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Hawking Searching For Africa's Einsteins
nuke-alwin writes "Stephen Hawking has traveled to South Africa in search of Africa's Einsteins. The project will create Africa's first post-graduate center for math and physics. The British government has unfortunately decided not to back the project, which is hoping to fight poverty by identifying the kind of talent that can create wealth." Neil Turok is deeply involved as well; he was recently named to head the Perimeter Institute in Canada, whose server we brought to its knees this morning.
Niel Turok was quoted as saying, "I'll also help defend the starving African children from rampaging dinosaurs, free of charge."
So, if these math geniuses get a degree there, whats to keep them from just moving out of country? Nothing? Honestly, if I were born in an absolutely impoverished country, and ended up being a genius and getting a graduate degree in mathematics, I'm sure I'd hop on the first chance at a big corporate job in some other country.
go in search of africa's einsteins, find africa's botlords?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hawking finds some African math guy.
If he's looking to create wealth, he needs to be looking for an African Warren Buffet.
Where did Einstein do his post-graduate work?
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
Not to go off on a tangent, but I wouldn't call Watson the "co-discovererer of DNA," for two reasons.
1. My understanding of research history was that DNA was discovered long before, and also long before was identified as the genetic material.
2. He likely didn't even co-discover the STRUCTURE of DNA so much as steal credit for that from Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling.
If the purpose is to somehow stimulate the local economy, I think it would make more sense to help build and expand the underlying infrastructure that would eventually lead to the desire to have top math/science experts in the region. Otherwise they will most likely just move somewhere where they're actually wanted and can be sufficiently compensated. Is there a need for physics experts when the region is severely lacking in agriculture?
I had to look Jenkem up. God damn!
If Hawking wants to get money for this sort of thing, he needs to make it into a reality show and get a TV network on board. Some ideas:
Africa's Next Top Physicist. Every week, contestants will be tasked with solving a major problem in physics. Their efforts will be judged by a panel led by Hawking, using Tyra Banks as a body double. The loser will be eliminated from the competition and thrown into the African savanna, where he will be eaten by a lion.
African Idol: Physics edition. Auditions will be held in various tribal areas throughout Africa. Hilarity will ensue as the ever-caustic Hawking mocks contestants' failures to adequately explain string theory. Losers will be thrown into the African savanna, where they will be eaten by lions.
Deriving With the Physicists. Contestants will be paired up with professional physicists and tasked to derive the Unified Field Theory. Each week, progress will be gaged by a panel of judges. Losers will be thrown into the African savanna, where the lions, fully sated from contestants from the earlier shows, will ignore them. They will then be shot by poachers.
Survivor: Africa. Contestants will spend the entire show dealing with extreme heat, drought, and the ever-present threat of starvation and disease while trying to scrape up enough money to attend school while keeping his family fed and not dying from malaria. The one who can manage to survive long enough to attend a post-graduate physics program wins.
If he were looking in China, no one would bat an eyelash. But because it's Africa it's suddenly pandering?
He's actually looking for more Hawkings to pass his legacy onto, not Einsteins.
If finding a genius in relatively educated, developed, Western nations is like finding a needle in a haystack, then finding one in Africa is hopeless.
...all the physics in the universe won't help them.
A major dose of population control is necessary as well, as a lot of Africa's civil unrest and political instability can be traced to overpopulation. Tribal lands get subdivided until they can't be subdivided anymore, and landless youth head to the cities where they are unemployed and easily pressed into whatever militia the local revolutionary, tribal rival or kleptocratic government is organizing today.
Building infrastructure, handing out OLPCs, curing malaria, etc. isn't going to help.
There was one Einstein, there will not be another, ever. Nor will there be another Newton, Maxwell, Bohr, Dirac, Feynman, Weinberg, or Hawking. Very accomplished folks, but all over the place with their personalities, like how they would be in a bar (a topless bar if it was Feynman).
I support the project, not the marketing of the project.
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
So that I, for one, can welcome our African Einsteinien overlords.
That's the most stunning part. I would never have guessed that Africa was so backward that it didn't have so much as one math or physics post grad center in the whole dang continent. While there isn't anything like the LHC or Fermilab, seems there has to be more to Africa than the headline suggests.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Funny with a realistic and sad twist. Brillant post. Thread over, you may all go home.
I doubt he will find much because it is such an undernourished and politically unstable place on the whole. You likely need a large population of relatively healthy people in order to produce sufficient geniuses. Poorly-fed brains with too few toys are not likely to end up at the top. Einstein traced his thought process back to a compass that his dad gave him.
