio waves. Or maybe light or matter. How is that all preserved if it is only turned into the one kind of radiation?" With out going into too much detail, think of it this way: a hologram can be considered a 2-dimensional object that holds the information of 3-dimensions... A lot of physics at this level involves bending your mind around concepts that are nearly impossible to visualize; you simply have the math in front of you and then you try to interpret it.
Hawking will prove that sound is stored in Ogg format and everything else in DivX
This parrot has ceased to be!
Especially those that "taught" English in college and have access to slashdot. ;-)
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Will he be releasing a new rap song relating to this new revalation? :)
Place sig here.
Or is that slashdash. A five second Google search would have told the author of the article and the moderator that they had the wrong name, rotflmao! It's hard to look smart when you make really dumb mistakes like that!
I tought the name was Stephen Hawkings... maybe not.
Is this the bet he had with his college pals for a complete set of encyclopedias of the winners choice?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Yup. Colliding an electron with a positron yields beauty (and the symmetrical anti-beauty).
Regards,
--
*Art
Resembling Black Holes that is almost surely running on windows, they are called blue holes, and are not in space, but actually right here on the good ole planet earth.
> It's not "informative" (IMO of course) to just call something a dupe without checking.
Metamoderate them to oblivion if you're concenrned.
You have the right to remain silent, everything you say will be run through a compiler with the options -g, -wall, --pedantic, and --posix-me-harder set.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
You may be right about his current condition, but Hawking didn't start suffering symptoms untill he was in college. He knows what "normal" felt like, and is married to boot.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Well that about says it all then.
Even the laws of physics comes to the same conclusion...
Information wants to be free!
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
One could assign a black hole "entropy" based on it's diameter
More precisely black hole entropy (amount of information in the black hole) proportional it's surface area. That is the basis of the famous Holographic principle : all of the information contained in a volume of space can be deduced from the boundary of that volume
The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997
hawking:~> wget -r http://wikipedia.org | tar czf - | mail preskill@caltech.edu
Those who can, do. Those who can't, consult.
OK, no streak through campus then how about punting along the Backs shrieking "I am utterly ignorant of
Physicks"
How the hell did Hawking sign his name?
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
I call it a hawking hole.
A bit of thread if not topic, but any idea which "laws" this violates? Just Pauli, or others? Is this "information" bit tied to Hawking's proving that black holes aren't singularities, or are they different points?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Anybody know what implications, if any, this has for the entropy of black holes and the Beckenstein Bound?
I thought that the entropy of black holes was determined by the fact that the only information needed to describe it completely was its mass, charge, and spin. The entropy computed from this assumption is proportional to the area of the event horizon, and, hence, we get the Beckenstein Bound.
At least, that's what I thought. But if a black hole, in fact, contains information about everything that has fallen into it, wouldn't that affect its entropy, and hence imply that the Beckenstein Bound is wrong, and therefore overturn some very significant ideas resulting from the Beckenstein Bound, such as the Holographic Principle?
If that were the case, this would be a much bigger story than it appears to be, so what am I misunderstanding?
...dupe.
Nothing new, except for the date he pays up.
This is TERRIBLE news! Just think, if information can come out of a black hole, maybe SCO will be able to produce that 'stolen' souce code! They might sue someone!
You know the one I mean: Data, Hawking, Einstein and Newton? It's been so long since I've seen it I don't remember the dialogue, but as I recall Hawking teased Einstein about how chance does play a role in life? :)
Nichelle Nichols: "It's about that rip in space-time that you saw!"
Stephen Hawking: "I call it a Hawking Hole."
Fry: "No fair! I saw it first!"
Stephen Hawking: "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?"
(And then here's the MP3 of this great quote.)
Education is the silver bullet.
Imagine a very long, stiff rod. Now when you push, pull or twist one end, the other end must also move. But it can never take less time to transmit this movement than the time it would take a photon to reach the other end, otherwise information would be travelling faster than light, which is Not Allowed. (*)
..... and botany .....
Think of it as being like a load of tennis balls in a drainpipe: you stick one in your end, the next one squashes a bit, then moves a bit and recovers its shape, squashing the next one a bit, and so on. The molecules are not bonded to each other with absolute rigidity. And there is a quantum limit to how stiff matter could ever be.
Which fits right in with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, somehow or other. At least, it did when I was conducting experiments outside of the realms of physics and more into the domains of chemistry
* OK, two particles which always have opposite spin, blah blah blah, one in your lab, one in a spaceship several gigametres away, you expend an obscene amount of energy reversing the spin on yours, and the spin on the far one reverses at the exact same time. But so what? You can't use the phenomenon to impart any useful information to the other party. You already knew that the spins would always be opposite.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
with all due respect Mr Hawking, just what the hell were you thinking.
When I was in college, some friends and I (all physics majors) were having a bull session about whether or when someone would cough up a Grand Unified Theory. It was eventually agreed that it would depend largely on when the good Dr. Hawking died.
