Slashdot Mirror
Hawking Gracefully, Formally Loses Black Hole Bet
Liora writes "Today at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Cambridge University professor Stephen Hawking said in his talk titled The Information Paradox for Black Holes that he was wrong about the formation of an event horizon in a black hole, and that matter is not destroyed in a way defying subatomic theory, as he had previously believed. According to the talk's short, "the way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon." A New York Times story and a Wired story are available, both apparently based on Reuters information." (This is the formal announcement promised last week.)
I once asked the Slashdot editors why they didn't replace reg-required NYT links with reg-free links. They pointed out that there is a chance that the NYT could get its panties in a wad, and do something stupid. Lawsuits, goatse redirects, the works. Lawsuits... that would just be wrong!
Anyway, here's the obligatory reg-free link:
Are you looking at ME?
(Courtesy of these fine folks)
I've been hearing about this for like 4 days now... Is Slashdot turning into a News Black Hole?
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
It's great to see such an eminent scientist willingly admit that he was wrong, or at least only partially right. It seems that all too often the path that people and organizations choose is to deny, spin, and turn things on their heads to avoid embarassment. Hawking showed he is a good sport, proving not only does he have a brilliant mind, he is a classy person as well.
Wasted the good part of his later life trying to disprove theories that are pretty much known to be true today.
Wired says: The best-selling author of "A Brief History of Time"
;-)
I didn't know hawking sold so well
Anyway, to be on topic - can someone give more technical information on this? Many of us probably have a fairly high understanding of maths and physics, and want more details...
I really don't understand why the bet sneaks into every headline about this story. Why are humans so obsessed with who was right and wrong? That we have the information is all that really matters...
...that was the best thing I had going for me. It's what got me through the day. What do I have to look forward to now? Nothing, that's what!
"The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon."
That man is way too smart to be a human.
-matt
Or else they'll send someone to break his knee caps, or the wheels on his chair.
Userfriendly.org had a funny take on the payment of this bet.
Well, at least you've still got that alternate reality you live in. ;)
Who the hell modded this up? HELLOOOO? MOD ON CRACK!!
So, does this mean that you cant go to hell, and back, bringing god knows what into our universe? What a rip off!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Ug mad at Ag. Ug hit Ag. Ug win. Oh no. Big TWIST of season. Og alive. Og kill Ug. Og rich now.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
I'm probably not alone in that my understanding (flawed as it is) of the Theory of Relativity, Quantum physics, and other Big Science Questions is based almost entirely on "A Brief History of Time" and "The Universe in a Nutshell". Well, that and "Cosmos" :-). But in those two books, he does an excellent job of explaining, well, *the universe* in a way that even I can understand. And that is no mean feat! So hats off to Hawking, may you lay down the phat beats for many more years to come!
You'll love this!
The fact that eminent physicists had a long-standing bet on this subject is an indicator to the rest of us about the question's importance and difficulty.
Send someone in on a string. Give it a good hard tug.
If they come out ok - black holes are cool and can spit out matter.
If they come out mangled, or you're left with a frayed end on said string, black holes are not cool and best stayed away from...
Well... Obviously he's going to loose gracefully. Its not like he can get up and start yelling at the other guy. His chair probably doesn't even have an "Angry" voice
The movie The Black Hole was about hell too - and a cool robot ends up being the devil - this may mean that the devil will take take the shape of a cool robot either! Dang!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Remember it well. It will get you out of a jam every time.
... because there's just no way the whole disagreement--and its resolution--could possibly based on the mathematics of black holes, or anything, right?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
No in a black hole the matter (or in this case energy) gets transferred into "503 Service Unavailable" and stuck in a consistant loop until a new event horizon is formed.
I'm with this guy. Parent poster is a fucktard.
I thought it was funny. Does that make me a bad person?
But thankfully they happen to David friggin Guest
Wow - a whole encyclopedia on a baseball ? It must be printed at subatomic scale.
Fry: Hey! Stephen Hawking! Aren't you that physicist who invented gravity?
Hawking: Sure. Why not?
Fry: Let me ask you something. Has anyone ever discovered a hole in nothing with monsters in it? [Hawking's eyes widen in horror.] 'Cause if I'm the first, I want them to call it a "Fry Hole."
Later:
Fry: So what do you nerds want?
Nichols: It's about that rip in space-time that you saw.
Hawking: I call it a "Hawking Hole."
Fry: No fair! I saw it first!
Hawking: Who is The Journal Of Quantum Physics going to believe?
Interesting note: Apparently Stephen Hawking did provide his voice for that episode.
It's not nice to make fun of someone just because he's a fucktard. How would you feel if you were a fucktard and people were pointing at you and laughing like, hey, look, what a fucktard!
I can understand how someone could find this offensive, but, I think it's just a little too harsh.
I personally have a handicap, and to be honest, I appreciate when people make jokes about it... I don't consider them cruel or offcolor, (except in the rare cases they are delivered with the intent of being cruel) to me its an acknowledgement of me as a person that someone can still treat as an equal. I doubt that there are many people who don't hold Hawking in extremely high esteem, and I in no way believe comments made by people who respect him in refference to his handicap would offend him, rather the people who try to ignore the obvious.
WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
I've never really understood why people thought black holes were the gateways to parallel universes, it's a bit like saying "Look! There's a hole where you get crushed infinitely and light doesn't escape, it must be a way out!" which strikes me as rather odd...
Hopefully though, there'll be different kinds of holes in the universe - the kinds that are more like doors and let you come and go freely without the need to switch on the headlights and crack open the paracetamol...
I can't believe that the editors have stooped to this level. We have come to an age where people can share information without being harassed about their physical mishaps, however the people who deliver this very information still find a way to make fun of others disablities.
Welcome to a brave new world where the gimp is called "physically challenged", the blind "visually deficient", the dumb "mentally differently abled" and where any joke who may offend anybody about anything is forbidden by the political thought police.
Guess what ModernGeek? I'm "different" and I laugh when people crack jokes about my differences. You obviously couldn't see a funny joke if it put on a silly hat and bit you on the behind. You make me sad...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
What are you, Jerry Faldwell?
So now all those aliens that got sucked into black holes in the seventies will be back in future Startrek etc episodes.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
(This is the formal announcement promised last week.)
Great! Now they are programming dupes one week in advance...
And you have failed to understand why there's a 'theoretical' in theoretical physics.
Oh damn, that means there's gonna be a sequel to Event Horizon... :o(
You also are disabled, lacking a sense of humor.
<jedi> There is something funny here. You laugh. </jedi>
Ok, my Karma Whoring didn't work, and you guys aren't as stiff as I thought. Look at the forum on my site, and you'll see I'm not stuck up.
Sig: I stole this sig.
The NYT one is more accurate.
"Don't forget the prunes." L. Francis Herreshoff
Well, your joke aside, it appears that you took in the 9/11 commission's report, and mangled it into an unrecognizable form before forming your opinion (or could, perchance, the problem be that you formed an opinion before knowing the facts, eh?) (No, surely not the always-logically-sound Slashdot crowd!)
I was actually trying to point out some irony. This guy bashes people who are hard nosed, and Einstein was one of them. I'm willing to bet this guy wouldn't have put Einstein in that group of people that refuse to give up on their idea even in the face of evidence that points the other way.
" We have come to an age where people can share information without being harassed about their physical mishaps, however the people who deliver this very information still find a way to make fun of others disablities."
Hmm..
I can't decide whether to nod my head approvingly or just arrive at the conclusion that some people need thicker skins.
I'm leaning towards "The words only hurt if you let them" right now. The net-effect of Political Correctness would appear to be over-sensitivity.
"Derp de derp."
