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Stephen Hawking Receives Copley Medal
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Nov 30, 2006 03:42 PM
from the i-certainly-didn't-deserve-it dept.
from the i-certainly-didn't-deserve-it dept.
smooth wombat writes "Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, has been awarded the Royal Society's 275th Copley medal for his contribution to cosmology and theoretical physics. Other notables to receive the award, established by Stephen Gray in 1731 'For his new Electrical Experiments', include Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur and Albert Einstein. In his remarks, Professor Hawking reiterated his previous comments that man must colonize other planets. The medal presented to Professor Hawking was sent into space onboard Space Shuttle Discovery and spent some time on the International Space Station in July of this year. Hawking has expressed an interest in going into space and commented, 'My next goal is to go into space, maybe Richard Branson will help me.'"
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I'm embarassed to ask, but-- (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm embarassed to ask, but-- (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?
His most recent paper of interest is the 2005 paper on information loss in black holes, where he argues that information can in fact leak out of a black hole due to a quantum mechanical effect. The irony of this paper is that he made a public bet with another famous general relativity researcher 9 years ago that information which went into the black hole could never come out again. After publishing his paper, Hawking conceded the bet, though the paper is still somewhat controversial in the field.
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Nevertheless, relatively recently, (and motivated by something very strange called the AdS/CFT correspondence), he and collaborators came up with the first formulations of black holes in higher dimensions with cosmological terms (loosely speaking, a small default curvature of the universe completely independent of gravity). These are now a huge area of research, and prompted his former student Gary Gibbons (together with collaborators) to find the completely general anal
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Humans will never be "enlightened". The term itself is meaningless - what would change? For all the variation between human cultures and eras, you still have no shortage of jerks ruining it for the rest of us.
Human nature isn't subject to fundamental change; merely the restraints upon it that have changed from time to time. Barring some sort of trans-human ascendancy (and I always thought the whole "singularity" idea was too far fetched), we'
Bum bum BUUUUMMM (Score:5, Funny)
Star Trek (Score:2)
Well, that shouldn't be tough with a With a couple of warp engines tied to his chair.
(Sorry Dr. Hawking, I do respect and admire you inspite of that seemingly crass joke.)
A donut shaped universe? (Score:3, Funny)
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Sorry, can't read "Stephen Hawking" anymore w/o... (Score:5, Funny)
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Q: The song E=mc Hawking contains the line, "my power is my mass times the speed of light squared."
Even a first year physics student in high school knows that energy (not power) is mass times the speed of light squared. Power (the rate of energy) is mass times the speed of light squared, divided by time.
If the song lyric were true, time would be constant and, it goes without saying, the universe would collapse upon itself. Given that this has not occurred, the statement must
And all I can hear is (Score:2)
(family guy)
The human race will not survive (Score:4, Funny)
I agree that transferring someone aspect of human consciousness off the planet has an aesthetic appeal. It would just feel wrong if, after all these years of striving, the human race just totally ceased to exist.
On the other hand, it is highly unlikely that the human race, in it's present form, will survive more than another few hundred years.
One possibility is that the human race will design a new species and raise this new species as it's children allowing itself to die off. This new species will look and act superficially human but it will be sufficiently different genetically that interbreeding with present day humans would be impossible. The main impetus for designing this new species will be to improve on and correct defects of existing humans. This species will be noticeably smarter and stronger and healthier.
Another possibility is that people won't bother with creating a new species at all and will instead transfer their consciousness to something like a computer. Everyone's consciousness will be sufficiently connected that the result will essentially be one collective consciousness.
A final possibility is that humanity will prove beyond any doubt that there is no purpose to its existence and simply allow itself to cease to exist.
Either way, enjoy it while you can - because you are likely to be one of the last generations of the human race in it's present form.
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Cyborgs, yay! *stomp stomp stomp*
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Colonisation (Score:3, Insightful)
Space Colonies: A Waste of Good Planets? (Score:2)
And before you say it - no we haven't learned from our mistakes here. We're still doing the same old stuff. It's almost certain that we would molest every other planet just like we do this one.
Space exploration is very educational and entertaining. It might even prove to have some real benefits of some sort, but colonization is a very bad idea.
Humans are an insidious parasite that needs to stay quaran
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Yes.
Humans are an insidious parasite that needs to stay quarantined on this one planet that we've already screwed over.
This is one of the most absurd statements I've ever read.
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Short answer: Yes.
