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Stephen Hawking Will Travel To Space (skynews.com.au)
Professor Stephen Hawking says he is planning to travel into space on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. From a report: The physicist and cosmologist, 75, said he had not expected to have the opportunity to experience space but that the Virgin boss had offered him a seat. Discussing the meaning of happiness on Good Morning Britain, he said: "My three children have brought me great joy. And I can tell you what will make me happy, to travel in space. I thought no one would take me but Richard Branson has offered me a seat on Virgin Galactic, and I said yes immediately."
Awesome that Stephen Hawking gets a chance to go into (the edge) of space, but is he up for the rigors of Spaceflight? Zero-G shouldn't be an issue, but some positive G's on the way up and way down. Hopefully this has been thought through ...
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I guess you could call this a stunt as Dr. Hawking, at 75 and with his health issues would not be considered a likely astronaut but I think it's great that he is given this opportunity.
Too many people have gone (Arthur C. Clarke as one) that fully expected to experience spaceflight during their lives and it's nice to see Dr. Hawking will get that opportunity.
From somebody hoping that one day their ship will come in and get the same experience.
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It is very generous of Richard Branson to offer a free flight on his imaginary spaceship. And to do so in such a discreet manner surely means this is not a ploy get free headlines for his struggling company.
He applied QM to black holes to determine that they inevitably must radiate energy, and thus are finite and will eventually evaporate. Why Hawking Radiation has yet to be observed (darned hard), it's one of the first critical examples of how Quantum Mechanics would effect a Classical system (in this case, a black hole, a singularity born out of General Relativity). So yes, it's pretty darned important.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Science is hard! Let's go shopping!
Hawking radiation for one and he did the mathematical proofs for others that's about as close as you get in astrophysics.
No sir I dont like it.
"...but that the Virgin boss had offered him a seat."
Should they really be reporting on this bosses sex life? What is this Gawker?!?!?
I was about to make a joke about frozen vegetable... But..no
If nothing else, he's been an effective popularizer of science. A Brief History of Time has been a tremendous success, and it's served as inspiration for many of today's scientists while teaching the public a bit about how the world works. Pretty cool.
Saying he has "a disability" is a massive understatement. The man's body has been effectively useless for decades now, serving only to keep his brain ticking and providing a cumbersome and exhausting means to slowly communicate. But he continues to engage the public and maintain a sense of humor. So that's something.
Sure, he's a celebrity. But he's also done some great things even if you discount all of his scientific accomplishments. He's served well as the face and (robo-)voice of science for a while. I think he's worthy of a short jaunt up to space.
> I'd really like to believe that he's a celebrity for something truly noteworthy that he has accomplished, but I'm at a loss to see what that is
Why would he have to accomplish something truly noteworthy, other than progress science? The difficult thing to imagine is that someone is brilliant and has contributed to physics while being trapped in a near-motionless husk, without producing a widget or revelation that the average geek would consider useful.
Hawking has created useful abstractions, descriptions and proofs to fill in the gaps left by other scientists, which is the majority of "work" in physics and for which there is an inexhaustible supply...Take a moment and consider each Doctorate in the US is based on a study that has never been done before, but could be. Most of those experiments-to-be include data collection and experimentation. In theoretical physics and some of astrophysics, the same applies, but you cannot perform experiments or collect data within specific realms.
He's also managed to build a personality and be considered likable. There is a cult of personality for some intellects. Perhaps some of his less likable physical and mental traits were stunted by the ALS.
Maybe there's something to the metaphor about the usefulness of theoretical physics vs a paralyzed man in a wheelchair. What he has done is physics and become a big-budget movie subject because of it. How unremarkable is that (since anyone can get on TV, amirite)?
So there was vigorous debate and Hawking was wrong! Wow, that must mean Hawking is totally useless.
As to Hawking radiation, the point wasn't that he was right (he's not actually wholly wrong either), but rather that it was one of the first major attempts to unify QM and GR, to look for a way in which classic and quantum mechanics both can product phenomena. But some other areas in which he has worked are:
From http://www.physicsoftheunivers...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
... I'd so chip in a few $$ for this.
Worst case, Dr. Hawkings dies doing what he loves.
Best case, aliens pick him up, think humans are way smarter than we are, and appoint us leaders of the Galaxy.
Oh, it's definitely a stunt - Branson needs publicity to divert attention away from the fact that SpaceShip Two is well over a decade late and still at least a year (and very likely more) from operations.
That was a badly written story, most of it was about how Hawking hates Trump. Not much about his upcoming space flight. It should have had some information about when VG expects to be able to launch the first trip with paying customers. For all we know, Hawking will be long dead by then.
When?
While I hold him in high regard and wish him the very best, I suspect by the time the travel actually happens, he will be travelling there in an urn.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Sending people to space is a useles waste of money.
Stephen Hawking as a brilliant scientist knows this. It is a shame to see that he got indulged into supporting a waste of energy, waste of ressources, waste of engineering.
This marketing just leads to false belief in the hope of men in space.
And he's bringin' Doomsday!
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I bet all those Playboy mansion lapdances built his ego up to SpayseX as far as a greenscreen and wires.
It will be another expensive series of photographs, with no ethical benefit to the public.
I prefer spaceflights from Hollywood because it is cheap vacation and I cant wait for flying bipedal drones so I can land in a themepark of rollercoasters under kids ticket price and experience the rides without risking my health.
He applied QM to black holes to determine that they inevitably must radiate energy, and thus are finite and will eventually evaporate.
Only for very large values of "eventually". A black hole the size of the sun would take 10e67 years to evaporate. The sun contains about 10e57 hydrogen atoms. So that means it would lose the mass of one hydrogen atom every 10 billion years, which is roughly the current lifetime of the universe. To lose an entire gram would take a hundred trillion trillion times as long as that.
I wanted to be exactly that when I grew up.
Not the astronauts. Challenger. I thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen.
Let Hawking go up there. Any incident up there is infinitely better than weeks of agony in palliative care.
do something about his under-bite? It is undignified.
his `hawking radiation' is not wrong. that's not what's debated. it's whether information that falls into a black hole is lost... that part currently argued to be wrong (and even hawking himself now doesn't believe information is ``lost'').
that said, there are very good reasons to think that information *is* lost though.
Outside of his many academic accomplishments, him simply being alive gives a lot of people hope probably.
Most people that get diagnosed with ALS are dead within 2-4 years, many times because it is hard to diagnose or is miss-diagnosed. Also it is incurable, and impacts different people differently. Hawking was diagnosed as a relatively young man, and is still around 40+ years later, now talking about going to space.