Have you ever noticed that it's never a bunch of blind guys or a bunch of parapalegics that make up these silly little labels like physically challenged? Instead it's a bunch of people who are offended that the people these labels are for aren't offended. What I think is that these people who make up these things were socially inept growing up and so afraid of what others thought of them that they spent all of their time thinking about what to say to other people so that they would be accepted that they never bothered to pull their heads out of their asses and look around and listen to what other people said. Whew! Too much of a sentence.
For those grammatically declined I'll explain it to you with an analogy. It's like when you were in high school and used mirrors to peek around the corner into the girl's locker room. The naked chick in the mirror is the APPARANT horizon. The naked chick that kicks the testes back inside your body shortly after DOES NOT EXIST.
Also, just for laughs (ok...hopefully for mod points too, I admit) Hawking is also a freaking awesome DJ and serial killer on the side. All my Shootin's be driveby's
Wu's site has other cool stuff to see too. (not a plug, just want to give credit to where the song is downloaded from)
One theory has been replaced by another theory, but neither has been tested, and neither can be tested. No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney!
A theory in theoretical physics being taken seriously for its own sake? Baloney, alright! I for one won't be taking all this talk about black holes seriously until I see this Hawking chap dropping something off the leaning tower of pisa or getting hit in the head by an apple.
What do you mean 'if'?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
we just need a +x religious zealot mod option, so that those posts can be filtered out of sight by people who don't give a rat's ass if god exists or not.
Machine9dotNet
since my job has disappeared inside a black hole
and I still don't see any trace of it.
Your ego is Matrix!
He just "marketed" his theory before validating it. What happens when his paper comes out and people find a flaw in the calculations?
A great one knows when he is wrong.
Would anyone care to dumb down his point a bit?
How can this be possible? I thought the whole point of black holes being 'black' was because they had a spherical boundary the crossing thereof would result in an escape velocity greater than C.
How can something like that only be apparent?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney!
Amen Brother! It's all a con game. Hawking and the rest of his Star Strek and time travel fanatics have been bulshitting the world with their time warps and wormholes for a long time. I wonder when someone is going to expose those con artists for good.
C'mon.. Coming from the church's perspective, I'd think you would be used to the idea of 'selling lies for years'.
Not to mention the 'flip-flopping' on issues.
And which bible is unshakable? From which era? Which edition? Do you mean all of them? Wow. Deep.
Pray for me!
I'm with me fellow deviantart(ist) here. having a handicap myself, unless the intent behind a joke is to be cruel and mean, instead of making people smile and laugh, it's a bad thing, otherwise I encourage people to make jokes about -my- disability, because in a sense it puts THEM at ease with it.
Machine9dotNet
MC Hawking could not be reached for comment.
/jk
Then comes the nonsense - he says, sum over both (a reasonable thing to do in a Euclidean gravity path integral) and that's unitary... huh??? You add unitary to non-unitary, and sorry, buddy, you get non-unitary...
The only way it would make sense is if you never sum over BH spacetimes, but that's not what he says, and anyway it would mean there are no BHs.
Anyway, if you want a coherent, and probably correct discussion, see http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0106112
Who the hell edited the hed? Get this straight: "gracefully" losing would involve Hawking doing pirouettes and somersaults in his electric wheelchair whilst wearing a pink tutu. I believe the word we're looking for is "graciously"!
I'm usually not a language-nazi but, sorry, in this case the conflation projects an unforgivably ridiculous image!
Welcome to good science.
They only said parallel universes there is actualy only one. Just think somewhere out there there is a parallel straponego wearing a cowboy hat.
From the Rueters article pubished by wired...
For over 200 years, scientists have puzzled over black holes, which form when stars burn all their fuel and collapse, creating a huge gravitational pull.
Now I'm no scientist, but 200 years of black holes seems like they're giving the issue more duration than history warrants. I thought the concept of a 'black hole' was a consequence of Einstein's relativity work (general, special I can never remember which is which... think it's general).
Am I wrong and just missed a whole bunch of science history?
Cheers!
SCB
Technically, the article said Hawking said that black holes do not lead to another universe. So if you want to think that there are other universes, you just have to look elsewhere.. String theory posits high dimensionality and "universes next door"; I'll remain parallel universe agnostic for the moment, but Hawking's point seems to have been that black holes do not eat information, and so they return the matter to the universe, and so he says, black holes are not an exit. If Hawking said definitively that our universe was the only existence, I would listen but I think unless we actually poke a hole into another universe with funky clues like, only 2 spatial dimensions (we could just be making a tesseract) or something, parallel universes will remain mostly philosophical.
Summary: Parallel universes aren't ruled out (at least by this article) so keep dreaming big! We'll need those other universes when entropy runs out in this one. Even better, ask someone who knows string theory whether the idea of multiple universes would be ruled out IF Hawking is right. Remember, he just lost a bet. He may be sure this time, but who's to say some bright kid 200 years from now won't have a different perspective... blah blah hypothetical
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
This misunderstanding stems from our science education in grade school, during which we're taught that a "theory" is just a guess that has yet to be proven.
Let me tell you about how theoretical physics really works. Quantum THEORY is just that, a theory. But it has been tested to unbelievable precision. Using the theory of quantum electrodynamics, one can calculate constants of nature from first principles to better than 12 decimal places. These theories are "right," even though there might be some improvement or refinement that comes along later.
That's the end of my general rant. Now to address specific things you said that were, quite ironically, complete baloney. You say general relativity (GR) hasn't been tested. Einstein's first prediction using GR concerned the deflection of light around the sun during an eclipse. His prediction was different from what others were saying, and when the eclipse of 1919 finally came, Einstein was vindicated. GR passes major experimental test #1.
Do you have GPS in your car? If you do, you may be surprised to know that those things rely on the mathematics of GR. Without taking into account some of the terms that pop out of the equations of GR, your GPS would never be able to locate you. But it can, and hence GR passes experimental test #2 with flying colors.
Finally, I point you to the Nobel Prize's page on Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor. They found experimental proof that two stars orbiting each other were decaying at a rate exactly in accordance to what had been predicted years before. This is a very stringent test of the validity of GR -- the stars were orbiting each other near the "strong field" where gravitational effects are really strong, and hence where any deviation from the behavior predicted by the theory should be obvious -- and, once again, GR passed the test like an Asian kid taking math.
A certain amount of skepticism is always healthy, of course. Do I think there will be eventual refinements to GR? Of course, probably in the form of superstring theory. But before you go around proclaiming that it's all baloney, you better figure out what you're talking about.
Pleased to serve. What's your disability? I have jokes about all of them.
Why is anything anything?
Unuseless over all.
Umm, "gracefully" can refer to non-physical actions. Haven't you ever heard of grace under fire?
Apparently,Heisenberg was once asked by a journalist that was it true that only two people in the world understood the quantum theory.And Heisenberg asked who is the other person.
Wanted : A Signature.
We've known for a long time that whether you observe something to fall into a black hole or not depends on your reference frame. That is, if you are riding along with the object falling in, you will pass the event horizon with it and be crushed at the singularity in a finite amount of your time (proper time). However, if you observe something falling into the black hole from a safe distance beyond the event horizon, you will never see it fall in - although you also won't see anything after a short while, since the light from the infalling object becomes redshifted exponentially in time... (indeed black holes used to be called frozen stars for this reason). I am assuming that Hawking has shown working in a reference frame outside the black hole, that the faint radiation (the average wavelength is about the size of the black hole itself, and a solar mass black hole has a radius of about a kilometer) emerging from the black hole is affected by the wavefunction of the particles that have fallen in. I've also heard some people have doubts about using Euclidean path integral method (need to have time t go to i*t so that -t^2 -> t^2, i.e. time becomes another space like coordinate), and I'm looking forward to reading the paper. There are other papers out on this stuff - here's one by Stephens, 't Hooft and Whiting.
