Stephen Hawking's Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site After It's Posted Online (bbc.com)

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Stephen Hawking's Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site After It's Posted Online (bbc.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Monday October 23, 2017 @11:00AM from the free-for-all dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Demand for Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis intermittently crashed part of Cambridge University's website as physics fans flocked to read his work. Prof Hawking's 1966 thesis "Properties of expanding universes" was made freely available for the first time on the publications section of university's website at 00:01 BST. More than 60,000 have so far accessed his work as a 24-year-old postgraduate. Prof Hawking said by making it available he hoped to "inspire people." He added: "Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding. It's wonderful to hear how many people have already shown an interest in downloading my thesis -- hopefully they won't be disappointed now that they finally have access to it!" The 75-year-old's doctoral thesis is the most requested item in Cambridge University's library. Since May 2016, 199 requests were made for the PhD -- most of which are believed to be from the general public rather than academics. The next most requested publication was asked for just 13 times. The Cambridge Library made several PDF files of the thesis available for download -- a high-resolution "72 Mb" file, digitized version that's less than half the size, and a "reduced" version that was even smaller -- but intense interest overwhelmed the servers. Here's the first paragraph of Hawking's introduction: "The idea that the universe is expanding is of recent origin. All the early cosmologies were essentially stationary and even Einstein whose theory of relativity is the basis for almost all modern developments in cosmology, found it natural to suggest a static model of the universe. However there is a very grave difficulty associated with a static model such as Einstein's which is supposed to have existed for an infinite time. For, if the stars had been radiating energy at their present rates for an infinite time, they would have needed an infinite supply of energy. Further, the flux of radiation now would be infinite. Alternatively, if they had only a limited supply of energy, the whole universe would by now have reached thermal equilibrium which is certainly not the case. This difficulty was noticed by Olders who however was not able to suggest any solution. The discovery of the recession of the nebulae by Hubble led to the abandonment of static models in favour of ones which were expanding."

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Wow! by 110010001000 · 2017-10-23 11:01 · Score: 5, Funny

60,000 hits? That is amazing. How can a website cope with such high numbers? They need to use "AI" to speed it up.
1. Re:Wow! by PolygamousRanchKid+ · 2017-10-23 11:15 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  60,000 hits? That is amazing.
  . . . those Cambridge Boys have got the smarts! They can figure out all the various forces shaping our universe, and important stuff like that.
  Unfortunately, the Cambridge Boys seem to have vastly underestimated the power of the force of a good 'ole fashioned Slashdotting . . .
  Stephan Hawking could post his toenail clippings, and the demand for those would be overwhelming . . .
  
  --
  Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
2. Re: Wow! by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 11:19 · Score: 0
  
  Yes, machine learn what 60,000 means and then load balance. Wow, how did internet work at all before the age of AI.
3. Re:Wow! by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 11:41 · Score: 0
  
  ... Thus proving you're disgusting and mob-ruled?
4. Re:Wow! by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 12:18 · Score: 0
  
  Throw some AI at it, that's what I always say.
5. Re:Wow! by Bing+Tsher+E · 2017-10-23 15:28 · Score: 2
  
  60,000 hits? That is amazing. How can a website cope with such high numbers? They need to use "AI" to speed it up.
  It's a classical old-school Institution. The server is probably a SparcStation 2 in the stacks, behind the Journals from 1976.
6. Re:Wow! by Pseudonym · 2017-10-23 15:34 · Score: 2
  
  Now I'm wondering just how serious "slashdotting" was back in the day. By modern standards, it was probably nuthin'.
  
  --
  sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
7. Re: Wow! by ShanghaiBill · 2017-10-23 17:56 · Score: 2
  
  I honestly don't give a shit what hawking has to say.
  Especially in a 51 year old thesis. You could learn more about the expansion of the Universe from a Wikipedia page than from that paper. We have learned a lot since then.
8. Re: Wow! by dougdonovan · 2017-10-23 23:30 · Score: 1
  
  The "heads" of MIT's IT dept should have known better...on the other hand...which...there isnt another hand...with all due respect...these people are supposed to be the most intelligent on the planet next to NASA's director of research where...most of MITs students end up.
9. Re:Wow! by Big+Hairy+Ian · 2017-10-24 01:22 · Score: 1
  
  60,000 hits? That is amazing. How can a website cope with such high numbers? They need to use "AI" to speed it up.
  You'd think they would have heard of cache. But then again some of these high IQ boys can't even tie a shoelace!
  