At the time, I don't think any of us thought he would still be around at this late date. Anyway, glad to see he's still kicking (so to speak) and doing new work.
OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
Hey, slashdot people posting in a steven hawking article all consider themselves geniuses and say crap like "it's lonely being smarter than everyone" or "all the girls are just too stupid for me".
Well you ain't so fucking smart if you can't even spell lose correctly.
are ok , but very patriarchial
the idea that this universe just popped into existance one day is rather laudable
back in the day we didnt have no old school
What ever happened to science? We truly live in an age where science fiction has become accepted as reality. Beam me up, Scotty!!
I think if you want to get to the top it helps to be a stubborn arsehole who will never back down even when everyone is telling them that they are wrong, how else could you chalange the way the world works?
Just look at the politicians, wankers, and if they weren't such wankers they wouldn't have enough faith in there convictions to make it there.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
But now you've got me thinking of what copyright policy should be, with reference to space travel. Should copyright term duration take lightspeed and relativistic effects into account? A man writes a book and is granted a 90 year copyright. He then gets into a spaceship at travels at nearly the speed of light to, say, a planet 100 light years away. For him, the journey has been brief and he thinks his book is still under copyright and then begins selling it. For the outworlders, the book was written a century ago and has lapsed into PD.
Now that I think of it, the policy of extending copyright by 20 years, every 20 years, starts to look reasonable. If copyright never expires, then you never have to deal with this issue. But then the DMCA issue that you raise, comes up. How do you take a black hole to court? I can't even prove that it received the summons, even though I sent it via registered mail. OH WAIT! THAT'S JUST WHAT HAWKING IS ARGUING AGAINST!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What if John Preskill asks for a set of Wikipedia? That's the best encyclopedia these days. But I don't see how anyone can be given a set of it.
The last time they had a bet, the wager was a subscription to either Playboy or some similar brittish magazine. They're slowing down, I guess. I really liked the fact that the smartest people in the world openly admit they like "reading" playboy... Maybe Thorne will acquiesce and say he wants an encyclopedia of porn or something...
There *are* theories, one of which involves the collapse of different dimensions into a single one. True, no one knows with absolute certainty how the universe was created, but how can you claim zero "functional difference" about the things we know now? You don't think both of the examples above brought us closer to the knowledge YOU seek? Or do you think you'll find out how the universe began by assuming a flat earth and only 4 "elements"?
Too bad the guy in the wheelchair made you his bitch and your homies just laughed at you for FAILING IT SO HARD!! My God, the failure you have done, it must burn and sting you!
That this goes right in line with the story. How could John Titor enter another worldline if you can't recover information from a black hole? I wonder if we'll find out spinning black holes can be created when the LHC comes online in 2007.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
I attended a lecture of Hawking's once at UCSB and let me tell you, he has an excellent sense of humor.
For a specific example he was talking about how he once gave a lecture in Paris about black holes, and after about 30 minutes realized that they didn't understand a thing he was talking about. It turned out that they thought he was talking about something obscene. He played off this for quite a while, ending with his dismissal of the black hole modled after string theory (fuzzball black holes) in which he claimed "A black hole has no hair... but this just confused the French even more"
it was quite something to watch one of the most brilliant minds in the world make jokes about the Simpsons and Star Trek while discussing Q-physics and whatnot.
Okay some facts about black holes: - The no hair theorem says that a black holes is described by 2 parameters, the mass M and the angular momentum J (classical spin if you must use that word). In case of a charged black hole you have to add the charge Q to get 3 parameters. From this one can argument that once information falls in a black hole it is lost since we only see 3 parameters. But others say that is just trapped inside the black hole. (the jury is still out) - The Beckenstein-Hawking formula (giving the bound) is related to the radiation of a black hole in the following way. A black hole radiates thermal radiation, with that one can associate a themprature, with that temprature an entropy wich after calculation turns out to be proportinal to the area. - Since this is proportinal to the area t'Hooft suggested tha holographic principle. - I don't think this is a real problem now, since no-one said that the infomation is really lost, so recuperating it might not be a problem. What could be is that the radiation turns out to be non thermal and then it could de harder (no idea how to do that) to calculate the entropy classically. But string theory for instance can calculate the entropy explicitly without the need for thermal radiation and an associated themprature. Hope that helps somewhat (hope I made only correct statements too)
#1) Respect the privacy of others. #2) Think before you type.
"the black hole becomes a giant tangle of strings"
. . .
like the tangle of strings that prevents my paychecks from escaping the black hole of the Treasury department . .
or the tangle of strings that prevents my civil liberties from escaping the black hole of John Ashcroft . .
or the tangle of strings that prevents my time from escaping the black hole of slashdot . .
Earlier in 2004, Samir Mathur of Ohio State University in Columbus and his colleagues showed that if a black hole is modelled according to string theory...
Go Buckeyes! Not just a football program! Neener neener!