All Abstract Structures of Objects and their Relationships exist.
There are many people that find cricket to be superior (I guess to baseball). I am sure several find baseball to be superior too.
If you cannot understand cricket, you are probably in no shape to comment on its superiority (or inferiority).
S
I seem to recall that one involved singularities as well..
Twenties Retirement
I always wondered if the people in the movie survived, but Hawking's theory left me with no hope.
I'm so relieved to know there's a chance they survived!
Some people who deal with him say he is difficult and arrogant.
He has been debating the issue for 30 years, and only now has he changed his mind. It took a lot of other evidence for him to change his theory, and it was a hot debate all the way. Hey, he made a bet of honor and stood by his opinion until others proved (to his own satisfaction) he was wrong.
That is what dealing with people in his realm of intelligence can be like. It may not always be pleasant and it may take a long time to get them to admit they are wrong.
But he is probably a nicer person than Newton.
Mmm. That is interesting. A dude who only wants to see facts if it suits him.
Not really objective. If you are a real man, you also have to deal with facts (provided by your own camp - by the way) which do not fit in your world view.
Welcome to new science, where facts are first classified whether they suit your worldview...
...so I imagine that once the event horizon in my clothes dryer collapses I will get back all of my missing socks? ;)
Nice try, but this is slashdot, not science.
You can still believe in paralell worlds via the "Many Worlds" interpetation of Quantum Physics. This just says that Black Holes probably don't lead to them.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
The man is reputed to have sold more books about physics than Maddona has about sex.
A fairly impressive achivement really.
I don't pretend to understand things I don't... "He now believes that black holes may allow information to get out." What does information mean in that context?
Dr. Hawking is perhaps the most briliant living physicist. From all accounts he has many sterling qualities, and I admire him. However, his various disabilities prevent him from being "graceful" by most meanings of the word. In his chosen environment, we can ignore his physical impairments and evaluate him objectively. In this environment, at this time, he was "gracious", not "graceful."
How does Hawking's "theory" on black holes even rise above a hypothesis? The top poster was right, was there any controlled test that was done to see if information really does make it out of a black hole?
What makes this any more than a hypothesis arrived at using math?
My feeling is that theoretical physics is pretty useless when it is being used to describe something that can not be realistically verified. I mean, with black holes, we think we've detected them but there's not even any real solid proof that they exist at all.
Hee - he's checking on his own postings. Ego?
Trailer is right here Site: www.mchawking.com
Sig: I stole this sig.
What Hawking seems to be saying to me is that since the matter never enters the hole from the perspective of an observer outside the hole, the information is never lost. Does this make sense?
Steven N. Severinghaus
This stuff is just awesome to think about. Here's some rambling. If anything makes sense I'd appreciate some feedback.
I hold that quantum theory is entirely a guess based on possibilities because we currently cannot (and perhaps never can) get true facts on the matter so that real analysis cannot be done. I don't know if anyone has any objections to this but I'm not sure if people realize it.
Take any level of physics, and only allow yourself to view it from a level above. You can come up with some good guesses as to how things will work which might have a very high degree of accuracy even 100%, but you are really just guessing. A simple example is that modern theory states that any two solid objects can pass through each other without interfering with each other at all-- it's just extremely improbable.
As a parallel: If you look at any scene in a 2 dimensional perspective you'll see objects passing through each other all the time (behind and in front although to 2d it's the same space). Now if the universe was 2d we could say that everything exists on the same 2d plane and any objects passing through each other is known to be impossible, but we know there's a 3rd dimension so to us it's entirely possible, even though everything in that universe is on the same plane. Well everything in this universe is in the same space, that is, they are all on the same 4th, 5th, 6th etc dimensional coordinates-- but that can just as easily change.
A 1 dimensional basic has 2 points connected by one line.
A 2 dimensional basic has 3 points, connected by three lines, encompassing one face.
A 3 dimensional basic has 4 points, connected by six lines, encompassing four faces, containing one space.
Guesses? A 4 dimensional basic has (5?) points, connected by (10?) lines, encompassing (5?) faces, containing (3?) spaces, bounding 1 thingy?
I know I'm not the only person who has tried to mentally vision higher order shapes!
The worst pun I have ever read on /.
For the many lexically challenged compatriots among us:
"Hawking"
noun: selling goods for a living.
verb: to peddle goods aggressively, especially by calling out.
As a long time science fiction fan, i can say that I find that part about black holes not forming links betweek universes fascinating. But what I really want to know is; what does his new math say about the blackholes first cousin, the wormhole? Does the wormhole still exist but the new math taking away the wild, wild possibility of time travel? Or maybe make wormholes easier to traverse/contruct? I'm actually willing to give up time travel stories, if faster than light travel via wormholes becomes more feasible.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
"turingintoo" that's the new linux distro runs on a 1953 NCR adding machine. "Rock solid" as the saying goes.
Who he?
Well, the uncertainty of particle behavior at the quantum level would provide the perfect "loophole" for God to intervene without violating our laws of physics, no?
And as far as the classic attack on the "certainty" of the theory of evolution: science tries to compress the Universe into something we can understand, and evolution (with its problems) is the best it has gotten. Science, by definition, is classifying the physical world by human means, and trying to get something out of it. Religion is classifying the physical world by the use of God. Wouldn't the two give completely different results?
Signed, a Christian with an avid interest in science who has never found a problem between his two beliefs.
As long as we are modding things like this "insightful" today I'd counter that we also need a +x rude atheist mod option so that the rest of us can avoid reading your posts.
.... the US "louisville slugger" baseball bat in cricket-dom? Might need that bit of trivia in another post someday..or on Jeopardy...or something
thankee kindly
One person wants "handicap". Another person would demand "disability" or, rarely, "crippled". Some PC folks go for crap like "special needs", "challenged", "differently abled", and so on. Then these people assume that they don't get along so well because of the injury/birthdefect/disease/whatever, never considering their own attitude about it.
You have a good attitude. It'll take you far and serve you well.
Physics != biology
and theories don't become laws, theory is as far as it goes. Laws describe a pattern in nature, a theory is the explaination of why that behavior holds true.
And the certainty of quantum mechanics doesn't have anything to do with the certainty of evolution. Certainty in quantum mechanics has to do with the fact that we can't observe the quantum level directly and so we describe the effects of millions and millions of quantum events using statistics.
The certainty of evolution comes from realizing that religious freaks can't accept that <insert creation story here> isn't true. If it was, what about dinosaurs? They aren't in the bible, but they certainly existed.
BTW, this theory doesn't have anything to do with evolution. This theory describes black holes in space with ramifications on quantum mechanics.
No, your just a troll with a weak grasp on math, science, and most other creative aspects of being human.
We all know about your handicap - as a matter of fact you probably already receive a few emails every day telling you how you can enl arg3 You rpen is.
Not even going to pretend to understand Hawking's latest result, but the black hole information paradox that the bet was originally about is pretty straightforward to explain:
The original GR picture of a black hole is one in which nothing within the event horizon has any causal connection with anything outside. Once something falls in, it's lost to the rest of the universe forever, there's no way it can send you any information. So basically lots of information would end up inside a black hole and not be able to get out. This was not in itself a problem.
However Hawking came up with Hawking radiation - the idea that black holes actually radiate, losing their energy (hence their mass), eventually evaporating completely. As I (don't really) understand it, Hawking radiation is a solution that arises from modelling quantum field theory in the region of the event horizon (there's a hand-wavy version which talks about particle-antiparticle pairs, but it's pretty unsatisfying IMHO). It hasn't been witnessed and isn't likely to be any time soon (Hawking radiation would be swamped in the radiation due to matter heating up as it spirals into a black hole), but the theory seems quite widely regarded as sound.