If only say 10 percent of Africa's population fits that bill, then you'd get about 10% of the hits compared to a similar population of mostly middle-class countries. This is not being racist, but merely observing the health of Africa's population as it is.
Table-ized A.I.
Race has nothing to do with it. Look at yourself; dumb as a box of rocks.
Put any kid of any race (say, your kid) in a third world country with little food, no medical care, and have unlearned people raise him, and don't send him to school, and he'll be just like the native Africans.
Take one of those African kids and raise him in an enlightened industrial society and he'll excel as much as anyone. It isn't about self esteem, it's about quality of life.
As to your own stupidity, racism is a tool of the rich to keep everyone else at each others' throats so they won't notice who's really using and abusing them, tool.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Thanks a lot you crippled bastard!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
New studies show there is more genetic diversity between humans in Africa:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1288178
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050310103042.htm
http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/Tishkoff1-1999.htm
It might be easier to find a genius among very different subjects, than finding one in a group where everybody is similar.
Hawking is a genius
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
Not to troll or anything, but China has a rich history of innovation and a rather large and obvious talent pools. When we're talking about Sub-Saharan Africa, we're talking about a place that never invented the wheel. Somalia didn't have a written language until the 1970s.
Conditions through out the continent were so abysmal that Africans crossed fences and landmines to put up with Apartheid rather than be "free" in their own countries...until they bitched and bitched and bitched for "democracy" in South Africa.
South Africa and Rhodesia have now gone from countries with major infrastructure and agricultural output to cesspools where the average woman can be expected to be raped 2.5x in her life, and over a quarter of the population has HIV.
But hey, they have democracy!
Subsaharan Africa is not a has-been, its a never-was. The cradle of humanity, and all it has to show for itself is dung huts and STDs.
China has its problems, but at least it can accomplish things on its own. Gun powder, rocketry, etc. They were there first.
If race is irrelevant how do you explain the obvious widespread advanced technological achievements of certain races vs others who, if left untouched, would most likely still be living as primitives for the next thousand centuries? You can't blame the natural evolution of the people of any continent on "social conditions". The greatest determining factor in the course of any civilization/society is the intellect of its inhabitants.
The smartest people in Africa, leave Africa :)
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Look, I'm all for helping Africa get great colleges and postgrad institutions. It's a good thing, and certainly can't hurt. But if these people think that a postgrad center for math and physics is going to help pump great wealth into Africa, I'm afraid they'll be dissapointed. They'd be better off building business and engineering institutes. People like Patrice Motsepe will do far more to bring wealth to Africa than someone like Hawking.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
It is kind of like trying to cure a broken leg with antibiotics. You might need the antibiotics but you'd really better get a splint on there first.
I.e. start by identifying the **real** root cause and work on that.
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
Go Team!
My browser width meant the first line happened to break after "Africa's first post-", leading me ever-so-briefly to ponder "What's so special about African first posts?"
Like 'Monkey,' I had to look up this 'Jenkem' stuff. It is apparently a hoax which has been debunked. See Monkey's link.
No reply to the rest of your post.
"It's a hoax! We're all equal! Race doesn't matter! Please, don't rape my white daughter! We're all equal, brother!"
I don't know what you're bitching about. The guy's creating a school in Africa to better their education and improve their quality of life. Whatever you said doesn't have any relevance.
So. What's your excuse sir? Not to mention that Africa became a war torn cesspool of a continent after European intervention. But you keep up with your unfounded hatred while the rest of us get on with our lives. Sucks to be you.
Because wealth creation is the only important thing in the world right? I guess that's why people love Bill Gates and hate that stupid Mother Teresa.
rising to the bait, there are fundamental problems to Africa, the two key ones are corruption in the governments and the continuous fighting within and between countries (for resources and between tribes). The D.R. Congo should be one of the richest countries in the world with its unequalled wealth of mineral resources, but years of corruption, greed and fighting have ensured its ability to exploit those resources are minimal.
another key problem is that foreign governments have caused major problems. for example, when Belgium controlled one part of Africa they deemed it unncessary to have much if any higher education, so there are very few universities, and thus people's education plateaus.
For the impoverished, wealth creation is absolutely the most important thing in the world.
I just *knew* the Jews had to be behind this!
I don't want you to rape my daughter either.