Longer answer: Our view of the universe is human-centric. The only reason you even notice the pollution is because it's impacting you. Is it really better if the most versatile form of life we know of becomes extinct than polluting some planets? Anyway, every planet in our solar system is lifeless on any kind of meaningful scale, esp. Mars, the best candidate for terraforming as
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Pollution? That was here long before humans, and will still be here long after we're gone. How about urbanization, paving, mining, deforestation, irradiation, damming, habitat destruction, species exploitation. There's a long list of bad things we do to this pla
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Well, why don't you stop using your big brain, or stop walking on your hind legs, and let me know how that works out?
The majority of your microscopic organisms can only survive under a very narr
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That statement doesn't even begin to parse. Those things you list are pollution. Or were you working from the idea that "pollution" only referred to air and water contamination?
Side note, what the hell is "irradia
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Is this related to their hit "The Scientist"? (Score:3, Funny)
"Yellow" was pretty good, too.
Is it just me? (Score:2, Funny)
I must be tired...
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Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, *that* medal! (Score:2)
Do you want a freakin' medal?!! (Score:2)
Re:Space Colonies: A Waste of Resources? (Score:4, Informative)
Saying that the former is essential is not saying that efforts should not expended on the latter. And, in fact, getting to the point where people can productively and sustainably live on other planets requires lots and lots of fairly generally applicable basic research that would do much to enable new ways of improving life on this planet.
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Let's say we clean this planet to the standards you refer to, then everyone is happy until a large meteor hits the planet and either wipes out mankind or our civilization (along with its technical ability to go into space).
He is thinking much deeper then a knee jerk liberal reaction to global warming and polution.
Re:Space Colonies: A Waste of Resources? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fact is, food is cheap, but getting it to the parts of Africa that need it isn't. Why? The transport system sucks. Why does the transport system suck? Because the African governments are corrupt or the area is filled with warlords who *want* people to starve in genocidal proportions.
You can throw money all day long at a place like Africa today, and all you will end up with is people like Idi Amin or Mobutu Sese Seko, who get just incredibly rich off of aid money and bribes that should be used to develop infrastructure. The people will continue to starve or die of AIDS. Looking at Uganda under Yoweri Museveni (who is now looking a little of the dictator himself), you saw a very real campaign against AIDS that *worked* not because we dumped a billion dollars on Uganda, but because the government and people worked on the problem.
Space, while not perhaps as pressing a goal, is still somewhere we really do need to go, and it is a place where there is a lot of room to throw money around and you will still get a result. What Africa needs is a new mindset, and peace, and simply pushing money at it doesn't help peace. Not with the corruption that thrives off of it.
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Amartya Sen [wikipedia.org], who won the Nobel prize in economics showed that even such things as famine are man-made. The way to solve these problems is not by throwing large sums of money but rather by a grassroots movement. Which needs to be triggered by the people.
Unless the people themselves inherently want change, it is not going to happen. They would need to invest in education, infrastructure, etc. and do something about their problems
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Now say
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Well, then I hope we invent teleportation, too. Even with multiple space elevators and an unlimited space ship carrying capacity you'd be hard-pressed to move a substantial portion of the current population of the planet off of it.
I think what he's saying is more that if we colonize other planets, it's harder for our race to disappear. Just colonizing
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We can acquire more resources off-world (the asteroid belt would be a good starting point), which will help matters some. But fundamentally, space exploration and overpopulation are unrelated problems. Advancing in one will not solve the other.
Apart from that, I'd also point out that projecting a trend indefinitely will almost always lead you to the wro
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Wouldn't it make more sense to spend the billions (trillions?) of dollars needed to put people on other planets on improving the lives of people on this particular planet?
Wait, all we have to do is spend money to solve poverty once and for all? Good lord, why didn't anyone think of this before?
Seriously, if it were just a matter of mere money, all of our problems would've been solved a long time ago. The problem is that you can't pay people to be responsible citizens. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Re:Space Colonies: A Waste of Resources? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's all about offsite backups, man.
-- Dave
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I've never understood why people think like that.
Yeah, some day humans may be wiped out by war, disease, a comet or something else, but who cares? Life goes on, just not ours.
I'm not saying it's a waste of time to colonize other planets, or that it's not cool, but it seems kind of silly to think of doing it to save the population.
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And that is why Hawkings is who he is, and why you are who you are. He is trying to look ahead to the time when the earth, or even just the major life forms (human being one of the prominents) WILL be wiped out. While you, OTH, want what is and will always be unobtainable.
Many years ago (~35), I thought that communism was an interesting form of gov.
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