So it seems the energy that falls into the black hole eventually leaves again via Hawking radiation. The problem though is that this radiation is purely blackbody - it's just a thermal spectrum that gives you no information about the properties of what fell into the hole. Throw in a dictionary or a rock of the same mass - the Hawking radiation which eventually comes out looks the same. It looks like the information is lost forever
This is in direct conflict with quantum mechanics which states that the evolution of physical systems is unitary - information about previous states is never lost (however hard it may be in practice to retrieve it). The conflict itself is not necessarily a big shock - people already knew that GR and QM weren't fundamentally compatible as they stood. But the question remained as to whether the information was really lost or not. This is what the bet was about (incidentally John Preskill whom it was with started out as a particle theorist, became very interested in the information paradox question, and through that moved into primarily researching quantum information theory - quantum computers and the like) and what Hawking claims to now have answered.
Hope you enJoy our Hawking comic... A Brief History of the Internet. :)
:-)
and be sure and do the JoyPoll, we've added a bonus Al Gore cameo.
Hawking is great and I am sort of disappointed that he found himself wrong. Why? Well, because I wanted space travel to be believable. He just ruined it for me. Okay, Cricket verses Baseball? I say U.S. college Football. :) Forget the other sports. They are off topic. ;)
Well, yes, but it's a solution to a philosophical problem that doesn't necessarily exist. Scientific laws are absolutely nothing more than expressions of an observed pattern. There is no empirical basis to claim that the pattern observed must always hold in all situations. Some believe that it does and that the laws of science can, in principle, be refined to the point where they are perfect predictors in all cases (possibly factoring in uncertainty), but that is more of a philosophical axiom than a scientific conclusion.
Anyway, the point here is that, philosophically, God is not bound by the laws of science. If God created and controls the universe, it is philosophically valid to view the laws of science as regularities we have observed in the way God choose for things to unwind. At one job, I used to quite consistently wear a T-shirt to work always and only on Fridays, and a co-worker joked that he didn't need a calendar to tell whether the weekend was coming up; he could just look at what I was wearing. This was a perfectly regular behavior according to his observations; he could have made a mathematical formula to predict it. However, if he had, this would not have in any way forced me to wear a T-shirt on Fridays or to wear something different on other days. Going back to God, when God behaves in a way that doesn't fit the expectations and that makes an exception to natural law, this is known as a "miracle".
On the other hand, uncertainty gives a whole extra level of leeway. Suddenly, there are an infinite number of possible "correct" ways (according to the laws of physics) for events to unfold, so as long as God chooses one of them, his actions don't disturb the natural order that has been established. (Why God would want to do this is another question, but one possible answer is to avoid making things so irregular that we cannot plan our lives and have some measure of control over what goes on around us. If we couldn't do that, it would be pretty chaotic and hard for finite creatures like humans to cope with.)
Also on this subject, there is the fascinating (to me) question of whether it's possible to create perfect physical laws and have all the necessary data to predict future events and have this all happen within the universe. This gets into all kinds of fun things like information content, density, etc., and it touches on the field of data compression. One thing we learn from data compression is that there is no such thing as a lossless compression algorithm that *always* compresses its input. (If there were, the consequences would include the ability to infinitely compress all files, and the ability to solve the unsolveable Halting Problem.)
But, it is still possible to create a lossless algorithm that losslessly compresses some inputs and losslessly expands others. So, to extrapolate (somewhat wildly) to the physical universe, it would seem the case that the universe cannot predict itself in all possible universes, but it may be possible that some universes could exists where it'd be possible to perfectly model the universe (and thus predict the future, etc.) from within the universe. If we should somehow discover that we live within one of those universes, then would really could fit the entire universe into our brains! Or at least some larger system that involves brains, computers, etc. It would be incredibly surprising to find out that we do live in such a universe though. (Which would be nice if it happened, since thenceforth nothing else would ever have to be surprising.) Anyway, the point is my gut tells me we cannot perfectly model the universe from within the universe, although it is not proven.
See if I'm understanding this right.... A blackhole is the cosmic equivalent of a blender and pressure cooker, and the contents are way overcooked? The composition has to be the same, but the form is completely changed? Or is he saying we may eventually be able to determine the original form as well?
I'll take you up on that...
:-)
I'm deaf and I've been looking for some new deaf jokes
Twenties Retirement
What's baloney is not the equations of GR or SR, but the model of reality that is extrapolated from such math. Similar to Newtonian physics (which is still used to put stuff in orbit around Saturn), the space time described by GR may not be reality. Ptolemy's equations did a great job of describing orbits, but was it real? I don't argue with the accuracy of GR but the model used to describe it is probably wrong. It is an awesome approximation, but one that has problems (such as singularities, and other infinite results). Can all points in space-time exist if you take into account all possible moving observers in the universe(Einstein's math says yes)? If so are you willing to give up free will (not that I believe there is free will, just arguing here)? Anyway, when people say Einstein = poopy, they are not complaining about the math, they are complaining that the picture of the universe painted by Einstein may not be entirely correct.
I just wish those Asian gangsters in the U.S.'s various cities and the Japanese kids I tought a few years back knew about this (to mention a few).
mass and energy. though science fiction based on Hawking's new theory probably won't be as entertaining as the previous theory (wormholes vs matter and light remain matter and light), it's good to see a physical constant proven to be true.
"There are many things that are known and things that are unknown; in between is exploration."
That's scientific! how do you know that about him? Any investigation? Any facts?
FWIW I'm a graduate in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics and also studied Philosophy of Science (to a basic level) at Uni ... but call me a troll if you like. Hey call me anything it's late and I can't hear you!!
... oops, moving on]. Why not? It's a reasonable theory, is it falsifiable, I guess it is. But, you say, the Earth moves round the Sun and so the Earth can't be the centre of anything ... here's where Occam comes in and falls on his face. Yeah, the maths is hard if you consider the Earth to be static, but just because the maths is more beautiful in one formation does that make it more true??
:0)>
A theory is just a 'guess'. A very educated guess that has yet to be proved wrong. For it to be scientific I believe it must be provably falsifiable.
This kind of stems from my general belief that current theories work well and are mutually consistent (in the standard models and moreso) but are not necessarily "the truth".
[climbs on hobby-horse]
Consider the oft-repeated tale of people in the middle-ages believing that Jerusalem is the centre of the Universe. [Apart from that being a bit of a historical urban myth based on our assumptions having seen maps with Jerusalem at the centre! - prove me wrong reference a work that states "we believe jerusalem to be the physical centre of the universe"
[/off hobby horse]
Anyway Bob, the theories have been tested. Great. They are sound. But are they true? Are photon energies genuinely quantised, perhaps as science develops this "theory" will be a historical side-note like the greeks atom (meaning indivisable)? How can we say that quarks are primal matter at one stage and be "right" yet at a later date we decide that we have superstrings, then later m-branes. Are all these theories "right" by you? [Sorry can't think of alternates for GR, my mind is not that inventive].
PS: Your theory on Asian children is false. My friend Aleem can't do maths very well
...he could do a full spread for Playgirl mag. With such a famous person they ought to sell a ton of mags and I bet that would pay handsomely.
The certainty of evolution comes from realizing that religious freaks can't accept that isn't true. If it was, what about dinosaurs? They aren't in the bible, but they certainly existed.
Why would it?
It also doesn't mention the duck-billed platypus, fire ants, or any of a billion other irrelevant things..
Twenties Retirement
You say that you are a Christian but you are not. That makes you a liar. Is it perhaps that you do want to claim salvation, but apart from that you hate God? Jesus says that he who does not believe the Word does not know Him. And that person has never believed. You are deceiving yourself dude. Be honest - you are just a non-believer who - for whatever reason - tries to associate himself with Christ. But that does not mean Christ knows you.
