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Stephen Hawking: 'There Are No Black Holes'
ananyo writes "Stephen Hawking has proposed a new solution to the black-hole firewall paradox, which has been vexing physicists for almost two years. The paradox troubles physicists because if the firewall scenario is correct, Einstein's general theory of relativity is flouted. But the classical theory black hole cannot be reconciled to the quantum mechanical prediction that energy and information can escape from a black hole. Now Hawking has proposed a tantalizingly simple solution to the paradox which allows both quantum mechanics and general relativity to remain intact — black holes simply do not have an event horizon to catch fire. The key to his claim is that quantum effects around the black hole cause spacetime to fluctuate too wildly for a sharp boundary surface to exist. As Hawking writes in his paper, 'The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity.'"
who?
Whenever I bend over, a black hole appears.
Who is this guy?!?
Just stick with PF.
Relativity is far from even remotely correct.
It spits out infinities all over the place.
Infinities don't exist in reality. They exist solely as concepts.
Any scientist worth their weight in salt will tell you that.
For crying out loud, relativity misses out more than 70% of the universe that it tries to predict!
Its uses right now don't even work right! They have to constantly resync GPS even WHILE USING it. It cannot predict anything beyond certain energies, masses or time scales.
I'd hardly care if it died. All it does is hold people back.
It has as much use as Newtonian gravity does, AKA it is limited in SCOPE.
Relativity should never be used to attempt to explain blackholes due to the fact that it lies outside the scope it can predict with any sense of accuracy.
Hawking: ...this means, in a sense, that there are no black holes. Only what I call "Hawking surfaces".
Layman: Does this mean it's possible to travel faster than the speed of light?
Hawking: Sure, why not.
Do not try to reconcile the event horizon. That's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth. There is no black hole.
Does that mean that he gets his $100 back he lost to John Preskill?
The information is quite useful for research.
That's it, science has failed once again. I'm going back to christianity.
lol
Look dumshit !! There are black holes and you are wrong jello brain !!
Does it exist or not?
The event horizon oscillates faster than the speed of light over a greater distance than quantum tunneling can occur. Inbound light would follow the wavefront in, only to become trapped as the next wave built outside its escape range.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
My sense, in reading a considerable number of articles about astrophysics, etc, is that we are in a period which is awaiting the next big breakthrough in knowledge, along the lines of what Newton and Einstein produced. There are still too many unknowns and ambiguities that need to be resolved by discovering a piece of the puzzle which we don't even know exists yet, and I think people are still trying to get their heads wrapped about quantum physics. That said, I'm not a physicist, just an interested lay person, so I may be wrong in that summation, but it seems many of the discussions occurring these days at least pay a backhanded nod to that sort of notion.
In this picture, there would still be astrophysical black holes in every meaningful sense of the word, i.e. condensed objects from which light would not escape. Such objects would have an "apparent horizon", which can be defined locally by the property that all lightlike geodesics are ingoing.
What these black-hole-like objects would not have is an Event Horizon, which is a global property of the spacetime, and is only defined by the behavior at asymptotic infinity. It's a neat resolution of the whole mess: way more sensible than firewalls.
But it's still just hand-waving -- note that the entire argument relies on AdS/CFT, which assumes the black holes are embedded in de Sitter space, which has a negative cosmological constant and is most definitely not the kind of spacetime we live in. And AdS/CFT is itself an unproven conjecture, although it is supported by many specific example cases. Until somebody comes up with a theory of quantum gravity, this stuff is all guesswork. Caveat emptor.
The actual paper can be found here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761. People have suggested informally ideas somewhat similar to this one before, but Hawking proposal seems to actually have the math behind it. Possibly most importantly, he can show that his predictions are a consequence of gauge/gravity duality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence. This suggests that this may be a testale consequence of certain string theories if one could observe a black hole under the right conditions and see that it only was pretending to be a black hole.
It's all Greek to me.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The family is saying something about as gently as possible about Steven Hawking. They say this at the same time of the celebrity news.
Now my head is going to hurt all day.
Why do I bother trying to read this stuff in the morning.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
That was a clever solution. I suggest we apply it to other problems too: Whoops, and there is no cancer. Pop - no more hunger in the world. Zip, and all the pollution is gone.
