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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.
Hawking finds some African math guy.
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?
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.
Some of us prize knowledgs and wisdom far more than money. Not everyone worships at the alter af mammon.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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
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
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
I don't even know where to begin, but here are some counterexamples of theoretical physics being quite practical: nuclear fission reactors, fusion weapons, transistors/microchips, computers, internet, TVs, sattelites/GPS, cell phones and wireless comms, MRI and PET scans, electron microscopy, LASERs...
See, I think you are making the same mistake of underestimating theoretical physics as the Germans did in the 1930s...
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
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
If TFA (which I haven't read) suggested that there's no post-grad physics or math department in Africa, it's wrong. I have personally visited several physics departments in various African countries that had Ph.D programs. For example, here's a math program and here's a physics one.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
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.
That's a very good point.
But, there's a bit of a leap when you go from laying down the theory to turning it into consumer products. And, that leap usually requires a large corporate/government R&D program with huge budgets and teams of people from a wide range of disciplines.
One or two "Einstein"s are not going to be able to take an idea from pure conceptualization all the way to an end product where the wealth return really happens. S Africa, unfortunately, doesn't have that large corporate or government infrastructure to achieve this.
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.
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).
I agree that Mugabe and the like need to go, and so do the voters in Zimbabwe, but I don't know that population control is necessary. There are population issues in China and India, as well, and they manage to avoid the same sort of hell that a lot of Africa is in.
Education, infrastructure, and Mugabe hanging by his feet like a piñata would be a good start.
Something like: "Theoretical physicists turn money into ideas. Engineers turn ideas into money."
This is why the best football and baseball players don't get paid more than our top engineers... wait, what?
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.
Does it start flashing when one is detected, and does a helicopter land outside shortly after that?
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Is there a gene for intelligence? I don't know. But it's beyond ludicrous to suggest that a gene for intelligence has anything to do with the genes for skin color. Any attempt to justify your brand of racism through genetics has fallen flat on its face.
"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.
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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.
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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
"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"
South Africa is a developing country - and I mean developing as in development is taking place, not as in third world backwards etc. There is a lot of well paying work here for people with maths and science. Engineers are also in short supply. A bright African student, with otherwise no hope of advancing his education in maths/science, will jump at an opportunity to attend a local center of excellence, get an education, and apply for one of these jobs. And not everyone is aiming for the Einstein level of excellence when it comes to scientific career - many people (most, in fact), would settle for a secure, well paying, satisfying job.
You're making the age old mistake of assuming that genetic diversity somehow precludes common traits arrising - such as similar skin colour, nose shape, hair type - whenb clearly it doesnt. Ergo theres no reason to presume it would preclude a lower average IQ than other areas in the world.
Btw , calling someone racist simply because you don't happen to like their views that different races may be different is pathetically childish, though standard tactics for people of the right-on persuation.
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.