Christ does not know you.
What's doody is not the equations of GR or SR, but the model of reality that is extrapolated from such math. Similar to Newtonian physics (which is still used to put stuff in orbit around Saturn), the space time described by GR may not be reality. Ptolemy's equations did a great job of describing orbits, but was it real? I don't argue with the accuracy of GR but the model used to describe it is probably wrong. It is an awesome approximation, but one that has problems (such as singularities, and other infinite results). Can all points in space-time exist if you take into account all possible moving observers in the universe(Einstein's math says yes)? If so are you willing to give up free will (not that I believe there is free will, just arguing here)? Anyway, when people say Einstein = poopy, they are not complaining about the math, they are complaining that the picture of the universe painted by Einstein may not be entirely correct.
What makes this any more than a hypothesis arrived at using math?
The fact that it is a mathematically derived consequence of theories that have already been extensively tested.
My feeling is that theoretical physics is pretty useless when it is being used to describe something that can not be realistically verified. I mean, with black holes, we think we've detected them but there's not even any real solid proof that they exist at all.
No theory is ever proved to be true. Theories are only proved to be false. Strictly speaking, we can't even prove that the universe has any physical existence outside our own perceptions, which we cannot prove to be reliable. Verification comes in the form of tests of the predictions of a theory (quite a few of which have already been passed by black hole theory). And mathematically deriving the consequences of a theory is the only way to come up with such tests. In recent years, for example, physicists have managed to test aspects of quantum theory that were once considered to be outside the range of possible verification.
If the explanation is accurate then I must say it's the only one that I understood and that intuitively makes sense to (as much as anythingthat touches GR ever does). If you haven't read it yet or just scrolled past it I suggest you give it a read.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Because the bible says the earth was created in 6 days, creationism and all that jazz...
Its an easy argument that debunks strict creationist, such as the original poster. There are good reasons to believe that dinosaurs existed, correct? And they prove that all animals that have existed don't exist today. Working from there you can disprove most of the rediculous claims made by creationists such as the original poster.
Of course I don't expect you to understand this argument. I though of it to explain evolution to childrem...
Actually, if you looked at the URL of the first poster, you would find facts (dug up by evolutionists) which contradict key elements of evolution theory. Evolutionists themselves say this. Really, the weakest of all theories must be evolution theory. It is getting sillier and sillier the more facts are found. Ha.
While your basic point about physics and math seems right, I would just add that ease of use is still a consideration in math. We're lucky not to have to use Newton's notation for calculus (with its "fluxions") or Schwinger's for QED.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I wonder if this latest pronouncement is related to my long held belief that the idea of Hawking radiation seems to contradict the notion of a black hole. If a BH can radiate energy and loose mass, how can one form. The rate at which a BH sheds mass is inversly related to the radius of the event horizon. For a black hole to form it would have start with an infitessimal radius which could support huge emmisions and mass losses, that would shed the mass that is needed to create the event horizon. It seems that there could be a region where mass densities are only able to reach the verge of creating event horizons.
(i'm agnostic or something, definitely not xtian though)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
My right hand got tangled in the umbilical cord and as a result is severely mangled and doesn't really resemble a hand at all.
Just call me "lefty" like everyone else ;)
Machine9dotNet
Fair is fair afterall.
I'm not an atheist btw. though I might come across as such at times. My irritation stems from people that feel the need to turn everything into a religious debate, there's places for those, slashdot isn't one of them.
Machine9dotNet
The poster is pointing out the fact that the "theory" IS RIGHT to more than enough precision in the things we've looked at so far.
When you finally find the areas where it diverges from reality, the previously tested correct results WILL NOT CHANGE.
Just because Newtonian mechanics is discovered to be "wrong" dosen't mean that all the bridges we built will come crashing down. Its still perfectly fine for use on everyday problems like figuring out how a car will move. Its even good enough for calculating orbital paths for our interplanetary probes.
Sure, its not absolutely right... but its not very wrong!
Absolute Truth in a theory is not required and is probably not possible.
So matter (dense energy) is converted to information and sprayed out of the black hole. Does the newly accurate mathematical model offer any insight into an equivalence formula for Energy and Information, along the lines of E = mc^2? How many bits to the joule?
--
make install -not war
I'll take you up on that...
:-)
I'm deaf and I've been looking for some new deaf jokes
I'd tell them to you, but uh...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Dr. Hawking has solved a rather famous problem in astrophysics. That he lost a bet in the process is hardly a slight. As far as I can tell he is quite a gentleman, but even a complete egomaniac would make an announcement like this, since it's much more of a victory than a defeat.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
So there was this priest, this rabbi and this guy who's right hand got tangled in the umbilical cord and as a result is severely mangled and doesn't really resemble a hand at all... Kinda hard to work with.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
The guy was presenting facts, disputed or not-liked by (apparently) atheists. What's wrong with that? Is labelling a discussion about the admissability / factuality of facts as "religious debate" sufficient reason to shut down debate? I don't think so.
You probably believe that you can be a Christian in your own home, and dump Christ when you walk out the door?
... by someone who doesn't know physics.
t ml)
The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.
The Euclidean path integral is the latest trick in quantum gravity.
The original problem with quantum gravity was that as you "quantitized" space into discrete units, explaining gravity in terms of particles like 'gravitons' and trying to do the math was possible for simplistic interactions like tree diagrams where time generally flowed one way - but extremely hairy and full of infinities if you started looking at loop diagrams where time can flow both ways.
So people like Roger Penrose came at it from a different direction, starting off with definining space-time in a quantitized manner (spin networks, quantum foam, whatever you want to call it) which had the side effect that complex examples of spin networks acted a lot like 3-dimensional Euclidean space.
Once people started talking about space-time like this, math started showing up that helped describe events and the progression of events in this space-time, including the Euclidean path integral which attempts to measure the end result of an interaction of particles in this type of space-time.
(Good link talking about path integrals and how they were a problem with quantum definition of gravity: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/qg_qc.h
Anyways, it sounds like he's saying: All this new math is great and if the world were a simple place, yeah, black holes would probably have an event horizon and the math to prove it is simple.
But the world is more complex than you think and doing the math for "the real world" shows that the closer you get to the end result, the less and less predictable the end result will be, even though overall it looks like it has a defined end result (i.e. it looks like it _should_ have an event horizon). In reality it's constantly shifting around - and likely this amount of shifting around is representative of the original information/particle system that went into its formation but you won't be able to trace it backwards and extract what the original information was.
This will probably tie into time dialation which will make it be: We never get to the end result event horizon that 'should' be there and in the process of never getting there, the black hole will have a nice jiggly event horizon as a result of all that information - but so jiggly we can't tell what went in to it, all we can do is measure the jiggliness.
What he hasn't explained is how he knows this and the math behind it.
Crap I'm bored.
Ugh, no, evolution has quite a bit of evidence behind it. Three points:
1) Exstinction -- dinosaurs
2) New species -- lots of fossil evidence, but if that doesn't please you, the evolution of bacteria.
3) DNA as replication mechanism -- You can see DNA, Dolly the lamb, etc.
From those three points, you can "prove" evolution is correct. Scientists can argue on the finer points, but these three top level items are beyond proved at this point and every credible scientist (including intelligent design believers) agrees on these points.
And I did read that rediculous link from the original poster. All it says that all scientist don't agree on all points and concentrates on the beginnings of life. If they did, it would be called religious dogma not science. But science is the brutal competition of ideas, and only ideas with proof survive.