It means all these business idiots will stop saying "event horizon".
Proverbs 21:19
That is an elegant solution that is far more consistent than the "absolute" limits so loved by many. It also points out that our understanding of Quantum Mechanics in reality (as opposed to theory) is pretty incomplete and fuzzy.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Personally, now that the firewall is down - I am more worried about all kinds of cyber attacks!
This ranks up there with "Einstein: 'The speed of light is actually infinite'", "Newton: 'Gravity doesn't exist'", or "Copernicus: 'Actually the sun does go around the Earth'."
Wow.
...because he calls them Hawking Holes!
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
And look in the mirror. I bet you see a black hole. Now where's my Nobel prize?
I don't know why people hang on this guy's every word. He's a man, just like any other man and he makes mistakes just like any other man. If you put your faith in man from time to time you're going to feel a let down. Just sayin.
I've always wondered why there had to be a singularity at the centre of a black hole. Now, it seems, there might not be!
If Hawking is correct, there could even be no singularity at the core of the black hole. Instead, matter [...] never quite crunch down to the centre.
I've been trying to tell people this for years (no, not in a serious crackpot physicist way, just a vague pet idea). Should've tried it with a voice synthesizer...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
So basically he's saying the boundary fluctuates so wildly, information behind it can suddenly end up outside it when the boundary jumps back. Of course whatever just ended up outside is now sitting next to a black hole, so the chances of escape are still very low (but non-zero).
If true, this is like saying Newtonian mechincs is wrong and broken now that we know about the relativistic effects, but the reality is difference is so minor we can still follow him for normal tasks.
Taking "there are not black holes" from this is just melodramatic. But then Hawking has been all about showmanship an ignored real science since about 1990. He should have been a reality-TV host instead of a physicist.
"I call it a Hawking Hole."
- Hawking in Futurama
Please look at this paper, as well as to the other papers published by prof. Loinger.
I always liked the term gravstar.
I imagine it to be something with uniform density throughout. Why? It would imply an upper threshold limit to gravity within the confines of space. ( Time is another matter, since we have yet to observe the end or death of a blackhole. No, I'm not implying it exists. ) Yes, this is likely counterintuitive, but then we aren't dealing with matter anymore. Only gravity.
Test case: If we observed 2 different 'blackholes' that had equivalent spatial diameter, but differing gravitational strength, it would negate that possibility. If gravity appears consistent throughout the Universe, something the former would also verify, and I think mathematically right now it does, then there should be no core because its density at any point within is equal to every other point. This is gravity being compressed to its limit. There's nothing else beyond this threshold. ( See no current evidence of 'blackhole' death. )
So what is it composed of? Gravitons! If you think of gravity as the 'garbage' left over from matter, and that the accompanying matter has been stripped away, then you are left with gravitational densities that don't disintegrate in the absense of matter.
So where does this lead us? Fluctuations at the edge, so say Hawking? Good. In theory, we should be able to observe those fluctuations against very close nearby matter, assuming we could measure with enough sensitivity. In fact, w
Where does gravstar fit in this? If the contents of 'blackholes' are only gravity, or gravitons, why not name it a gravstar?
Q had it right . . . .
When you don't like how the current theory is going . . . just change the gravitational constant of the universe . .
Seriously . . . there are few absolutes in Science . . . just models. And perhaps this (todays) model . . . is improved over yesterdays. He's at least willing to fling something down and see if it sticks . . . that's how progress is made.
No, I don't remember your name. But the memory mapped screen on a TRS80 from 1977 is from 15360 to 16383 if that helps.
He made a mistake on page two.
How are eternity and second law of thermodynamics interrelated?...I think you are assuming that laws and principals observed here must apply everywhere. Here's a thought experiment: suppose I created a simulated world with my own laws applied to---am I subject to those laws as well?
He made a mistake on page two. Technically, he made an arithmetic mistake on page two.
Atheism. Do you know what it means? Lacking a belief in god or gods.
There are scientists who are of faith.
Indeed in the past, it was entirely a clergy-like following to do "Natural Philosophy". Many vicars and priests were scientists.
But the problem is that a lot of you fundie xtians have at least enough sense to know you have no grounds to attack rationality, therefore have to resort to accusations of your own irrationality onto others to attack that, or at the least, "reply" to your detractors "Well, you are too!".