... what?
a:= dv/dt = d^2x/dt^
And I've got news for you, and it's called the uniqueness of solutions to linear systems of differential equations: stating a derivative and its initial conditions determines the motion (in many cases, see self-force in classical E&M for examples where other principles are used to determine motion).
it also has to do with what the cultural values. Backwards cultures value physical strength and strong domineering personality types, whereas more technologically advanced cultures tend to value intellectual pursuits and achievements as much or more that physical prowess.
Backward cultures often keep themselves backward by focusing on the very things that make them backward.
When did we lose faith in finding an American Einstein, huh?!
Your link reads like Time Cube. STEPHEN HAWKING IS EDUCATING
Oh yeah, sorry, I forgot that we humans are the supreme arbiters of what goes on in the universe and that our laws of science are based off of observation of events around us. I guess it just totally slipped my mind that we can see the entire universe and the entire history of time and know exactly what's happening and what causes it. You win.
Would anyone have looked in the patent office in Switzerland in 1904?
here is the link to Neil Turok's TED talk where he wishes for the next Einstein to be African. http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/232
I certainly hope for his sake that Hawkings doesn't fall prey to some 419 scammers.
I guess you missed the entire point, which is that we absolutely don't know if anything can move in spacetime. We only are pretty sure it can't based off our observations, but our observations are pretty damn limited considering that spacetime is a construct of the human mind and not an actual physical object or plane which can be monitored.
I take offence at your comment; you should've used OpenOffice Calc.
Well it certainly brings new meaning to the term "Woah, this is some good shit!"
This is why the best football and baseball players don't get paid more than our top engineers... wait, what?
The OLPC was designed to be an Einstein detector, IMHO.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Whatever the true metric of how worthwhile an activity is, I'm sure that bitching on slashdot doesn't rate very highly on it.
"Racism is a tool of the rich to keep everyone else at each others' throats so they won't notice who's really using and abusing them."
The jew
sig sig sig siggy sig
That being said - the key differentiator is in opportunity. I agree that if a kid of any race and of reasonable potential was in the same situation you described above, he would probably not do well -- but not strictly because of how he was raised; but rather the lack of opportunity available for him to learn about his own potential.
Take one of those African kids and raise him in an enlightened industrial society and he'll excel as much as anyone. It isn't about self esteem, it's about quality of life. This is patently incorrect - look to any inner city of an enlightened industrial nation for tons of examples of some very intelligent individuals who never realize their potential. (This is independent of race.) As to your own stupidity, racism is a tool of the rich to keep everyone else at each others' throats so they won't notice who's really using and abusing them, tool. I agree that GP is stupid, but as to the rest... must be some good stuff you're smoking there.If a black man did something horrible to you or your family, you have my sympathies.
A member of my family was beaten to death by a black man in the street. It happened before I was born. Routine mugging gone awry. She spent the rest of her "life" in pain and a vegetative state. It was the woman who raised my mother.
I don't blame race. I blame human nature. Most people of any color are just vicious animals running on fear and greed and desperation.
But I like to think -- or, I hope -- that I am a man and not a beast. And I believe that to be this I need, constantly, to overcome the paranoia that would make me a fearful animal and not a man. I believe abject racism is just one more form of animal paranoia.
I do not believe in a utopia where race does not matter. I learned that again in college, and it was my saddest lesson. You see, racist Chinese people say the same things about white men that you say about blacks -- that they (we) are fetishists, perverts, rapists, deviants, and worse. I learned this the hard way when, for six months, I dated a nice and good-looking girl from Shanghai. People said nasty things, whispered snide comments -- particularly two kinds of people: (1) uneducated whites, and (2) racist Chinese people. My mind's eye saw the caricature of the racist white man -- sitting on his front porch, spitting tobacco, and saying, "Watch out! Them watermelon-eating niggers take our women!" morphing into a Chinese student who was pointing at me, and the "nigger" becoming a stereotyped "Westerner" with my face. She was a nice girl, and though we did not have enough in common to continue the relationship -- our value systems were moving rapidly apart, and it became more and more clear that we, in basic philosophy, wanted very different things -- we certainly did not deserve the kind of comments we received. It was insulting to me and dehumanizing to her: The assumption by her "own people" seemed to be that she could not possibly be appealing as a human being, that the only reason anyone could want to date her was that he were sick, that he were some kind of twisted pervert and that the only appealing quality she could possibly have was the ethnicity she happened to come from. She had warned me when we started that people would say these things, and I had replied naively that it didn't matter, but I guess in fact I had really thought it wouldn't happen enough that it could matter. I had to learn the hard way that this wasn't true. It was severely disillusioning.
