Slashdot Mirror
Stephen Hawking Going To Canada
thepacketmaster writes "A previous Slashdot article I posted mentioned the possibility of Stephen Hawking coming to Canada. The Toronto Star now reports that he has accepted the position. Hawking will hold the title of distinguished research chair at the prestigious Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics."
First post, written using a clicker from my wheelchair. MC Hawking in da house, bitches!
Never heard of it.
Good, he's probably due for an upgrade.
At least if he ever gives lectures and they start to fall asleep, he can shoot lasers out of his eyeballs.
I wish him all the best, and hope he can still make more great contributions to theoretical physics. He is an example for us all.
I seem to recall that he did a lot of research into black holes. Maybe he's done studying now and is leaving the country so he can get outside the event horizon to publish his findings.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It's kind of ironic in that Canada has historically had a problem with what we call the "brain drain", where students graduate and leave for the US or overseas for higher paying jobs. Nice to see us on the other end of that for once!
Germany.
Is this an ominous sign?
Two versions of Hawking will come into existence. One will go one way, and will stay in England. The other will go the other way (unless it crosses an event horizon), and will move to Canada.
I just hope its not to kill him. But that's the word on the street.
The word on what street? Crazy Street?
I'm so excited I just made water in my pantaloons!
He's probably moving there to study the event horizon surrounding a certain black hole, otherwise known as the US financial market.
We poured over $700 billion into it, and I doubt even he will discover Hawking radiation leaking out. Maybe a few nickels, but that's it.
I think I see a flaw in your logic... See, crossing the US/Canada border *is* the event horizon. At that point hawking will split into a finite number of hawkings will cross the event horizon, while an equal number of anti-hawkings will stay inside. I'm guessing they'll head to Ohio as soon as they figure out their better halves are sitting down for tea.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
We don't need him in the U.S.A. The world ends in four years and a month anyway.
distinguished research chair at the prestigious Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
I don't know, a research chair sounds a bit dangerous, however distinguished it may be. I think he better stick with his current chair until this new one is at least in beta testing...
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Our plan is to give him free health care and poutine, and see which one wins.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
I am so glad I am not in charge of moving him and his stuff! What daunting logistics.
-- I Am Not A Terrorist.
Note to the geographically cgalenged: It is possible to go from England to Canada without crossing the US/Canada border. In fact it is the most direct route.
$speak_text = $speak_text.' eh?';
According to the article - it's a 'visiting Chair', and he will make regular visits to Waterloo, ON.
In other words, he's getting a big paycheque for attaching his name to the institute and will make the minimal number of personal appearances to make it look legit.
This guy has been around for awhile, and obviously he's still productive. How is that possible with his degenerative disorder? Don't those diseases usually get bad enough that the body fails, e.g. muscles too weak to move the lungs?
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
Done.
(But you have to figure out how to use it. )
---
The least witty thing possible.
"...a finite number of hawkings will cross the event horizon, while an equal number of anti-hawkings will stay inside."
And they'll be easily distinguishable as the anti-Hawkings are all evil and have goatees.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
"In conclusion, I understand nothing about the anomaly, even after cashing the huge check I got for writing a book about it."
- Stephen Hawking, Futurama
"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special."
- Stephen Hawking
More funny and insightful quotes here:
http://www.quoteaddict.com/
Hawking has a wicked sense of humor and will pull practical jokes. Many years ago I watched him skewer Caltech professor Kip Thorne just as he (KT) was about to begin a seminar. It was one of those "you had to be there to appreciate it" moments, but it was hilarious - the whole audience was laughing. Not bad for someone who, even then, could do little more than activate his motorized wheelchair. A sense of timing does wonders.
Maybe he voted for McCain, and when they lose he just change the country of residence?
When I first read this, I really thought Slashdot's value had gone into the toilet. "So Hawking is taking a trip to Canada and that's newsworthy?"
Next up: Ballmer stays in America, rest of world celebrates.
(Related: http://www.pown.it/?uid=844)
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
UW 91, baby
I don't want to hear any of you complaining about a Brittany Spears piece ever again.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Yeah, my name's Josh Beltash. I've been in a wheelchair for just over three years. I get by. I make quite a lot of inventions for myself. I made a little pantograph lift that'll take me up and down for the right level for the sink, but I think that this has got to be the best. That wheelchair will do best part of seventy mile an hour. More into seventy-two, we clocked it on the bypass, Gabriel timed me and, er, I reckon we could do eighty on a good day. But I'm not really a speed king myself, you know, so I'm going to give it away to Stephen Hawking, 'cause he's coming to London on June the second to do a talk, and Gabriel and me have got backstage passes. So when Hawking comes out into the car park for a piss, like he normally does before he gives his speech, we're going to jump him. Gabriel is going to bundle him in the van; we're going to drive up to an old airfield in Bedford and we're going to give the little fucker the ride of his life!