  --
  Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
10. Re:Wow! by schleimkeim · 2017-10-24 03:11 · Score: 1
  
  nonono. ai is the wrong technology here. they need 'big data' and the 'clowd'.
Re: Stephen Hawking aka Stephen Fraud Hawking by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 11:14 · Score: 0

Stephen Fraud Hawking's thesis headline crashes ./
Really? A server than can still be slashdotted? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 11:16 · Score: 0

It must be running on a Minecraft Redstone computer. https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/vie...
1. Re:Really? A server than can still be slashdotted? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 11:25 · Score: 0
  
  No, no.. It's a Ti-994a, with the memory expansion of course... Those Cambridge students throw nothing out... Even their old decrepit professors...
Use AWS S3 or Cloudfront ? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 11:20 · Score: 0

Why not post it on AWS S3 or Cloudfront, it's not like 0.023$/GB cost a lot of money for a CDN.
60000 * 72 MB = 4320 GB
4320 GB * 0.023$/GB = 99.36$
or use AWS free-tier
https://aws.amazon.com/free/
or use CloudFlare free-tier ?
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/88659/how-can-cloudflare-offer-a-free-cdn-with-unlimited-bandwidth
1. Re: Use AWS S3 or Cloudfront ? by Monster_user · 2017-10-23 11:42 · Score: 1
  
  Amazon mixes 1-year trials into their "free tier" page. They may have even used up their free trial for another site. Hard to know what is free, and what might end up costing the University more money. I imagine there is a sizeable database of non-time sensitive content. Meaning outside of a rare case such as this, the server doesn't need much to operate, and might be more useful to the education facility itself, and so is more cost effective to host in house.
2. Re:Use AWS S3 or Cloudfront ? by sexconker · 2017-10-23 11:50 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Or the most superior version of all: BitTorrent.
  Offer a fallback slow link for people who can't use a torrent. Hell, do it as a Google Drive / Dropbox / Box / One Drive / whatever link.
  If you can't cope with hosting it, there are plenty of free options.
3. Re:Use AWS S3 or Cloudfront ? by Applehu+Akbar · 2017-10-23 16:02 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Why not post it on AWS S3 or Cloudfront
  Or better still, on Sci-Hub.
4. Re:Use AWS S3 or Cloudfront ? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-24 00:31 · Score: 0
  
  I could have hosted it on my $50 150/150 dedicated p2p fiber business connection at home with Level 3 as upstream. Less than 250ms to anywhere in the world and I always get my full 150Mb/s to Germany, Paris, and London from the Midwest USA. I seed Linux ISOs from multiple SSDs and upload 150Mb/s just fine without affecting my gaming. The ping to my ISP hovers around 0.14ms+-0.1ms with zero packetloss during saturation to thousands of clients with sub 10ms ping spikes. HFSC+Codel is wicked awesome. Plus my ISP has some AQM on both my connection and their trunk to Chicago. Even when my ISP was getting DDOS'd, their ping never went above 50ms, but tons of packet loss. DDOS'n my 150Mb connection with 1Gb/s causes my ping to jump to 20ms with high loss.
5. Re:Use AWS S3 or Cloudfront ? by coofercat · 2017-10-24 01:15 · Score: 1
  
  I'd imagine some Varnish would probably have done enough.
  I'd love to know what their general architecture is. I know "get some Cloudfront" or "get an Akamai contract" are solutions, but I'll bet this site gets a small base-load year-in, year-out and so doesn't really justify much expense. It'd be nice to know what architecture fails as much as what works.
  As for BitTorrent - it's great and all, but it's not just a matter of "click the link, wait for the download" for most people. Perhaps it should be, but right now it's "download a client with a strange name, install it on your PC, don't install the Chrome toolbar, don't install the McAfee trial, bla bla" - way too much work for "just one download".
6. Re:Use AWS S3 or Cloudfront ? by schleimkeim · 2017-10-24 03:12 · Score: 1
  
  because the cloud is just some one else'1s computer. and amazon is evil and doesn't deserve to be supported in any way or form.
bittorrent by roc97007 · 2017-10-23 11:24 · Score: 2

Sounds like this might have been a good application for bittorrent. Have only magnet links on the campus website.