'YoU se3, even
- Black Hole
Science is not opposed to christianity.
However, the articles of faith that make up christianity, being complete works of fiction, do not withstand the dispassionate and rational scrutiny of science, and therefore the faith is opposed to science, in the same way as rats are opposed to rat poison.
FAITH may not be opposed to christianity, but that method of faith has to ditch almost all the recorded catchetisms of organised faiths to do so.
Hawking is opening the door to a scenario so extreme "that anything in principle can get out of a black hole"
What? And no one has mentioned the Heechee yet?
There used to be a time when I could read the comment section of a post like this and really learn something insightful. Used to...
First they tell me Pluto is no longer a planet but instead one of a huge number of KBOs.
Now Black Holes don't exist.
What's next, the coffee I'm drinking is actually tea? Oh wait... this was a Chai Latte.
NVM.
Maybe General Relativity and Quantam mechanics are wrong, not the existance of black holes.
In fact the image showing galaxies interconnected maybe be an inter-galaxy highway using black holes.
He seems to have forgotten the rule about theorems, if there is one case that falsafies a therom, it should be 1) discarded or 2) rethought.
How long, I wonder, shall we have to wait? There was rapid scientific progress in the 19th and 20th centuries, but when looking at the longer timescales, that is an aberration. For most of history technological progress was slow and rare, and the next millenium may just as likely to be similar to the 500-1500 period, when nothing much happened.
Once physicists realized the speed of light was finite, you could conceive of density and radius that exceeded the speed of light. Einsteins special realtivity showed that Maxwells equations implied light speed as a maximal speed in the universe, so this radius then became a barrier.
We just read an awesome article about science. Now let's start talking about religion!
Einstein can't be wrong, right? He must have been god himself and not human!!
I think Einstein wouldn't argue other theories, part of being a scientist or physicist is not fully believing your own BS. And fully being open to other possibilities.
The fact that they brain wash students, educating them from a singular theory goes against everything.
Thou shalt define thy acronyms.
Stephen, you insensitive clod ! DAMTP Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics CPT Charge, Parity, and Time ADS Anti-De Sitter CFT Conformal Field Theory (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...)
There's a "Robinette Broadhead" joke in here somewhere, and I just can't make it come out. Where's Gelle-Klara when we need her?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The theory of relativity wasn't that hard to comprehend. If the speed of light is a constant, time isn't. The only other answer is that all math is fucked.
There was already a decade-old or more theory that a particle entering the black hole will enter at even the slightest angle. That causes the hole to change spin just slightly in one direction due to the energy and mass of the incoming particle. The spin of the black hole can theoretically be reverse engineered with math to determine what particle mass and velocity fell into the black hole. The only problem is opposing particles creating a net spin change in one direction or the other. Technically for any given spin level, there is a 1 dimensional parabolic line of potential "answers" which may be allowable for preservation of information.
Saying the event horizon isn't a static and symmetrical line doesn't help the fact that if you go a short distance deeper past the potential area where the event horizon could occur, light still can't escape.
There is a third theory that if a singularity gets enough energy in one direction from a jet of particles, it can spin faster than the speed of light due to having a radius that's large enough to exist yet infinitely small (I know, headache-inducing) and at that point it would stop emitting gravity then transport itself to another location or turn into dark matter or break apart or inflate to a neutron star or turn into pure energy or shift into another dimension. Any of those solutions simply delay preservation of information instead of destroying it.
"That's what she said."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What happens to cosmic censorship?
So you're saying science can be improved over time, taking new evidence into account to provide a more accurate understanding of how the universe works? That's a good point; it's very much the opposite to religion that continues to hold fast to myth and legend.
Religion doesn't need to change, because it's already been perfected. But don't let that stop you from trying to reconcile your myths to your legends. Someday your science may achieve perfection, too.
You see, it works both ways, asshole. You don't have to be a condescending douchebag, just because somebody holds a different set of beliefs than you do. You do realize that science is a set of beliefs, don't you? Regardless, you'll never prove that I am wrong, therefore you must accept that I may be correct. I don't understand why I have to keep explaining it to you people. Please tell me that not all scientists are that fucking ignorant.