I've always seen him as a bit of a Brandoesque kind of a figure, so Gabe's going to thread him in the van. I reckon with a fair wind we could probably get him to do a hundred. We're going to film it on video. I'm not going to all that trouble just to see it once! And that will also help us shut him up, 'cause we're going to film him with his cock out, so if he ever does get any ideas about talking to anybody about it, he knows what we're going to do with the pictures. Fucking jumped up little spider!
(Thank you Chris Morris)
Nima Arkadi-Hamed, who currently occupies the chair previously held by Hawking, came from Canada.
Mwahhahaaahhaaa... !
How little do you know!
Crazy street? Why YES!
Our irony has already conquered YOU. And left you for dead.
But perhaps you were dead to begin with.
I knew this weeks ago, did you see the SGA episode?
.. See, crossing the US/Canada border *is* the event horizon
You're American aren't you?
Most planes fly from Europe, the UK, and the rest of the world to Canada, WITHOUT having to go through the US.
And... believe it or not, they try to AVOID flying through the US airspace.
WAKE UP! NO ONE wants to go to the US! except a few ignorant Cubans and Haitians)...
Wait- forget "Haitians"- they prefer Canada also. ... hmmn except for the white racist ones, Cubans ALSO prefer Canada!
> See, crossing the US/Canada border *is* the event horizon.
exactly, Detroit IS a black hole.
The institute he's en route to is called Perimeter, is it not? Surely we can work that name into the whole Hawking Radiation posts flying about.
A vacancy has just opened up. Apply by December 15.
Utah my friend, all anti's go to Utah.
We welcome our black hole overlord to the Great White North, aka Canada, eh.
I wonder if control by brain waves is advanced enough to communicate efficiently.
Canadians don't typically say, "aboot", they say, "a boat". Americans often pronounce the word as, "a bow t" (with the 'bow' part drawn-out and sounding like the front of of a ship or 'take a bow' as one might do if being applauded).
Gnome sane, yaaall?
Is the United States experiencing a brain drain? More and more scientists and people with technical skills seem to be leaving to do their research, teaching, and work elsewhere, though mostly to Asian countries. Historically the the drain has always been from Canada to the United States, but perhaps this is shifting.
Q: What's a synonym for Perimeter?
A: Rim, or more appropriately, RIM (Research In Motion)
Not sure if it's already mentioned in the comments, but the Perimeter Institute was founded, and is primarily funded, by Mike Lazaridus, Co-CEO of RIM and Chancellor of the University of Waterloo.
I wonder if Dr. Hawking will be getting a free Blackberry? (I guess he'll have to design an interface as his first task at Perimeter.)
Well, at least now the phrase "Slower than Steven Hawking in a snowstorm" might actually have some basis in fact.
Actually, if Hawkings and Anti-Hawkings are going to be created similarly to matter and anti-matter, then the Anti-Hawkings should have more than just goatees. Every trait would have to turn opposite.
Anti-Hawkings would be in perfect physical shape and health, but dumb as bricks.
Hawking is one of a group of scientists who are famous for non-scientific aspects of their lives (including Dawkins and Chomsky). Unfortunately this tends to send all the wrong messages, because the most productive scientists are usually too busy doing science to appear on TV, and the best science communicators won't dumb down enough for it.
Jay Gould was a far better science communicator than Hawking, and Olivia Judson is proving a worthy successor (while Dawkins rants at Creationists, Judson gently takes them apart by explaining slowly and carefully how evolution actually works, with real life examples.) Neither of them have the instant name recognition of Hawking, but I suspect that, in terms of getting potential biologists interested in biology, both of them are much better than Hawking has been in terms of getting potential physicists interested in doing physics.
My point here is that, in a way, Canada is doing itself no favors. Hawking's achievement is to fight severe disability while still being a working mathematical physicist, and this should be recognised for what it is, a major achievement of the human will, but using his name (since he will not really be working in the job) to try and get some publicity for Canadian physics is pure dumbing down.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Do you mean the University post, or the one with wheels and an electric motor?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There is a HUGE difference between a hunting rifle and an automatic pistol. Try to conceal one.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Lee Smolin is my hero!
To someone more knowledgeable than me: is he still doing actual bleeding edge research these days?
