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."

Comments

Re:What exactly has he accomplished?

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Is Hawking up for the rigors of spaceflight?

[MobyDisk]

I don't think Virgin Galactic's flight plan involves nearly the kind of g forces one experiences on a rocket. It's basically a plane that goes really really high. Take a look at the flight plan for SpaceShipTwo, which was the previous generation.. (The image came from here)

I really don't know what I'm talking about, so this might be TOTALLY wrong, but: It says it accelerates to 2500mph over 70 seconds. 2500mph divided by 70 seconds, in meters per second, is about 1.5Gs.

Re:Is Hawking up for the rigors of spaceflight?

[slew]

You are acting like you know what the profile is and just aren't telling us. I'm guessing in reality you have no idea.

FWIW, according to this article SpaceShipTwo riders will experience 3Gs on takeoff and 6Gs on decent.

As a reference point, SpaceShipOne riders experienced about ~5G of deceleration when it re-entered the atmosphere...

Re:What exactly has he accomplished?

[MightyMartian]

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:

Among the myriad other scientific investigations pursued by Hawking over the years are the study of quantum cosmology, cosmic inflation, helium production in anisotropic Big Bang universes, "large N" cosmology, the density matrix of the universe, the topology and structure of the universe, baby universes, Yang-Mills instantons and the S matrix, anti-de Sitter space, quantum entanglement and entropy, the nature of space and time and the arrow of time, spacetime foam, string theory, supergravity, Euclidean quantum gravity, the gravitational Hamiltonian, the Brans-Dicke and Hoyle-Narlikar theories of gravitation, gravitational radiation, holography, time symmetry and wormholes.

From http://www.physicsoftheunivers...