Slashdot Mirror
Stephen Hawking's Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site After It's Posted Online (bbc.com)
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."
60,000 hits? That is amazing. How can a website cope with such high numbers? They need to use "AI" to speed it up.
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.
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.
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.
Thus "Olber's Paradox". Text recognition error?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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.
>"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 :)
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.
Here's a link to a copy of the original 72M version:
https://mega.nz/#!dgRUgLhS!OcP...
Why not post it on AWS S3 or Cloudfront
Or better still, on Sci-Hub.
Math error on universe, the answer is actually 42.