But it sounds to me like Hawking is beating off.
This is just mental masturbation.
You have no idea what you're talking about. GPS has to be resynced because our clocks are imperfect, the path of GPS satellites is imperfect and there are tiny errors introduced by outside forces like the Earth's electromagnetic field. Satellites fail because we are incapable of building perfect, error-free machines. And quantum entanglement has nothing to do with relativity.
I presume what restricts us is our senses. No wonder we can't define feelings scientifically. May be the only way accelerate learning is by genetically modify us. Oops
information can escape from a black hole
Already proven by Facebook.
I love this comment...
Hawking is to me a joke now. I don't take his work seriously. He gave up his Scientific perspective & just now takes any new thing that might replace his theories & makes up new components of his theory.
Sure Relativity has it's problems...*why should we expect otherwise?*
We do not have our Theory of Everything yet...so, by logic, our theories will conflict at some point...otherwise we'd have a theory of everything!
Relativity & Quantum Physics don't need Hawking redefining Black Holes yet again to keep his work relevant.
This isn't an article about Science...it's PR for Stephen Hawking.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Decades of trolling the physics community and still going strong. Keep it up, Wheels!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Herbert Dingle proved this 40 years ago, of course he wasn't some hip twisted cripple freak inner circle occultist, and it was just not "fashionable" to come forward with the proof at that time in history. Now that the jig is up, the cripple freak admits that the dogma of physics that have been pushed all those years is of course, a sham.
Bravo, cripple freak
It's like a straw-man has just been burned at the stake. The notion of religion you're citing seems to be derived from Jack Chick tracts (and the like). Read what he has to say about evolution sometime. I can assure you that his knowledge of historical Christianity goes no deeper.
Why is Pi 3.14159...and not something else
I have been asking this question my entire life and have never come across anyone who even seems to understand the question. I try to explain by discussing the varying values of 'Pi' on a sphere, and that usually just confuses them.
They say something like "It doesn't matter." or "It just is." or "Because of proof X" (that answer is particularly funny, but most mathematicians seem to think that proofs are evidence.)"
No one (before you) has ever said "We don't know, and we can't know." (of course you then said it doesn't matter, that part I disagree with.)
I am not sure this is the right answer, or that it is satisfactory. But I salute you for admitting that there are (may be) some kinds of limits to our knowledge. I find it important to recognize and examine this concept, but in my experience almost nobody (especially not scientists or mathematicians.) have the ability to do this. At least not in any depth. Even philosophers get impatient with the discussion.
But I still want to know why Pi has the value it does, and what would the Universe be like if it was different. Or maybe Pi is just an illusion, since the perfect world of geometry and mathematics is just imaginary, or maybe ...
Probably why I never get past the introductory courses in Physics, Astronomy, or most branches of Maths. When a field starts out with unsatisfactory assumptions it is hard to stay focused on what is being built on what I cannot but suspect is a faulty foundation.
Your approach seems to reduce everything to Engineering, which may be the case, but boy that will enrage a lot of scientists.
On the other hand, people treat science as some kind of infallible process. That eventually, an answer will be found if we try hard enough. That science has a monopoly on truth. In reality, science has several fundamental limitations.
1. It assumes everything that exists is observable by humans -- directly or indirectly. It has nothing to say about that which cannot be observed.
2. It assumes everything that exists is measurable by humans -- that it can be somehow quantified and tested. It has nothing to say about that which cannot be measured.
3. It assumes everything that exists is comprehensible by humans. It has nothing to say about that which cannot be comprehended by human intelligence.
No-one is claiming science is able to understand everything that exists. There are whole categories to which science can never contribute anything useful (existence of an omnipotent being who wishes to remain unknown, existence of a truly omnipotent being who is just messing with the first one who only thinks he's omnipotent, last-Thursdayism, etc). However, and not at all coincidentally, *nothing* can ever contribute anything useful in those categories. You can choose to ignore them, or you can make up stories about them, but no approach will ever allow you to learn anything at all about them (and if you disagree with this statement, you need to go and look up what the word "omnipotent" means).
It's not that science is perfect - it's just demonstrably better than everything else anyone has ever come up with.