I do not want to be like those people who spoke insults and acid. I do not believe in utopia, but I reject their petty tribalism, and I am a better man than they were.
Are you? Are you a better man? A thinking, reasoning being with thoughts as well as instincts? Or are you a beast yourself?
I'm not asking you to change your mind immediately. I'm not telling you to discard what you think just because people call it "racism:" having a name for an idea and saying "it's bad" doesn't by itself mean it's wrong. I'm just asking you to moderate your thoughts for a bit, to let the man overcome the beast. Because I think -- or hope -- that in time and with thoughtfulness, you will conclude differently than you do now -- and I don't think bitterness is a very good route to peace for society, or to happiness for yourself.
Cheers.
"
As to your own stupidity, racism is a tool of the rich to keep everyone else at each others' throats so they won't notice who's really using and abusing them, tool."
that's just stupid.
The super wealthy need people to be educated so they can make money and buy there stuff.
Racism is the tool of cowards and the weak of mind.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So instead of battling each other for tribal territory with spears, before being ruled-over by Europe, they were battling each other for tribal territory more efficiently with guns, after Europe left?
It's the same situation, with different, more destructive weapons.
I keep reading that as "Hawking Searching for Africa's Intestines." Seriously, this is the SECOND TIME.
See it there, a white plume over the battle - A diamond in the ash of the ultimate combustion - My panache. --Cyrano
I am very disappointed in the quality of the trolls. this is a subject just begging for a good trolling and you losers can't even manage a 1/2 way decent black troll?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
.
I can see Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman doing this ad, and I can see where having Stephen Hawking would totally rock, but I can't quite wrap my mind around Dr. Hawking having such a... flexable sense of humor. One doesn't expect to see someone with that amount of sheer brain power to have feet of clay... or even a sense of humor that I could understand.
Totally rocks though, if true.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
DNA is a program. It is a program that has features (and bugs) that vary in different regions. These features cluster together, and those larger clusters we call "race".
You are basically saying that if you take notepad.exe and stick it in a xeon, suddenly it is going to grow all sorts of features beyond "find and replace". The converse holds, because if you take vim and put it into a system with not enough memory to run it, sure, it probably won't run, or maybe a few features won't work. It would still probably be more featureful than notepad.exe though.
Either that or you are making an argument that intellectual capacity is something not coded for in DNA (why are humans more intelligent than slugs if not for DNA?), or that the different clusters of people all have the exact same average potential intellect (seeing how every other aspect varies by race, why would this aspect be an exception?). While unsound, the argument is certain to garner you +5 insightful from the PC faithful.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Yeah, how do you explain how far ahead of everyone else the Jews are?
"If race is irrelevant how do you explain the obvious widespread advanced technological achievements of certain races vs others who, if left untouched, would most likely still be living as primitives for the next thousand centuries?"
Read Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond, (or download the torrent of the movie the made from the book if reading is too hard for you) and you may become less ignorant.
Why aren't comments like this being modded down? There are at least two others below this one that require it as well.
what's that now?
[quote]
Put any kid of any race (say, your kid) in a third world country with little food, no medical care, and have unlearned people raise him, and don't send him to school, and he'll be just like the native Africans.
[/quote]
Absolutely true. As an example, look at the Kalash tribal people of Pakistan. They're basically white-caucasian (descended from Greeks), but they are among the poorest ethnic groups in the region.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
Nonsense. That does not explain why the Negros in USA suffer so much in education, and need all kinds of help just to get passing grades. That does not explain why Negros tend to commit the highest amount of murders and rapes.
Actually, Just read a few sites to clear all your doubts once and for all:
American Ren. StormFront.
Proof positive that expertise in one area does not translate to others. Hawking knows nothing or won't admit the real reason for Africa's being a black hole for human achievement.
It's culture. Other places were colonized, some quite brutally. China, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, all come to mind. Other places knew starvation and tribalism and despair that dwarfs that of Africa. A third of German speakers were slaughtered during the Thirty Years War.
Africa's problem, besides tribalism to the extreme (a problem in Europe till the 1600's, China until Mao, and Korea until the 1950's) is Big Man culture. There is no cooperation, no rule of law, no work hard get ahead. No space for guys like Einstein. When your continent consists of variants like Idi Amin or Charles Taylor etc. all you're going to get is guys who are good at fighting other guys, and not much else.
