Stephen Hawking, Who Examined the Universe and Explained Black Holes, Dies at 76 (nytimes.com) 307
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'm still optimistic... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I'm still optimistic... (Score:4, Funny)
I think you mean cues, social queues are the lines outside of clubs.
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Sorry I'm not good with Social queues.
I think you mean cues, social queues are the lines outside of clubs.
Stephen got to skip those - and the ones at Disney World.
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Social queues are cocaine?
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That's lines INSIDE clubs.
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There's no lines inside clubs because clubs are made of sliced cooked poultry, fried bacon, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise.
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That kind of reminds me of a short story by Iain Banks, "Descendant", part of "The State of the Art". Astronaut in an intelligent mechanical suit after a spaceship crash, trying to get to a base hundreds of kilometers away, the suit doing its best to keep him alive while doing most of the walking itself.
Thanks for all the fish (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thanks for all the fish (Score:5, Insightful)
Something to think about: he showed that even a person as crippled as he was physically could have strengths in other fields that would make it profitable for entirety of human kind to invest massively into keeping him alive.
It makes for an interesting statement on value of human life itself.
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I get your point, but the UK is not a subsistence society. There are people who drive around central London in £400,000 Rolls Royce phantoms as their work cars. I would like to think our society still feels it is a decent thing to help out those born into the other end of the luck spectrum.
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There are people who drive around central London in £400,000 Rolls Royce phantoms as their work cars.
They're all being sent back to Russia, any day now...
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One of the best inventions is universal education system, and other methods of removal of systemic obstacles. We no longer live in the society where birthright is everything. That was the time of the aristocracy, and it's long gone.
It's telling how well we have done when "poor" are people who have housing, heating, never go hungry and can afford smartphones.
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Re:Thanks for all the fish (Score:5, Interesting)
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...why not just disallow babies? See how easily that train of thought falls apart.
No, not really. But I can see how you might be getting confused.
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Wow, and thus ends humanity...right there in that statement. Once we begin to think of worth in terms of contributions then it inevitably calls into question; what is a contribution? Babies don't contribute anything to society...why not just disallow babies? See how easily that train of thought falls apart.
Bah humbug. You're just jealous because those babies still have a higher net contribution than you...
But never fear, you can still turn it around until the crystal in your palm goes black [wikipedia.org]. You've got plenty of... never mind.
Hawking can't die. (Score:5, Insightful)
He's just moved to the other side of an event horizon.
Respects, Dr Hawking.
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I agree - he did a lot of contributions to move science ahead.
RIP, good sir. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Shouldn't the average IQ be constant 100?
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Wish I could mod parent up. Yes, you are exactly right - and you know it.
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Tightening the curve (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, it rose.
By definition if cannot rise. But it might be a few standard deviations tighter.
It's turtles all the way down (Score:5, Insightful)
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell [wikipedia.org]) 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 [wikipedia.org]!"
- Stephen Hawking - 1988 - A Brief History of Time [wikipedia.org]
Re:It's turtles all the way down (Score:5, Insightful)
Chukwa the world turtle, is swimming through the Ocean of Milk (aka the milky way(. It's only necessary to have something for the turtle to stand on if one already asserts the relatively modern idea of empty space as we know it. "turtle's all the way down is" a misinterpretation (the story a fabrication), attempting to make the believer look foolish. A sensible answer to "What is the tortoise standing on?" would be "The turtle is swimming", or "The ocean of milk, which is bottomless".
It is about as humorous as asking a Christian creationist - "So, what day was it before Monday" - and the reply being - "Oh, every day was a Monday before that". Quite funny, if you aren't a creationist.
If we accept the Chukwa myth on it's metaphorical basis, then it's not dissimilar from all those marbles-on-mattresses pictures used to show the curvature of space-time under gravitational fields, If we were to cross-pollinate the metaphor, we could say that the child Chukwa is swimming around a whirlpool caused by the mighty Surya-Chukwa (the sun-turtle), while the baby Chandra-Chukwa (moon) is swimming around a similar 'whirlpool' created by our own Chukwa.
So, just because current science prefer marbles and mattresses, it doesn't make it particularly funny if someone else uses turtles and oceans. What makes it sad is when someone takes another myth and ridicules it in a short-sighted, and arrogant, manner. Moreover, the (rather tired) scientific misogyny comes out in naming the person in question as being a woman.
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Fuck! That's the first time a Slashdot comment (or possibly any website comment) has caused me to re-examine my outlook on something.
Well played.
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Turtles don't work (Score:3)
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
Re: Ocean of Boredom (Score:2)
I always love those apologists "see, the myths were right all along!" rationalizations.
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The plate - or "disc" - is actually on the elephants on the turtle's back. And the turtle's name is A'Tuin. Enjoy your visit and don't go in the Mended Drum.
Farewell, Professor Hawking (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Farewell, Professor Hawking (Score:5, Insightful)
He was an inspiration to those of us who whinge and lie in bed when we get a head cold or tummy ache. Dude faced the ultimate physical challenges and seemed to go on with good spirits. Plus, from all accounts he was pretty bright.
