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Steven Hawking Considering Move To Canada

thepacketmaster learned of "...the possibility of Steven Hawking moving to Waterloo in Canada: 'A report out of Britain suggests Stephen Hawking is considering an invitation to come work at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics....But he's also being encouraged to move to Ontario by his University of Cambridge colleague Neil Turok, the mathematical physicist who will take over as Perimeter's executive director on Oct. 1. Perimeter confirmed last night that it has made a standing offer to Hawking...Turok is leaving Cambridge after failing to persuade university authorities, research councils and sponsors to spend $40 million...By comparison, Waterloo's Perimeter Institute has about $600 million in funding...The addition of Hawking to Perimeter's staff of top physicists would be a major coup for the research institute, founded in 1999 by Mike Lazaridis, founder and co-CEO of Research In Motion, which makes the BlackBerry.'"

2 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. Re:who in their right mind by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    You clearly know nothing about Hawking and nothing about people who do research. It beggars belief that someone as ignorant as you thought that your comment was worth putting on display for other people to read. What is this? Youtube?

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    Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
  2. Parent post makes a dumb mistake by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    If you read the thread you were replying to, you'd see that the very topic of debate is about how circumstances are correlated with opportunity to display one's brilliance. So cities with more inventors etc. could be (and almost certainly are) a sign of a certain cultural and economic climate which encourages it. Maybe all the goatherds of Albania are as smart as Newton. How would we notice? Maybe Newton would have been a very average goatherd, or worse. That was the point!

    But if we accept your shoddy evidence, you'll also have to admit that cities had spurts of brilliance at specific times - Athens in 400BC, Copenhagen in the late 20s, Vienna around 1900, etc. Would you suggest that the cities smartened up or dumbed down on a time scale of one generation? Or is it rather that the social circumstances changed while the intellectual talent of the people stayed the same? Of course there are brain drains throughout history, but that doesn't explain any of the examples I gave.

    I don't know how your comment got modded up. Your remark about agrarian countries lacking brilliant people is totally reprehensible - and stupid. Yes, you're stupid.