All of my Canadian Comp-Sci and Engineering friends (myself included) are happly employed in the fields we studied making 6 figures. Sounds like your problem is looking right back at you in the mirror. I will admit though that one of my med school friends recently decided to take a pay cut and move to Boston (They just couldn't pay him enough to stay in Thunder Bay)
As a UW Student in their Faculty of Mathematics, I would like to just say that I think it's wondering that UW is attracting such well known people. We have many ties with a variety of people and establishments around the world! This is just an example of how to bring the top people in the field together to help each other out and reap some very large benefits. I do not think this is a bad thing at all. Hawking is the first of 40 people that PI wishes to invite over to the Waterloo area. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081127.whawking1127/BNStory/National/home?cid=al_gam_mostview
I do hope someone's told him about the awful state of the Canadian health care system. With his condition, he might well be signing his own death warrant by moving here....
For poutine, he'd have to consider McGill instead of Waterloo.
I make a reasonable middle-class wage by going to work and not spamming blogs with scams.
No, he's probably a USian.
Don't worry, he was just joking, oh short-dicked Canadian.
On the other hand, you're still irrelevant.
He is living in England primarily so he already has the use of UK free health care system.
Don't know if the Canadians are working on making a name for themselves in Theoretical Physics, but PI certainly is doing it for them. Attracting Hawking fits what they've been up to.
They also have a strong public outreach with public lectures; and if you're not close enough to attend you can view the past lectures at:
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/Outreach/Public_Lectures/View_Past_Public_Lectures/
Greg
...but why did he leave Cambridge and the Newton Chair? No troll, I honestly want to know.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
I hope he's able, you know, to get around ok since there's no Americans w/ Disabilities Act (ADA) in Canada. Best of luck to him!
Before Hawking, people had used general relativity to prove conclusively that information couldn't travel outwards through a gravitational horizon. It was geometrically impossible. Hawking's own "area-addition theorem" was responsible for closing one of the last potential logical loopholes that might have allowed information-escape.
If you talked to relativists, the "perfect blackness" of a black hole was supposed to be one of the purest and most perfect results in the history of human thought. It was a bit like general relativity's equivalent of the result under special relativity that you couldn't accelerate through the speed of light.
But what Hawking then said was that all this perfect logical proof was irrelevant, because another logical system, quantum mechanics, gave a different answer. Since QM was based on more abstract general principles than general relativity, QM really couldn't be wrong. We had two perfect logical systems GR and QM, and neither system's results seemed to be negotiable, and yet, when we applied both systems to the same scenario to try to find out what happened, they both gave qualitatively different answers.
Something fundamental at the core of C20th physics was broken, or misconstructed, or was at the very least missing a critical piece of the puzzle.
Where Hawking scored over his contemporaries was that he recognised the conflict, and went public. Lesser scientists who'd noticed an apparent mismatch had probably thought that they'd done something wrong, and dropped the matter, or were reluctant to go public with such an obviously wrong answer. Hawking's contemporaries thought he'd gone mad, and one well-known black hole populariser, John Taylor, famously stood up and walked out of Hawking's first talk on the subject part-way through, declaring "I'm sorry, Stephen, this is complete ___ * "
* (accounts vary as to what the word used actually was)
So Hawking stood up against pretty much the entire expert community and made a declaration that everyone knew was wrong, and he turned out to be right. Nobody else had the clarity, and the guts, and the sheer don't-give-a-damn attitude to see the problem for what it was, and stand up in a room of theoretical physicists and say so (and to hell with the consequences).
When it comes to "deep" theoretical physics, I rate Hawking as one of the most critically-important theoreticians of the last half century. He's not always right, but he's usually interesting. You can read his research work and see that there's a real human intelligence at work, which isn't always the case with the papers of some of his more mathematically-inclined colleagues.
I agree that some of Hawking's popular books aren't as good as they might have been (unsurprisingly, given that the guy can't sit down and draw diagrams and layouts), and I agree that his public image is probably partly based on his situation rather than on the public actually understanding what it is that he achieved ... but his record stands.
I think that there are probably a lot of mathematical physicists out there who think that they're techically better than Hawking, but if you ask them when's the last time they overturned a major foundation-stone of of theoretical physics, or what physical effects have been named after them, you're going to get an awkward silence. If they think that Hawking's a bad communicator, ask them when's the last time they published a popular book on their speciality subject.
____________________
I tend to agree with your criticism of Richard Dawkins, though - I think that RD's arguments are often clumsy and crude, and often don't do credit to the POV he's trying to present - I find it difficult to watch RD on television, because of the wince factor at some of the dumb things he comes out with. Dawkins is enthusuastic, but he's too emotional, and he's not really a logician.
Hawking, though, is the real deal. Hyped, yes ... but still the genuine article.
Eric Baird