Um.... *requests refund from Hawking on several books predicated on black holes existing*
look, I don't understand why I have to suck up to Hawking by quoting his resume to you in order to criticize his science
he's a scientist and public figure who presented research...fair game...i know he's a genius & has done great work but **fuck that**
what is THIS theory? seriously read through this thread...so many /.'ers dont even discuss the actual theory or physics or cosmology they just argue about Hawking
I want to discuss the actual research & theory
no, it will be a statement that **Hawking's Version** of Black Holes do not exist...which we already know anyway
Hawking is not the be-all-end-all of black hole research...his cosmology was & still is popular but he's become biased egregiously to his own legacy
Black Holes are bubbles of Quantum Foam. They are the same as what is beyond the horizon of the universe itself. The Event Horizon simultaneously has a quantum entaglement with anything that touches it's surface (the hologram) then all that it was, light, matter, radiation, etc etc. gets turned into the pure randomness of the black hole itself.
Black Holes are truly pure nothingness. Nothing escapes it but the total area of the event horizon expands in relation to the matter/energy that touches it.
Hawking is a genius but he crosses the line of scientific skepticism. He's actually a very biased scientist promoting an agenda. His book a brief history of time has a late chapter where he theorizes that a 'god' could not exist in two of 4 types of universes...one being a universe that ends in heat death. He crosses the line of skepticism into promoting an agenda.
you could defend him by noting that none other than Sir Issac Newton did the same thing...but Newton's reputation and his enduring work are separate things...one is hype one is what matters to this discussion. Newton's theories were **helpful**...I'm sorry that Hawking felt Cambridge crammed them down is throat like dogma but the solution is not to react in the opposite way!
Thank you Dave Raggett
I am Cornhawkingo. I need TP* for my blackhole.
*theoretical physics
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
No black hole? Oh yes there is. There is a large black hole in Stephen Hawking soul.
I'm religious, and don't want anything. If I'm wrong, oh well. If you're wrong, oh boy!
And don't say 'I know I'm not wrong' because then you have confused yourself with god.
I find most athiests/agnostics are just trying to make fun of people so they feel smart / superior.
How's that for painting a bunch of morons like you with a wide brush?
Now go figure out how life began if there was never a creation event.
"The firewall went down, the massive server exploded, and now your information is lost in a black hole. Sorry about that. We might however be able to get a small portion of it back, as it still appears to be transmitting information in high frequency streams on either side. The receiver we placed to get that information fluctuates a bit and might catch on fire, however, so no guarantees."
I followed it up with one of the senior engineers who's worked on this server for years and they told me there was no black hole, just someone forgot to plug in the backup system.
Is it just me, or is Hawking overrated? How is this idea new?
Accounted for.
"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." Scoffers will scoff but "Jesus is Lord."
Ian Wolfe / P3NDRA60N
I have lots of black friends and they all have holes. I'm pretty sure they all have event horizons too. In the meantime I need to go drop some dark matter.
... it's dark matter being concentrated due a supernova collapsing on itself drawing fragments of dark matter that is continually compressing into itself that eventually creates a vacuum engulfing any physical matter within it's immediate environment.
No, no...the Event Horizon of the Black Hole does all that.
The black hole itself is something that **NO** information can escape from, including light.
The Event Horizon is the continual process of matter/energy being consumed by the black hole...it is the thing that gives off "Hawking Radiation"
Thank you Dave Raggett
Do you know how many episodes of Stargate that's just ruined? And how many classic Science Fiction books got trashed by that if it's true? For literature's sake , sir we MUST have black holes !
a simple two page resolution of the information paradox was presented at last spring's Rochester Conference on Quantum Information and Measurement http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=QIM-2013-W6.01
for those who are not American Optical Society members, this paper can be found at
http://vixra.org/author/peter_cameron
this happens to me too...fanbois screw up the whole spectrum, b/c I'm not nearly as strongly 'anti-Hawking' as the fanbois are the opposite...it's the same with all fanbois. Another example, Gerard 't Hooft is a spokesman for Mars One, something Im highly critical of...but 'tHooft is of course an amazing physicist.
