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Stephen Hawking, Who Examined the Universe and Explained Black Holes, Dies at 76 (nytimes.com)
Stephen W. Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist and best-selling author who roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity, has died at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76. From a report: A family spokesman announced the death in a statement to several news media outlets. "Not since Albert Einstein has a scientist so captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world," Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, said in an interview. Dr. Hawking did that largely through his book "A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes," published in 1988. It has sold more than 10 million copies and inspired a documentary film by Errol Morris.
The 2014 film about his life, "The Theory of Everything," was nominated for several Academy Awards and Eddie Redmayne, who played Dr. Hawking, won the best-actor Oscar. Scientifically, Dr. Hawking will be best remembered for a discovery so strange that it might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a black hole not black? When it explodes. A brief history of Stephen Hawking: A legacy of paradox.
The 2014 film about his life, "The Theory of Everything," was nominated for several Academy Awards and Eddie Redmayne, who played Dr. Hawking, won the best-actor Oscar. Scientifically, Dr. Hawking will be best remembered for a discovery so strange that it might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a black hole not black? When it explodes. A brief history of Stephen Hawking: A legacy of paradox.
I reckon most of his smarts was derived from AI in the wheelchair anyways. He was probably dead for years. How would anyone know. Sort of a "Weekend at Bernie's" deal. Not as funny... just more boring and science-y. Too soon? Sorry I'm not good with Social queues.
An imperfect person, he still made humanity that much better off.
He's just moved to the other side of an event horizon.
Respects, Dr Hawking.
And with that, the average IQ of the human species dropped a few points :.(
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"
- Stephen Hawking - 1988 - A Brief History of Time
His life was remarkable in many ways - one of which was surviving with ALS for so bloody long.
My dad died from complications of ALS way back in the 1990s. Having seen first-hand how the disease progresses, I marvel at how Hawking managed to live with that disease for so many decades. Yes, they called it "slow onset", but that seems to be mostly a hand-waving attempt at explaining a disease they still don't really understand. Even with support devices like a respirator, it's hard for me to wrap my head around it - those things bring with them their own complications.
Godspeed, Dr. Hawking.
#DeleteChrome
How is it that Stephen Hawking won every prize there is except the Nobel? Discovering something revolutionary about black holes would seem to qualify.
It has been an incredible honor to be alive at the same time as Stephen Hawking. His idea's and his story impacted so many people around the world. The impact he made on science will likely be remembered and studied for thousands of years. The Maya, Plato, Copernicus, Einstein, Hawking. These are just a few. Hawking is now and we all got to live in his time! Thank you Dr. Hawking, you will be greatly missed and always remembered.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Long after rappers and reality TV stars and tinpot despots and kings and presidents are dust and forgotten, Stephen Hawkings name will be remembered.
He joins Einstein and Newton as a giant.
Hawking is dead, long live Hawking !
Usually I'm not the person to gush over a public figure or cast strangely intimate condolences at a person I've never met.
In this case I'll make an exception.
Back in the day- it was Dr. Hawking's book "A Brief History of Time" which drew me into a lifelong love of physics. Many books on the subject have followed. The basic knowledge of the universe learned form those books increased the quality of my life. Going to bed at night knowing what is true, what is not true, and what I do not yet know is a very comforting experience.
His life was an example of devotion to a principle called the "Scientific Method". Perhaps the ultimate measure of truth in a world everyone thinks they know everything without the knowledge of what they do not know. For all his brilliance, like Einstein before him, he admitted he did not know everything. He was simply an explorer through an environment which could only be experienced in the mind because it is beyond the human senses.
And he had to make a case for these truths to many people who would not accept his ideas. He did it only with logic, math, and a passion for finding what is true.
No man lives forever. Hopefully his inspiration of others will last forever. Hopefully we will learn his lessons of science, humility, and good humor.
He was such a good human, it was worth losing him, just to have him. Hopefully, his waveform continues elsewhere.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
My Condolences to his family, first and to Humanity second. He was a giant among men, and a beacon of hope to all.
To err is to be human, to really screw up takes a computer and a human.
Well, here you all go since the paywall is breaking things. Stephen W. Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist and best-selling author who roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity, died early Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.
His death was confirmed by a spokesman for Cambridge University.