The exact mechanism of the evolution of protolife isn't completely known because bacteria don't tend to leave fossiles. How rude of them, but that doesn't mean that an invisible man in the sky created everything in 6 days. Now really, which idea is more absurd?
Lisa: Bart, you cast the wrong spell. Zombies!
Bart: Please, Lise, they preferred to be called "The Living Impaired".
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Leeching? How is posting a link to an article leeching?
If anything, Slashdot is helping the NYT by sending them more visitors.
I understand that a theory cannot be proven, only disproven (or shown to be inconsistent with experimental results). I also understand that there may be some time in the future that we can test Hawking's idea. But I don't consider this to satisfy the requirements of being a scientific theory.
I mean, I could say "There is a pink elephant on the other side of the universe." Well, sometime in the future, we may get a telescope that can see to the other side of the universe with accurate enough precision to pick out a pink elephant. Does this mean my idea is a theory because it is potentially falsifiable?
"If anything, Slashdot is helping the NYT by sending them more visitors." ...and making money through ad-revenue. NYT does the work, Slashdot benefits from it, and everybody bitches about following NYT's terms.
"Derp de derp."
What?
and STILL nobody has disproven time cube despite the hefty $10,000.00 reward.
Hey, I'll give you a hand for trying anyway.
that shoulf be 'stupud -fuckinh= shti" yuo dkickwaf
...that I have to burn all his previous books?
Hawkings writes it better, but isn't that just about what I wrote? Three WEEKS AGO... The universe is a closed, regenerating loop... www.newpath4.com/anwar_ drillitfast drillitgood forgetaboutthneighborhood_ anwar.htm#BlackHoleRevelation ; What do I have to do, get in a WHEELCHAIR TO SCORE?! Hey, anybody watch Fox Cavuto yesterday? He pulled Jack Kemp from a mothball closet to tell us all that Social Security is a wonderful program. If it's so wonder full why did he spend his life making sure he wasn't depending on it? hehehehe www.newpath4.com/SS_FIX.htm (Well, at least I'm 50% ON TOPIC TODAY eh? Do I get any /. points for that?) ON TOPIC THEN (75%):
www.newpath4.com/theuniversalwall_doesitexist.htm . You guys really are hard to please.
"The guy was presenting facts, disputed or not-liked by (apparently) atheists. What's wrong with that?"
Maybe because it has absolutely nothing meaningful to say about BH theory or Steve Hawking which is the actual discussion point?
The original post came across as an idiotic swipe of a rather intelligent man, with a rather contextually meaningless link tacked on.
I find that both wrong and pointless.
This quote evolved from a NYT interview with Einstein in 1919. The NYT sent its golf correspondent who made stuff up in his story, and these exaggerations made it in the headline of the article itself. I quote Bill Bryson in "A Short History of Nearly Everything" (who in turn is quoting David Bodanis in "E=mc squared" (both of which I recommend...)
"Almost at once his theories of relativity developed a reputation for being impossible for an ordinary person to grasp. Matters were not helped... when the New York Times decided to do a story, and -- for reasons that can never fail to excite wonder -- sent the paper's golfing correspondent, one Henry Crouch, to conduct the interview.
Crouch was hopelessly out of his depth, and got nearly everything wrong. Among the more lasting errors in his report was the assertion that Einstein had found a publisher daring enough to publish a book that only twelve men 'in all the world could comprehend'. There was no such book, no such publisher, no such circle of learned men, but the notion stuck anyway. Soon the number of people who could grasp relativity had been reduced even further in the popular imagination -- and the scientific establishment, in must be said, did little to disturb the myth." [He then mentions Eddington's "I'm trying to think of the third person" quote.]
Here's the link to the original 1919 NYT article. (yes, you have to pay, but you can see the headline for free...)
Also, here's
I was there. The speech was awesome but someone haxored Hawkings speechbox with an ebonics mod:
"So dis black hoe, she look likes' a motherf**ker around it but get dis... AINT NO MOTHERF**KER!"
Way over my head, anyway.
It would be nice if the propanents of the human causes of global warming were so open to critisism. Cheers for Hawking for keeping what science was ment to be...honest and open for discussion. If only the editors of Scientific america were this nice to Lomburge and other skeptics.
stendec@gmail.com
But you never see the matter actually hit the event horizon!
I've been saying that line before on slashdot - but that does not cover it all, anotherWhat happens during black hole formation - you basically have some sun, which collapses, and suddenly some part of it will find itself actually inside the event horizon. However, I think Hawkings math suggests that the black hole/its event horizon isn't a perfect sphere - it preserves information by moving and jiggling a bit, like lots of overlapping bubbles.
You could still have a parallel universe inside the black hole, which maybe would be temporary and evaporate, but it would be connected to ours. Actually thats a good thing, since what would you have parallel universes for if they didnt connect to ours ?
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
I've never understood this "creationism wins by default" argument. Even if evolution were proven wrong, that doesn't mean suddenly we should accept the ancient Jewish creation myth as true. Why not the ancient Greek, the Hindu or any other? As a "logic thinking guy" I'm not seeing much logic. Sure lots of people beleive it, but reality isn't a democracy.
If God did make everything, and us in his image, that doesn't seem humiliating. It means we matter, and are inherently important in someway. If we are just a cosmic accident in an uncaring universe, that seems a lot more diminishing to me.
I know, I'm responding to someone modded a troll, and Hawking's theories have nothing to do with evolution. Just wanted to get a few things off my chest.
It seems that JOHN TITOR got this one 'prediction' right...
Darby (of anomalies.net) won't be happy, I'm sure.
John Titor claimed to be a time-traveller from the future.
From the johntitor.com website's news page:
JOHN TITOR SAID STEVEN HAWKING WAS WRONG ABOUT BLACK HOLES - NOW HAWKING AGREES!!!
When John Titor visited our worldline in 2000 - 2001, he gave certain physical details about the physics and engineering behind his time machine. He stated the machine operated through the use of two mini black holes that produced a gravity field that allowed passage from one worldline to another. In march of 2001, John got into a discussion about his machine with his arch nemesis, Darby. For those unfamiliar with Darby, he is currently the moderator at the Time Travel forum at http://www.anomalies.net.
For the last four years, Darby has been hell-bent on driving people away from the idea of time travel and John Titor specifically. In their last few conversations before John left, Darby and John went back and forth on many subjects where Darby took great pride in trying to out-maneuver John over his physics statements. As time went on, John has proven to be correct on many of the bizarre statements he had made. It appears he was right about another.
Darby attacked John on a routine basis (and still does) based on Steven Hawking's theories on black holes. When John was here, Steven Hawking believed that mini-black holes were impossible to contain because they would evaporate and disappear in something called "Hawking Radiation." Here is a short question and answer between Darby and John:
"MARCH 14, 2001
DARBY: It's Hawking Radiation you can't overcome.
JOHN: Yes, that is true. If you firmly believe that Hawking radiation cannot be controlled or goes on even without the presence of virtual particles forever until the singularity explodes than you are correct. "
As it turns out, Hawking has now re-thought his views on this subject and he now agrees with John.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
>> Well, because I wanted space travel to be believable how about the apollo missions?}
I believe he had a bet with Kip Thorne over whether Cygnus X1 was a black hole or not. Hawking said it wasn't and Thorne said it was. Hawking conceded the bet a while ago. It was for a subscription to playboy. Hawking said that he really thought that it was a black hole but wanted a consolation prize if it wasn't.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
There is a sense in which statements like Hawking's are less scientifically satisfying than predictions about the properties of materials or even predictions about what will be seen at particle accelerators. In physics we're always working in mathematical reverse - we look at the complicated results of a zillion experiments and try to figure out the fundamental principles that let us explain them all. Theoreticians (like Hawking) also try to work forward and see what they can derive from these principles. It's always possible that these derivations go a little too far and can yield wrong results. If a theorist claims they can tell you what's happening inside a black hole, take it with a grain of salt - it might be right, but so far we can't be sure.