This is Africa's problem, it's deeply rooted, it's not going to change any time soon. Hawking is wasting time and money, but it's his to throw away. Only Africans themselves can fix this, and I don't see that happening any century soon. "There's a lot of ruin in a nation." And there is.
Dr. Livingston, I presume?
No, generally, I'm relatively sure I'm Al Einstein. You haven't seen that Hawking fellow have you. I heard he was looking for me, and figured he'd never find me here! You won't tell him will you?
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
"first post-graduate centre for maths and physics"
South Africa built a few air drop nukes and maybe tested one too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
They also built Secunda, a neat coal-to-liquids plant.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Well, a more interesting question might be - does the average engineer get paid more than the average football player?
I guess you've never met a black person before. Let me put it in your terms: most of them are actually amazingly smart! Almost like us! Amazing!
I was there, it was great, I blogged about it.. I was very pleased to meet and listen to Michael Griffin - head of NASA. One doesn't often have all these important people milling around for two days - they are usually at the other end of a red carpet for 5 minutes.
Andy Rabagliati
That's a rather strong claim they're making there. Dear mathematicians, don't quit your day job yet is what I'm thinking. Oh, you're teachers!
You don't have brain capacity to be like africans.
If anyone wants to buy futures in reincarnating as an African lion drop me a line.
Boom time on the African savanna is just around the corner. Don't miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity.
Call now!
I live in South Africa and I think this is hillarious. Most South Africans are so clueless, that this didn't even make the news! And did you read the line up of speakers? It's a list of people who are brilliant and want to improve the sitation around here and then the idiot most responsible for the fact that its going downhill fast. Bwahahaha
some chimps smart enough to use twigs to dig for termites.
Wealth has never been created by geniuses per se. Unless they have two other elements that need to exist. Extreme motivation, and the opportunity for capitalism. Most of Africa is controlled by socialist / communist governments, and never in the history of the world has socialism built and promoted wealth. The countries with the most freedoms, owning property, basic human rights, etc. are the wealthiest nations. Don't give me "China" either. Per capita they are a third world country. The government controls who has the wealth, and only if it benefits the "state". If Hawking wants to promote the creation of wealth in Africa, he should be there promoting freedom. Worked for us over 200 yrs ago.
Einstein was a Jew. Jews have a natural tendency towards high IQ due to environmental variables that encouraged endogamy and a culture that highly prized intellectual and educational achievement. Africans, unfortunately, are not known for high IQs, and the environmental variables that would give rise to high IQs are not in place. It would take thousands of years of natural eugenics, as with Jews, to create an outcome where an African Einstein is within the realm of possibility. You cannot take a person and mold them into something else by tossing them into a school. You cannot rewire their brains to such an extent. It would be better to simply seek out the most intelligent Africans you can find, and see how far they can go, without burdening them with a near impossible goal for anyone, of any race.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I must not have been clear. You are correct, the key differentiator is indeed in opportunity. Have one of Bill gates' kids, as a newborn, raised by a crack whore in the Detroit ghetto, and he'll most likely wind up in prison.
Environment counts for far more than genetics.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The super wealthy need people to be educated
I didn't say ignorance was a tool of the rich, I said racism is a tool of the rich. It's a political tool. Racism hurts the poor, whatever the poor person's race. It helps nobody except the rich.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Ok, now THAT was funny.
since when does math and science create what Africans consider wealth? their quality of life is not tied to their gdp. Hawking's Einsteins seem like another African resource to exploit.
Every region in the world has great works that have lasted for thousands of years, with the arguable exception of Europe. Africa has some ruins that were built by the ancestors of the Zulus. Asia has a number of works in China, India, Cambodia, and others. The Middle East has a number as well, including the pyramids and a city carved into stone in the middle of a desert, which had canals and cisterns to collect the inch or two of rain per year for miles in every direction to support the city. South and Central America have their own pyramids as well. North America has the Pueblo cities in the US mesas.
The place where you don't find a lot of stuff going back much over a thousand years, and even less from over 2 thousand years ago is Europe. Besides Stonehenge, which barely compares to the pyramids, to name just one, is the only thing I've heard of that comes close.
If you're looking for advanced civilizations, look to people who weren't fair-skinned and blue-eyed. And yes, all of them collapsed at one time or other. Do you really think the current one will do much better?
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenkem
But it does exist, unfortunately. Extreme poverty often breeds extreme desperation. It's also very poisonous. sad.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
Umm.. I'm not sure Einstein was much of a pioneer in Quantum Mechanics.