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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.
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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.
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.
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...
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... 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.
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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.
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.