There's still a big difference between that and pink elephants. Quantum field theory and relativity have been tested ridiculously strictly (especially the former) over a very wide range of scales and energies. Even though physicists believe they aren't the final answer, they give the right answer so often that one starts to believe that they contain insight into the truth. If those two theories start to tell you something, you think about it seriously, even if you can't yet see how to test it. Even if it's wrong, the reasoning involved might lead you in new directions toward new fundamental principles. I can't say the same for the previous poster's offhand remarks about the distribution of chromatically diverse pachyderms.
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
repeat as needed (Slashdot doesn't like repetition)
Does the loser of a bet about an event horizon have to sew his eyes shut?
We're complaining about the requirement to register to read the article. I don't read the NYT unless I'm following a link. I don't want to have to 'register' just to read an article. Either slashdot needs to enter an agreement with the NYT to remove the registration requirement for referrals from /. or /. needs to find articles from non-registration required sites. CNN/Foxnews/Wired/BBC/AP/MSN/... There are plenty of sites that don't require registration.
I don't read AC A human right
I understand that a theory cannot be proven, only disproven (or shown to be inconsistent with experimental results). I also understand that there may be some time in the future that we can test Hawking's idea. But I don't consider this to satisfy the requirements of being a scientific theory.
I mean, I could say "There is a pink elephant on the other side of the universe." Well, sometime in the future, we may get a telescope that can see to the other side of the universe with accurate enough precision to pick out a pink elephant. Does this mean my idea is a theory because it is potentially falsifiable?
More of a speculation, and not even one of much interest, since it has so far passed no experimental tests at all, explains no known observations, and is not derived from any fundamental theory. On the other hand, if you could show that gravitational theory or quantum theory required that elephant to be there, then it would be of considerable interest, because the same reasoning that led you to predict that elephant might well yield other predictions that could be tested.
Hawking's conclusions are derived from theories that are already extensively tested, and that are fundamental to how the universe works. The fact that you can't instantly see how the reasoning that led to these conclusions might also yield experimental tests does not mean that it does not.
To the 'Creationism wins by default' argument when evolution is proven wrong: There are only two possible explanations for our existence here. Either God created us (special creation) or life evolved. You suggest that other 'myths' might also be true. Problem is they are myths. The ancient Jewish history, despite your claims, is not myth. Myth has very definite characteristics, such as fanciful creatures, that mark it as myth. The Jewish account as recorded in Genesis bears no similarities to myth.
You are correct. We are special to God. We are His only creation created with free will, meaning we can choose to sin, or to do God's will. It is our choice. God created us to have a relationship with Him, but the fall of man in the garden put an barrier between us and Him. That barrier is the penalty for sin: death. Because none of us could pay the penalty and live, God, in His love for us, provided the way for our debt to be paid in full. He sent His son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross in our place, that we might have salvation and the eternal relationship with God He created us for. Jesus' resurrection proved our salvation was assured if we would but accept the free gift of salvation by repenting of our sins and accepting Jesus' death on the cross as payment for our sins.
Evolution holds we are an accidental creation of random chance actions because it then frees its believers from reponsibility for their actions. If God did not create us, then we are free to do whatever we want and nothing has long-term meaning. Reading any newspaper shows the horrible result of that thinking and teaching in real lives every day.
You suggest that Hawking's theories have nothing to do with evolution. In some sense perhaps not: theorizing about black holes does not directly have anything to do with evolution. But his theories of an ancient universe do. Evolution demands an extreme length of time for it to fulfill its purposes, but there is sufficient evidence that does show the universe is not ancient. Yet evolutionists, and Hawking's, choose to ignore the evidence that contradicts those theories.
Ok lets see what we got with these three things.
1.) Exstinction..stuff dies so what
2.) New species..ok this is true what is lacking
is something beyond the sepecies line. Show me a new family. This would
be necessary for evolution. Yeah you can take two species of dog and interbreed them but the result is still a dog. If you can get two dogs to prodouce anything but a dog I would be impressed. Bacteria is the same way. Get it
to prdouce a more complex lifeform thats not a bacteria. Here's where evolution takes a leap of faith. It assumes that since you can make new species you can make the leap to new genus's, new families, all the way up the taxinomic chain. THIS HAS NEVER BE OBSERVED.
3.) Cloning a sheep proves even less as the result is a genetic replicant of the original. Again show me a sheep producing something besides a sheep.
Not Really, and Definitely Not.
1: Hawking is the one who formalized the Chronology Protection Conjecture, which states that even if time travel is theoretically possible at a quantum level, macro-scale physics will always prevent it from being used. Note: the conjecture is void if parallel universes exist and can be accessed, but this new black hole theory makes that case less likely.
2: most of the currently plausible theories about the nature of space-time have nontrivial real solutions that imply time travel. Studying these cases is an excellent way to test whether the theories are valid or not.
Conclusion: will someone please mod down Louis Savain for flamebait?I'm sorry you got modded as a troll. Anyway, my mother has used a wheelchair for the last 20 years (since I was five) and has been disabled to some extent since she was nine years old. When I was in middle school, she became an activist for persons (don't ask me why they use the word persons instead of people, but they do) with disabilities. As such, I grew up with lots of people who used wheelchairs, read braille, used sign language and all kinds of other disabilities, some apparent, some not. The guy who taught me to drive was mostly confined to a wheelchair because of MS. All this to say, I've known over a hundred people with disabilities, and almost every one of them would find that phrase really funny.
Occasionally, you'll find that someone is really bitter about their disability and wouldn't find that phrase funny. Give it a few months though, maybe even a few years, and most of them would agree that obligatory wheelchair ride jokes are really funny. When I was a kid, my mom happened to have two electric wheelchairs, and once we were really bored and she wasn't using either (she had sort of stand-up arm-chairs that she would sit in occasionally), so she let us race them up and down the driveway. My little brother grew up catching a ride by standing on the little tilt bars on the back (meant to sort of help pop the chair up a curb if necessary). She still gives rides to little kids. I think this joke is really quite appropriate, especially given Stephen Hawking's own seeming good-naturedness about his disability.
Liora
That one is a handy-cap.
Why is anything anything?
It's good that you've been looking because you would get very far just listening for them. Okay, that was terrible. It turns out I haven't used any of these jokes in years and the only ones I remember are the [insert ethnicity] ones. Have you heard the one about...?
Why is anything anything?
According to this site http://www.xdr.com/dash/blackholes.html there is a different explanation entirely.
The neat thing about path integrals is that the solution is the same regarldess of what path is followed, provided that the endpoints are the same and the equation is consistent over all points crossed by the function. Both of these things are usually true in finite space....
So it seems to me that he is implying that the event horizon doesnt "exist", it merely "tends to exist" at a particular location.
Or am I imagining things?
SS
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Don't forget the LDS book, it's the third in the Trilogy. I'm still waiting for the original three, but I've heard they won't be nearly as good.
It looks like for whatever reason, Mr. Hawking has decided to conform to 'popular wisdom' in the Einstein centric academic community. After all, he DOES have a chair to protect.
If one stays in a field long enough, one will acquire a 'gut feeling' about it. Mathmatics is no different! By saying now that matter 'leaks out slowly in a mangled form' but leaving out the way it was mangled, my math gut is telling me that this mangling may be the result of light's assymtotic approach to zero resolved velocity as it approaches the event horizon of the black hole. This is approaching the limit of infinite slowness through negative values. Now if some of the photons actually fall back to the singularity, some could say that inasmuch as the gravitational acceleration must needs meet or exceed 'c' for this to happen, then the velocity of the falling photons could well exceed 'c' at the point of arrival at the singularity; but this is beside the point.