--
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
1. Re:bittorrent by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 11:27 · Score: 0
  
  But then they might have trouble glorifying Stephen with a download count.
2. Re:bittorrent by roc97007 · 2017-10-23 14:31 · Score: 1
  
  But then they might have trouble glorifying Stephen with a download count.
  You have a point. I suppose there's some bragging rights to saying "we put up this paper and it broke our site". I guess it comes down to what you're actually trying to accomplish.
  
  --
  Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
3. Re:bittorrent by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 15:39 · Score: 0
  
  He'd get more publicity by saying "Harvey raped me."
4. Re:bittorrent by bobbied · 2017-10-23 23:39 · Score: 1
  
  But then they might have trouble glorifying Stephen with a download count.
  No, but you would be able to get a "leechers" count...
  
  --
  "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Why is Hubble credited? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 11:28 · Score: 1

Why is Edwin Hubble credited with the idea of an expanding universe? The idea was first proposed by Georges LemaÃ®tre, a Catholic priest in Belgium who published a paper on it in 1927, two years prior to Hubble. Although Hubble did provide very useful observational evidence to support the theory, it is inaccurate to attribute the theory to him.
1. Re:Why is Hubble credited? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 12:31 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Why is Edwin Hubble credited with the idea of an expanding universe?
  He isn't. Hubble's fame comes from finding an elegant way to demonstrate it.
2. Re:Why is Hubble credited? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 12:50 · Score: 0
  
  ahh... the "cosmic egg" big bang (derisive term) theory. The scientific community doesn't like outsiders too much. Especially the religious types. Haven't you heard about Pluto being demoted because the guy who discovered it didn't have a PhD? Note how these distant "planets" being discovered can even be verified visually, but only by gravitational pull before you start flinging shit at me.
3. Re:Why is Hubble credited? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-24 00:38 · Score: 0
  
  Maybe he didn't have a PhD, but at least...
  
  He earned his bachelor's and master's degree in astronomy from the University of Kansas
  https://www.space.com/19824-cl...
  So, according to you, people who contribute to science and math must have a PhD?
4. Re:Why is Hubble credited? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-24 03:26 · Score: 0
  
  It looks like someone doesn't understand the difference between a theory and a hypothesis. Also, the idea was proposed by someone else but it was Hubble that came out with the scientific data to back it up. I can hypothesize a ton of ideas but it's the people who come up with the data and the methodology that supports it that get the credit. Otherwise sci-fi authors would have been awarded the Noble prize for physics.
  Yes, there were a lot more elements in play aside from Hubble but it was not only his own research but his coordination of data into a meaningful model that ended up getting him the credit he gets today.
5. Re:Why is Hubble credited? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-24 04:36 · Score: 0
  
  ahh... the "cosmic egg" big bang (derisive term) theory. The scientific community doesn't like outsiders too much. Especially the religious types.
  Which is a really good thing. Religious people can't really reason. There will always be ghosts and fairies hiding in the back of their heads, poisoning their thinking. Religion is brain killer.
6. Re:Why is Hubble credited? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-24 04:39 · Score: 0
  
  So, according to you, people who contribute to science and math must have a PhD?
  Yep, that's ridiculous, when you know the great Newton had completed only trivium and quadrivium [much less than junior high nowadays].
7. Re:Why is Hubble credited? by tehcyder · 2017-10-24 22:25 · Score: 1
  
  Why is Edwin Hubble credited with the idea of an expanding universe? The idea was first proposed by Georges LemaÃ®tre, a Catholic priest in Belgium who published a paper on it in 1927, two years prior to Hubble. Although Hubble did provide very useful observational evidence to support the theory, it is inaccurate to attribute the theory to him.
  I was taught in school that it was Lemaitre who first came up with the Big Bang theory. He is a useful example for both sides to show that science and religious belief can co-exist, despite the fact the Big Bang theory bears no resemblance to the Bible's creation myth(s).
  