“Not since Albert Einstein has a scientist so captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world,” Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, said in an interview.
Dr. Hawking did that largely through his book “A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes,” published in 1988. It has sold more than 10 million copies and inspired a documentary film by Errol Morris. The 2014 film about his life, “The Theory of Everything,” was nominated for several Academy Awards and Eddie Redmayne, who played Dr. Hawking, won the Oscar for best actor.
Scientifically, Dr. Hawking will be best remembered for a discovery so strange that it might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a black hole not black? When it explodes.
What is equally amazing is that he had a career at all. As a graduate student in 1963, he learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neuromuscular wasting disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was given only a few years to live.
The disease reduced his bodily control to the flexing of a finger and voluntary eye movements but left his mental faculties untouched.
He went on to become his generation’s leader in exploring gravity and the properties of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits so deep and dense that not even light can escape them.
That work led to a turning point in modern physics, playing itself out in the closing months of 1973 on the walls of his brain when Dr. Hawking set out to apply quantum theory, the weird laws that govern subatomic reality, to black holes. In a long and daunting calculation, Dr. Hawking discovered to his befuddlement that black holes — those mythological avatars of cosmic doom — were not really black at all. In fact, he found, they would eventually fizzle, leaking radiation and particles, and finally explode and disappear over the eons.
Nobody, including Dr. Hawking, believed it at first — that particles could be coming out of a black hole. “I wasn’t looking for them at all,” he recalled in an interview in 1978. “I merely tripped over them. I was rather annoyed.”
That calculation, in a thesis published in 1974 in the journal Nature under the title “Black Hole Explosions?,” is hailed by scientists as the first great landmark in the struggle to find a single theory of nature — to connect gravity and quantum mechanics, those warring descriptions of the large and the small, to explain a universe that seems stranger than anybody had thought.
The discovery of Hawking radiation, as it is known, turned black holes upside down. It transformed them from destroyers to creators — or at least to recyclers — and wrenched the dream of a final theory in a strange, new direction.
“You can ask what will happen to someone who jumps into a black hole,” Dr. Hawking said in an interview in 1978. “I certainly don’t think he will survive it.
“On the other hand,” he added, “if we send someone off to jump into a black hole, neither he nor his constituent atoms will come back, but his mass energy will come back. Maybe that applies to the whole universe.”
Dennis W. Sciama, a cosmologist and Dr. Hawking’s thesis adviser at Cambridge, called Hawking’s thesis in Nature “the most beautiful paper in the history of physics.”
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm037...
He accomplished so many things in spite of his physical issues.
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So go again and arrive earlier.
It has never occurred to me that Stephen Hawking was getting old. He's always felt kind of ageless to me. And frankly, 76 is a pretty good old age, certainly for one with ALS.
He was an impressive individual, and I'm really glad that he was around and managed to live and contribute for so long.
Because nothing in this world was ever accomplished through competition that couldn't have been done far better through cooperation.
But also, socialism (by it's name) requires us to understand and empathise with those who aren't ourselves (or extensions of ourselves). That itself supports a pluralist stance, which itself weakens the traditional conservative / libertarian ethical foundations.
Socialism is a natural conclusion of the agora - when we are in the agora, we must deal with the fact that our views and beliefs are just one way of being - and we must work with those who hold differing - and even heterogenous views.
The Conservatism/Libertarian Right is an artefact of the rural, where strangers are to be feared rather than to be welcomed as trading partners.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
> Because nothing in this world was ever accomplished through competition that couldn't have been done far better through cooperation.
Please, if you've not read it, read Darwin's work "On the Origin of Species". Or if you'd like entertainment as well as old theories, I'd suggest David Brin's book "Earth". The idea that species change dynamically due to ordinary competition is critical: many contemporary scientists consider the evolution of economies, societies, or even of thought itself to have the same foundations, in competing for resources to survive by reproducing successfully. Competition is critical to such evolution. Even the scientific method is a form of competition, where ideas are tested and those which are effective survive. Eliminating competition is as dangerous as voting on physical reality. A cooperative consensus may be reached, but but the lack of verification or competition can foster destructive wastes of resource.
This is not to say that cooperation is not useful: but pure cooperation has no power to discard wasted or mistaken effort. Even for cooperative efforts, the competition of distinct efforts to get resources or mind share is itself key to selecting the forms of cooperation.