Perhaps someone here can clear something up for me about the formation of black holes...
Let's say I'm watching something (a gigantic encyclopedia, say) collapse to form a black hole.
As the object collapses, its gravitational field gets stronger, and therefore, as observed from my vantage point, the time dilation effect gets stronger. i.e. From my perspective, the collapse proceeds ever more slowly. Although it never stops collapsing, I don't believe I would observe it actually turn into a black hole in a finite amount of time.
From the point of view of someone standing on the surface of the object, the reverse happens -- time in the universe outside seems to accelerate, to the point where the universe ends before the black hole is created.
So... my question is... are black holes actually formed in the universe, from our perspective? Or are there just a bunch of objects that look almost exactly, but not quite, like black holes (because they've been collapsing for billions of years)? Or were all the black holes created in the big bang? Or is there some neat trick that allows a nearly-black-hole to flip into a really-black-hole?
Sorry for the slight digression... it's just a question that's been bugging me for years.
Bruce
I grew up in Cambridge, you can easily cross Cambridge "proper" in 90 minutes on foot. Even including suburbs and walking from the edge of Cherry Hinton to the edge of Chesterton, or whatever, couldn't take more than 3.
i wonder what Hawking's thoughts are on the goatse guy. that black hole has has not only destroyed lives, it has destroyed itself!!
they really should bring back goatse.cx
home of the original cupholder
Hawking Radiation as a college undergrad. What little I understood I thought was absolutely brilliant.
As to whether or not he "lost" a bet, hell, I'm sure he is not bothered one way or the other. My gut feel is that he never liked the idea of "information is permanently destroyed" anyway.
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
http://slashdot.org/~jesus
http://slashdot.org/~stephenhawking
what do ya'll think now?
Hawking should just e-mail Kip a link to Wikipedia.
Score: -1 (missed the joke)
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
No, he really meant "therapist".
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
What kind of encyclopedia does a great physicist want when {he,she} wins a bet?
Or are you just stupid?
Bah, "dupe" WAS a bad choice of word - my apologies. Should have been "Also mentioned here..." *inserts foot in mouth*
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I read an article a while ago proposing that black holes with high rotational velocities lose more radiation near the equator. I wonder what would happen if two black holes collided at extreme velocity and broke apart enough to lose the "black hole" effect, becoming many small scattered chunks of high-density space debris. Is that possible? If so, wouldn't that count as returning information too? Hawking's new work seems to support that possiblility...
include $sig;
1;
In his biography of Feynman, "Genius", James Gleick basically comes out and states that there is a cult of personality around Hawking. I need to grab the book and find the exact passage, but he states that some physicists and cosmologists have gotten way too much pub due to their personal afflictions. And that many others who are perfectly healthy have had their work overlooked because they aren't in a wheelchair.
I don't know if it's quite that vitriolic, but I remember reading it and thinking "wow, he's no fan of Hawking."
Gleick's new biography is on Issac Newton, so perhaps he will have something else to say about modern physicists in there, I haven't read it yet.
And Penrose it not only an asshole, but a stupid one.
At least Hawking isn't stupid. However, by all accounts, Hawking was an asshole long before he got sick. If anything, being disabled has mellowed him out. I'll see your "My Left Foot" and raise you the episode with the blind woman on Night Court.
"He's due to make a formal announcement July 21."
And so he started typing in April.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Not too big, but cold enough in winter to give extra meaning to the phrase "vanishing black hole".
In a nod to Stewie, someone could pelt him with a snowball in the ass and he could turn around and say "Look! Don't it make my brown eye blue?"
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Penthouse is better, they show pink and it's only slightly out of focus.
For Linux people, you can easily store them in your /dev/null.
For Windows, NUL.
All I want to say is that I'm really glad that someone in a position of authority is willing to admit when he's wrong.
The world needs more humble people like that.
Like you I grew up there too so I know how long it would take to run around it all. I was meaning going around all the roads obviously. :-)
You're walking quick if it takes you 90 minutes to cross on foot. That's assuming Trumpington P&R to, say, Milton.
It's odd that this announcement comes roughly 4 months after researchers at the University of Ohio similarly announced that they may have found proof that Black Holes can leak information.
(With apologies to Doug Adams)
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
That is very interesting. Few days ago I was wondering whether the net amount of entropy of the universe can be decreased.
Will mankind one day without the net expenditure of energy be able to restore the sun to its full youthfulness even after it had died of old age? So I asked Google: "How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?"
Google fell dead and silent. The slow flashing of modem lights ceased, the distant sounds of beeping router ended.
Then, just as I felt I could hold my breath no longer, there was a sudden springing to life of the browser connected to Google. Five words were printed:
"INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER."
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Looks like /dev/null is the only "real" black hole left in the world ?
Having trouble typing "American", you "bloody wanker"?
Something related... I heard that black holes can move empty space around them. How's that? Is it a simplified explanation?
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.