  --
  To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
1966? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 11:35 · Score: 1

Why is that is science paper that is 50 years old is finally free?
1. Re: 1966? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 11:41 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  It's quite recent that universities have moved away from print copies of theses and dissertations in favor of electronic copies. I believe it has always been free, just as a print copy. I suspect that nobody has gone back to scan in most printed theses and dissertations, so they just sit in a library somewhere. Because of the demand for Hawking's dissertation, the university has scanned a copy and posted online. It was probably free the whole time, just in print form. I doubt there's interest in scanning most of the other theses and dissertations, so they will just remain as printed copies.
2. Re: 1966? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 13:01 · Score: 1
  
  Printed copies were still used when I submitted my phd in 2006, though there was an option to submit an electronic version in addition to the mandatory printed one. Printed theses used to be (are?) available at the library for reading but obviously only in dead-tree form unless/until someone bothers to scan them.
3. Re: 1966? by tlhIngan · 2017-10-24 04:51 · Score: 1
  
  It's quite recent that universities have moved away from print copies of theses and dissertations in favor of electronic copies. I believe it has always been free, just as a print copy. I suspect that nobody has gone back to scan in most printed theses and dissertations, so they just sit in a library somewhere. Because of the demand for Hawking's dissertation, the university has scanned a copy and posted online. It was probably free the whole time, just in print form. I doubt there's interest in scanning most of the other theses and dissertations, so they will just remain as printed copies.
  Correct.Heck, 60,000 downloads of Hawking's dissertation is probably 20 or 30 times as many downloads as the university was expecting - the next highest download count for a paper was under 2000 downloads.
  Chances are, that record is going to stand for a really long time, too.
Crashed? by Inviska · 2017-10-23 11:44 · Score: 2

Wikipedia defines a crash as when a computer program "stops functioning properly and exits". A crash is generally a non-recoverable state. Are you sure you don't mean the site was overloaded?
More interesting is the website "intermittently crashed". I think we'll need Mr Hawking to explain the mechanics behind a program that is both crashed and not crashed. It must be that quantum physics stuff.
1. Re:Crashed? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 12:07 · Score: 1
  
  Well it's on one of them new fangled quantum computers. It's both fast and slow, smart and dumb, hot and cold, ...
  Oh wait that's my wife.
2. Re: Crashed? by Zero__Kelvin · 2017-10-23 22:38 · Score: 1
  
  Processes that crash get respawned with the same name but different PID, so just because the site eventually starts working you can still say it crashed. Learning how computer systems work from Wikipedia is a bad idea, but coming here and getting snarky based on the limited knowledge you derive from that behaviour is just plain foolhardy.
  
  --
  Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
3. Re:Crashed? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-24 02:13 · Score: 0
  
  Well it's on one of them new fangled quantum computers. It's both fast and slow, smart and dumb, hot and cold, ...
  Oh wait that's my wife.
  UPDATE: wife >> ex-wife.
Olbers, not Olders by careysub · 2017-10-23 11:49 · Score: 4, Informative

This difficulty was noticed by Olders who however was not able to suggest any solution. The discovery of the recession of the nebulae by Hubble led to the abandonment of static models in favour of ones which were expanding."
Thus "Olber's Paradox". Text recognition error?

--
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Vector by markdavis · 2017-10-23 11:53 · Score: 2

>"The Cambridge Library made several PDF files of the thesis available for download -- a high-resolution "72 Mb" file, digitized version that's less than half the size, and a "reduced" version that was even smaller"
Why not just provide TEXT or a vectorized PDF? OCR it and do some clean up and then, compressed, it would be what, a few hundred kilobytes, if that? This isn't rocket science :)
1. Re: Vector by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 12:26 · Score: 1
  