Actually, it rose.
By definition if cannot rise. But it might be a few standard deviations tighter.
His life was remarkable in many ways - one of which was surviving with ALS for so bloody long.
My mother died from ALS recently. Her course took about a decade which is WAY too long with that awful disease though I'm grateful I got to have her alive as long as I did. Stephen Hawking is someone I admire probably more for what he accomplished in the face of that disease than for his scientific accomplishments. And in saying that I am in no way minimizing his contributions to science. I've seen what that disease does to a person up close and even if you aren't religious (I'm not) you should pray that you never have to experience ALS. To do even a fraction of what Hawking did with that malady makes him to my mind one of the most remarkable people to have ever lived.
In the year 2135, two scientists turned astronauts travel to a black hole to capture radiation. Their mission is a success, and they return to earth with expectations of fame and profit. They begin selling their radiation to various scientists around the world, but they are eventually arrested. What were they accused of?
They were charged with hawking radiation.
Stephen Hawking was, without any doubt, a world-class physicist and one of the essential scientific figures of his generation. However, a new Einstein he was not. In fact, it can be argued that he may not even be among the top ten scientists of the last third of the 20th century. More specifically, one can easily make the point that Roger Penrose has been significantly more creative and scientifically influential than he was, and that Hawking was heavily indebted to him, and to his own lamentable condition. A great physicist is gone, but let's keep things in context.
It was at the 300 Years of Gravity symposium. He was an incredibly cheerful guy.
The best bit of his lecture was when he said that whenever anyone predicted the death of physics, something new and exciting came along, so he was going to predict the end of physics in the hope of making this happen.
(Ok, CERN was a bit slow, but recent announcements from them suggest Stephen got his wish in his lifetime.)
My second favourite bit was during the Q&A for his lecture (never published as far as I know, it wasn't ready in time for the conference book). A guy was asking him if he had considered bouncing universes. The question was long and drawn out. Stephen cut him off with a curt "no" and left it at that.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
A black hole ends in a bang? So, if a black hole got big enough to swallow the entire known universe, it would end in a... Big Bang.
But if no one is around to hear it, does it go bang?
While it is no secret that I profoundly disagree with the concept of a singularity, I have, over almost the same lifetime, come to greatly admire Professor Stephen Hawking as a thinker and as a man. His life has been a wonderful example of dogged refusal to give up. He himself has stated that, never give up, is one of his primary teachings. He has set perhaps the very best example of overcoming adversity and making a success of his life regardless of the difficulties caused by his long term illness.
We should also be fully mindful of the kindness and hard work of everyone surrounding him during his long infirmity; their care for him as simply a human being, made much of his more recent work possible. Without their support he might not have lived beyond his twenties. They too have set a standard that will perhaps not be seen again, certainly not in our lifetimes and as such I salute you all too.
Chris Coles.
There is no sound in space. The noise (vibration) is still reverberating. We call it "chemistry."
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
" Dreamed of stars, told of stars, made of stars.
^ What kind of drivel is this? Sad."
I guess she knew him only as a guest-actor in the Big Bang Theory.
In the fabric of space, quantum fluctuations create matter from energy in the form of matter/antimatter pairs.
These rejoin and their masses are converted back to equivalent energy.
When this happens at the event horizon of a black hole, on rare occasions, one half of the pair has enough velocity outside the event horizon to escape.
So, black holes leak matter.
After trillions upon trillions of years, the black hole explodes, but it hasn't happened yet.
When it does, the universe will have long been expanded to a point that it won't really matter. (see what I did there)
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
At least he wasn't a cunt that was too afraid to log in before trolling.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
So, just because current science prefer marbles and mattresses, it doesn't make it particularly funny if someone else uses turtles and oceans.
Science prefers "marbles and mattresses" because if you put a marble on a mattress it deforms the surface so that a smaller marble nearby will fall towards it. If you put a turtle in an ocean it will not suddenly cause all the smaller turtles nearby to be pulled towards it. So the reason one analogy is preferred over the other is that marbles and mastresses work and the turtles do not and if you change the story to have the person reply "It's swimming in an ocean of milk" they don't come across as any less foolish!