Hawking is still a real scientist. I'd love to have a converstation with him in some manner.
to develop my Event Horizon comment further, I should have said, "the event horizon of the black hole obliterates everything after the holographic moment"
so in a sense, the instant after anything meets the event horizon, it becomes quantum entangled at the edge & then becomes pure randomness, which is the same as being destroyed..all information then is retained at the moment of destruction...the eventn horizon itself is the balance preserving the thermodynamics laws as it expands in relation to what it absorbs and sometimes emits radiation of its own...
this is an extention of the holographic principle
Thank you Dave Raggett
Thnx Anita Hunt.
Note that my explanation isnt quite commonly accepted but IMHO it is the loose consensus among scientists who I respect.
This guy, Lawrence M. Krauss would definitely disagree with my characterization of what happens at the Event Horizon.Here he is on the Colbert Report talking about his (bogus IMHO) theories. He's great but I just differ.
See, in the Quantum Foam, Heat Death universe that I propose & Hawking is against thermodynamics is maintained because the Event Horizon itself, the very edge, has angular momentum, etc and can emmit radiation
Here's the difference, at the Event Horizon the Holographic moment is when anything touches the actual Event Horizon it instantly becomes Quantum Entangled then **obliterated**
The black hole obliterates everything into pure nothingness/randomness, which preserves the Thermodynamics laws & works with QED via Quantum Foam theories.
Thank you Dave Raggett
"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." This applies not only to black holes but also to the minds of lost men who are "always learning but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth." Hear Jesus's words regarding those who are considered wise and intelligent in this world, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children." God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Satan is very very real and most of the world knowingly and unknowingly are worshiping him(many many "churchgoers" will be in hell just in case you didn't think God was fair.) For all you people who absolutely must have a scientific sign and evidence that God exists I can't help you. If you want empirical evidence that either Satan exists or that the world is run by people that claims he exists and they worship him, mountains and mountains of evidence can be provided. Hidden in plain sight(one of their mantras) is quite an understatement to the learned. Satan's crew runs this world and you are dumb as a door nail if you search this matter out and come to any other conclusion. If you know or come to know who runs the world and you still deny or won't turn to Christ then I truly fear for you the day you stand before the Living God in judgement(we will all have to give account for who we've been.) I would apologize for the Jesus plug but I won't because I hope someone might at some point be led to the saving knowledge of Christ's sacrifice for them. I love the /. community as they are so bright in many areas and I like to see what's what in the world so don't think I'm just trolling. Every believer is called to share the gospel of God's truth(though many are fearful of the worlds judgement of them/I prefer to fear God instead) Next time you get mad at a Christian for sharing their faith with you consider that they will receive judgement from God if they don't and quite literally your blood will be on their hands if they neglect to share the truth of God's love for you and the necessity for repentance.
God Bless,
P3NDRA60N ~ Ian Wolfe(momma didn't raise no coward : )
how much taxpayer money gets wasted on guys like this?
we pay for the research of scientists, then they get to keep the spoils (patents, nobel prizes, credibility, etc) and we get to pay for it again as spinoffs
being a taxpayer is akin to slavery
Matter of fact, it's all dark...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Matter of fact, it's all dark......
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
GPS satellite programmer here. I can confirm that problems with GPS positioning mathematics have mostly to due with the precise calculations of non-integer numbers, and nothing whatsoever to do with problems with relativistic mechanics.
Hawking, Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Newton are theoretical physicist, sort of like great artist that sculpt what they perceive. Unlike theoretical mathematicians (Descartes, Gödel, Whitehead, Leibniz ) theoretical physicists do no abstract art. Together these two groups of artist (AKA: theoretical scientist) have provided the greatest science, technology, and art advances in human history (not Pdity a/o Jesus). Boneheads that have insulted Doc Hawking, or others, should show some respect for their obviously betters.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Or maybe Stephen is right. Maybe the real problem is that all science is in its infancy and fundamentally flawed because we change the physical reality of any given scientific experiment by simply observing it. That's why they made 2 series of laws for physics, one for which no human eye, camera or any kind of recording instrument is used until after the experiment had taken place and one set of laws that ironically follow one general constant; atoms behave as we would expect them to when we're watching them but exist in multiple places simultaneously when atoms are not being observed. So whom really has the right to claim they know anything in comparison to the complexity and diversity of the universe we are just starting to probe our way into the abyss.