  Theses and dissertations generally contain quite a few figures that can't and shouldn't be reduced to text. They may well include tables that won't make sense if improperly formatted. Given the field and type of work being done, I strongly suspect there are a lot of equations included that would need to be properly formatted in order to make sense. For a single dissertation, it's definitely possible for someone to review it and ensure that figures, tables, and equations are handled properly. However, we should hope that other theses and dissertations are also scanned and made available digitally. Given that Cambridge is hundreds of years old and they currently have over 7,000 postgraduates enrolled, they have a lot of theses and dissertations in their archives. They certainly have tens of thousands of theses and dissertations, quite possibly more than 100,000. No doubt it's possible to automate scanning in the documents, but I highly doubt they have the money to pay someone to ensure that figures, tables, and equations are properly handled. Therefore, it makes more sense just to scan it and not bother with things like OCR and formatting, especially if more are going to be scanned in the future.
2. Re:Vector by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 12:53 · Score: 0
  
  Probably because it was created before everything was done that way? These days the thesis would be submitted electronically and possibly (depending on institution) a copy or two would get printed, bound and put on a library shelf to gather dust. Not so long ago the situation was reversed. If you bother to look up old thesis (80s or early), as I have, expect to see a photocopy of something obviously typed up on a manual typewriter with hand-written equations, hand-drawn diagrams, and corrections done with white ink and a pen.
  (In fact this was true surprisingly recently: I finished my phd in 2006. The official copies were still printed and bound at great expense. Electronic copies could be submitted elsewhere but this was outside of the "official" process entirely.)
3. Re: Vector by markdavis · 2017-10-23 13:45 · Score: 2
  
  I don't disagree with what you are saying, especially about the volume and such. But, obviously, Hawking is famous and demand for his single document could certainly justify someone performing an OCR of the text with bitmap of the figures, as needed. Good work for a intern or graphic design student :)
4. Re:Vector by gl4ss · 2017-10-23 20:08 · Score: 1
  
  I seriously doubt that nobody has ever converted it by hand into electronic form.
  on top of that, they could have found someone to do it for them.
  however serving 60 000 copies of some megabytes is really easy.
  
  --
  world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
5. Re: Vector by jabuzz · 2017-10-23 21:42 · Score: 1
  
  Further a "proper" PDF where the text is in fact text and not a bitmap is a lot more useful than a bunch of scanned images because it can be searched.
6. Re:Vector by Vroem · 2017-10-24 00:57 · Score: 1
  
  It’s typewritten and all formulas are handwritten. Check it out on one of the mirrors below.
7. Re: Vector by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-24 03:27 · Score: 0
  
  Additionally, new work by PhDs would already, likely, be digitized and in a simple PDF format already.
  Doesn't everyone just use LaTeX?
So lame. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 12:10 · Score: 0

So, Cambridge can't run a website. Not surprising given their current situations and recent past history. ROLMAO
1. Re:So lame. by Bing+Tsher+E · 2017-10-23 15:34 · Score: 1
  
  The conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra can't run a website, either.
  I bet Mick Jagger would struggle to run a website as well.
  In between sneering about that, maybe you can hop up in a jiffy and see if the toner needs changing in the LaserJet on third floor for us, like a good IT guy?
2. Re:So lame. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-24 06:47 · Score: 0
  
  And? The comment you replied to didn't mention Hawking at all, so comparing him to conductors or rock stars is completely irrelevant. A better claim would be why you think the London Symphony Orchestra doesn't need a functioning website.
3. Re:So lame. by tehcyder · 2017-10-24 22:51 · Score: 1
  
  And? The comment you replied to didn't mention Hawking at all, so comparing him to conductors or rock stars is completely irrelevant. A better claim would be why you think the London Symphony Orchestra doesn't need a functioning website.
  Cambridge University'sprimary purpose is not to create websites, any more than the LSO or Mick Jagger's is. Nothing to do with Hawking per se.
  