When any wave like this is 'slowed down' the percieved frequency is lowered as the information flow is retarded by the deceleration. This could account for the percieved 'mangling'. It would be like a time dilation literally set and made permanent. This is where the so called universal matter and energy 'speed limit' break down. Larger and larger 'black holes' should by the certainty of mathmatics have larger and larger gravitational acceleration values. If 'c' can be approached or even equalled for small black holes, what then for large ones, not to mention galactic or even larger ones. It is my 'gut feeling' that somewhere along the line Herr Einstein divided by zero whether he realized it or not. That is how he must have arrived at the so called inviolability of 'c' in the first place. Later scientists have mistakenly treated this as some kind of gospel. Astronomers routinely find evidence of superliminal velocities during the conduct of their jobs. They just as routinely and unthinkingly apply 'corrections' to their observations and report the results as 'facts'.
Mr. Hawking never once considered that conservation of matter and energy might trancend universes to other universes as well? True conservation laws might later have to consider a larger definition of the overused word: "universe". The idea of a multiverse has already entered the lexicon many times and has been presented in many major contemporary periodicals. Ultimately it may be that Albert Einstein will be later remembered for the one statement that will finally prove true: "The universe is stranger than we can even imagine!".
By now altering his view of 'black holes', he has let in the possibility of a math error my Mr. Einstein. Maybe someone in the near future will step up to the plate and find this error. It will likely be very hard to find; it may well be buried in one of the trigonometric substitutions that calculus and differential equations users are so fond of. Find it we will, and once again we will have to ask ourselves questions that once were comfortably avoided by the so called scholars among us that used that old wooley haired eccentric as a shield against thinking.
What you are discribing is what the observer sees.
Simply put, light gets slows by black hole -> light gets slowed more -> light slowed to a halt. Since the light isnt moving, this is as far as you'll ever see. As we can not see light travelling away from us.*
To put in it's simplist terms what Hawking is say:
Old - What goes in, can't come out.
New - What goes in, has to come out, just looking different.
*Ignoring red shift
A significant number of folks tend to gravitate towards Hawking's disfiguring life depleting disease (as he by rights he should have died from complications at least a decade ago.) Yet he can mentally run circles around the majority of us. And while we are unable to measure it, I would be willing to bet that he has the spare mental capacity to abate some of the effects of his disease. Now look around, at a society of persons striving to be normal. Millions of kids "diagnosed" with ADHD/ADD and other similar disorders and parents more than willing to cram pills down their throat. Yet look at our environment, we are rarely required to concentrate on things for more than a bit at a time yet every job description on the planet says that we need the ability to "multitask". Likely not the best argument. But, we have slowed our own growth and evolution as a species due to classifying everything as an ailment and something that needs corrected if it is out of the "norm" and by other practices. Perhaps if we reevaluate this, more extraordinary persons will emerge and humanity will be all the better for it.
Does this mean a factually correct remake is forthcoming?
I doubt I'd notice, what with being a fucktard and all.
Well - discussions can be changed. You display exactly the unscientific attitude of evolutionists: "don't bother us with facts we don't like".
It's hard to be a complete asshole when your wife can steal your wheelchair batteries and leave you in the back yard.
Only half-kidding.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
scientific postmodernity ... is that self-contradictory?
... just like (11+2) mod 10=3 might be derived by noting that 11 is 3 in base 2. It's completely wrong, but it works in this scenario.
It is "absolutely right" in the sense of getting the correct result
I suppose if you only care about what works and not what the truth is that's fine.
Actually I never mentioned whether I "like" the facts presented by the orginal creationist poster or not.
That is something you have disingenuously asserted.
A fabrication. A lie.
I just said I found them irrelevant to the topic of Black Holes and Steven Hawking- Which they are.
How ironic then that you would perfectly demonstrate the attitude of creationists: "I'll just believe what I want to believe".
"Myth has very definite characteristics, such as fanciful creatures, that mark it as myth. The Jewish account as recorded in Genesis bears no similarities to myth."
Last time I read Genesis it featured a talking snake and a mystical apple... That matches your parameters of a myth rather nicely.
"Evolution holds we are an accidental creation of random chance actions because it then frees its believers from reponsibility for their actions"
No it doesn't. It has absolutely nothing to with "freeing its' believers from responsibility". It's a scientific theory. Not a way of life.
Why is that so difficult to grasp?
Why do you feel the need to make stuff up just to attack it?
Thanks for the website compliment - I try :)
In Zimbabwe, yes, there is a dismal failure. I wouldn't put it down to race relations all that much though, although they do play a part. Bob Mugabe (the president) is severely abusing his own people, most of whom are black, as is the majority of the political opposition. Personally I think he's simply grown power hungry and arrogant. My own country's relationship and attitude toward him I find shocking and disgusting, treating him like there's nothing wrong, but I have no reason to believe that what has transpired in Zimbabwe will repeat themselves in South Africa - we don't have a Mugabe.
In South Africa I don't see overwhelming trouble in the near future. Economically we are growing, but too slowly. This can only worsen when Aids starts hitting our labour force (this sounds heartless, but it is the bigger picture. Obviously I feel for the human element as well). This will hurt our economy, certainly. However, I don't think the country will descend into civil anarchy or anything like that - if anything I think the overall situation will improve despite all these problems.
The government appears to be beginning to get a handle on many issues which have plagued the country since democracy in '94. It is widely predicted that the ruling ANC, which currently has 70% of the vote and accordingly the 2/3's majority they need to pass any bill in parliament, will not see a majority anywhere near that big again. Accordingly politics will become more representative in the near future (say after two voting periods - 10 years), where the ANC will be in charge most likely but the other parties will wield considerable parliamentary influence as well. This can only be a healthy and good thing for a democracy.
Let me put it this way: I'm a white male Masters student at a South African university, and I have no intention of leaving the country when I graduate. I feel positive about the country's prospects. A good intro to the country can be found at this site, while this is the official internet gateway to the country.
Onto the cricket...
Yes, a Test cricket match, one of the two major international varieties, is scheduled to take 5 days. The other version takes about 6 hours, while a newer, shorter version recently introduced takes about 3 hours. The basic rules are explained here much better than I am capable of doing so. I personally think it is the most awesome of sports, which may of course be slighly tempered by the fact that South Africa is quite good at it...
An excellent cricketing link if you have a further interest is here.
Hope this is concise enough. Always a pleasure to spread some info about my home or my favourite sport!
Daar is nie 'n lepel nie
speak for yourself, troll.
this may mean that the devil will take take the shape of a cool robot
You mean like this?
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
I thought the whole point of black holes being 'black'
The other point of a black hole is it being a 'hole'
(Must not make goatse joke here)
From my naive understanding of the physics involved in this, mass has a tendency to cause a dip in space and time, like a marble or basebal on a blanket, but thats only in 2 dimentions instead of 4 or 5 or however many there really are. The more mass the object has, the more significant the dip. Gravity isn't the idea that matter attracts other matter, it is the dip in the blanket. And if you put a big err heavy enough object, it will rip a whole in the blanket.
So, as an SF geek I got to ask, what happens when you go through that whole?
Is it a portal into another universe? Does the black hole itself create a new universe? Or is it just a really really dense object that is getting more and more massive?
In the end will there be nothing left in the universe but a bunch of black holes? Will the black holes attract each other to form one really big black hole? If that happened would that result in a big crunch that would then turn into a big bang?
Or are these ideas just a joke?
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
MC Hawking could not be reached for comment.
Is there an actual CD or is this just a joke?
Are their mp3s on KaZaA or anything?
I'd like to listen before I buy.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.