  --
  To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
church trolls ddos by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 12:35 · Score: 0

they think they lost virtue when thee idea of not existing a god occurs
Hawking Quote by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 12:37 · Score: 0

Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding.
Hawking displays eloquent wisdom in addition to massive intelligence.
Hawking Age by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 12:41 · Score: 0

Hawking is 75??? I assumed he was more like 60. That medical science plus Dr. Hawking's determination can keep a man with ALS alive and hugely productive for so long is simply amazing.
1. Re:Hawking Age by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 23:52 · Score: 0
  
  Hawking is 75??? I assumed he was more like 60. That medical science plus Dr. Hawking's determination can keep a man with ALS alive and hugely productive for so long is simply amazing.
  The last 15 or so years for Hawking has been a pretty abysmal array of attention getting stunts if you ask me. As bright as the man is, I think he's gone off the deep end emotionally and has largely become disconnected from reality. He's been preoccupied with what looks like a quest for attention, attempts to build a legacy and otherwise find for himself meaning in life, and his fast approaching death.
  What's sad though, is that all this is so unnecessary. His previous brilliant work will be remembered in the same breath as Einstein and his life with ALS as a testament to his humanity. He already has a legacy and has secured a place in the history books besides the greats.
Abolish copyrights by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 13:43 · Score: 0

Wow, it only took 51 years to get a piece of research written before the internet was invented freely released to the public.
Copyright and IP laws are one of the most destructive and anti-social areas of public policy.
Link by krray · 2017-10-23 13:49 · Score: 4, Informative

Here's a link to a copy of the original 72M version:
https://mega.nz/#!dgRUgLhS!OcP...
1. Re:Link by bsharma · 2017-10-23 16:50 · Score: 1
  
  Thank you; I was wondering why there is no mirror.
Space is fake. Earth is flat. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 13:50 · Score: 0, Troll

Einstein. Cosmologies. Get it yet? These are the people who make the lies that make your world round. But their model doesn't work, because it is fake. Instead, they explain away why the universe doesn't move according to their own made-up model of gravity: Because of invisible dark matter, and unknown dark energy!
Earth doesn't move. It doesn't curve.
And jeez, how many round-earth stories do we need to read each week? The spell must be wearing off awfully fast lately!
Whoops by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 14:23 · Score: 0

Math error on line 42, the universe is actually contracting, and black holes don't exist. Should have peer reviewed that sucker.
1. Re:Whoops by turbidostato · 2017-10-23 17:03 · Score: 2
  
  Math error on universe, the answer is actually 42.
2. Re:Whoops by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 17:48 · Score: 0
  
  Yes, but that is the good ending, where you defeat the nemesis known as Earl Grey.
  Bad ending is 27.
I got it! by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 14:54 · Score: 0

I mean, I downloaded it, not understood it...
Now what? Get an education??
The Internet Archive would've been a better choice by jbn-o · 2017-10-23 15:31 · Score: 1

Yes, and uploading copies of all the various renderings of the document to archive.org would have given them this, time-honored robust hosting via an ordinary HTTP GET request, from a secure site that doesn't require Javascript to use (contrary to the Mega download link someone else posted to /. elsewhere in this story), made a "download" URL available one could put anywhere (even their own website without alerting most users the data was actually coming from archive.org such as a requirement to go through a separate download page), and done it all gratis. Perhaps the IT admins involved should look into doing this now.

--
Digital Citizen
Oh dear!! by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 17:56 · Score: 0

And you thought it was a good idea to post a site that crashed with 60,000 views on Slashdot?!!!
Small wonder by nospam007 · 2017-10-23 18:45 · Score: 1

"Stephen Hawking's Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site "
Well, there's a lot of gravity in that thing.
"stuff that matters" by mapkinase · 2017-10-23 22:12 · Score: 1

Yeah

--
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Ruler by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-23 23:50 · Score: 0

Why is there a ruler on the scans of this book? Is that for scientific theory dick-measuring?
Comment by WallyL · 2017-10-24 05:00 · Score: 1

News for nerds, stuff that matters. Slashdot is reporting on the slashdot effect!
Funny Joke by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-24 05:24 · Score: 0

This isn't rocket science
Neither is theoretical physics/cosmology. L. O. L!!
Regards, Stephen Hawking
Dspace repositories by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-24 08:14 · Score: 0

The site fell over because Dspace repository are badly engineered rubbish.
We are sinking by Anonymous Coward · 2017-10-25 05:08 · Score: 0

An object in motion stays in motion and what is energy but motion. Its more than likely the Universe is not expanding, but we are sinking into a blackhole.