Walk free, Dr Hawking.
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Good for you, brother. I hope the struggle gets easier for you.
Re:Farewell, Professor Hawking (Score:5, Insightful)
I have the same feelings, 93. My wife passed away from ALS five years ago. The fact that Prof. Hawking not only survived for over 40 years with the disease, but did so much amazing science during that period is incredible.
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Amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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A comment like this is the reason I still come to this site. May your mother rest in peace.
Thank you. That is very kind of you.
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Why no Nobel Prize? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why no Nobel Prize? (Score:5, Informative)
How is it that Stephen Hawking won every prize there is except the Nobel? Discovering something revolutionary about black holes would seem to qualify.
Unfortunately, Hawkings only theorized his signature Hawkings-radiation. Although it is an elegant theory, I don't think anyone has developed a way to validate it yet and the Nobel committee generally isn't persuaded by elegant theories that may or may not turn out to be wrong...
Also Hawkings has been notably wrong before. He bet against the Higgs particle. He bet that information was lost in a Black Hole. He also wasn't initially convinced that the surface area of a black hole event horizon was a measure of entropy (although Jacob Beckenstein was able to convince him).
Don't get me wrong, I think he's quite an amazing theoretical physicist in that he has a very good intuition on how things might work, but the physical world doesn't respect intuition about how the world might work, it demonstrates it to us. As a result, not all intuition about the physical world (as elegant as it may be) turns out to be correct about the world in which we actually live...
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Anyone should be able to contribute, but celebrity status forcing a disproportionate level of attention in a field someone is unfamiliar with can be extremely damaging
I do not want to speak ill of anyone (least of all the dead), but amen to that! And that goes for the "field" of politics as well.
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Brilliant != Infallible (Score:2)
Not only this, as smart as he may have been at Physics, he was a fucking moron about AI.
Which is not something the Nobel committee cares about at all. Linus Pauling won two Nobel prizes and he had some pretty lunatic ideas regarding Vitamin C. Just because someone is brilliant doesn't mean they are right about everything. I find it curious that the first thing you go to is to try to tear the guy down. I'm pretty sure you aren't perfect either.
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Although it is an elegant theory, I don't think anyone has developed a way to validate it yet and the Nobel committee generally isn't persuaded by elegant theories that may or may not turn out to be wrong...
Some researchers created an acoustic version of a black hole, that followed the same mathematical model, and exhibited Hawking radiation [nature.com].
Not exactly the same thing, of course, but if our current modelling of black hole physics is correct, they should also exhibit Hawking radiation.
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How is it that Stephen Hawking won every prize there is except the Nobel?
Well, the Nobel Prize is only awarded to folks who are still living. Stephen Hawking was supposed to die "tomorrow" for most of his adult life.
I always thought that this was the Nobel Prize committee's way of keeping him alive. They didn't want to give him the prize . . . because then he would die. The hope of receiving the prize kept him alive for so long, despite an illness that would have finished off most folks much earlier!
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How can an AC be a wanker... given they have no balls?
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There is only one Nobel prize in physics per year. Picking the one prize for a specific year does not mean other discovers were not important or were not contenders for that award.
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It has been an honor to be alive (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: It has been an honor to be alive (Score:5, Funny)
They invented Mayannaise, dumbass.
Stephen Hawking will never die. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 !
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Yes remembrances belong to the living, and then passed on.
RIP, Dr. Hawking. : (
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Typically, you would say that about the person taking over to replace the person that has just passed. To say it about the person that just died is nonsensical, but I guess you were trying to say something that sounded solemn.
He will be missed though.
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Long after rappers and reality TV stars and tinpot despots and kings and presidents are dust and forgotten
I guess he was hedging his bets ...
All my shootings be drivebys [youtube.com]
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I read one of his last lectures, where he postulated about what we can know about the universe prior to the start of time. While I wish he had been able to come up with even more brilliant ideas, it does seem kind-of fitting that he explored the concept of physics of the universe outside of time before he passed. Escaping the bounds of time seems to me the most fitting definition of immortality, and Hawking got there before he died.
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We'll always have his brilliant career as a gangsta rapper [youtube.com].
He IS the Guide Mark II in the new HHGTTG (Score:5, Informative)
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Coincidentally, I was listening to him count down the seconds to his battery depletion death as the guide mark II at nearly the exact time he died in real life.
An Unlikely Tribute... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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His Last Words (Score:5, Funny)
My condolences (Score:2)
My Condolences to his family, first and to Humanity second. He was a giant among men, and a beacon of hope to all.
He was also an actor and narrator (Score:3)
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm037... [imdb.com]
He accomplished so many things in spite of his physical issues.
First thought (Score:2)
While I mourn the loss of opportunity every living year of such a genius represents... I have to admit that I am interested to see what the Big Bang Theory makes of this.
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Well done, old chap (Score:3)
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.
Go beyond the event horizon in peace... (Score:2)
A few more generations of physicists will have to go by before we can know Hawking's place in the ranks of the great, but his status as a popularizer of science is already established.
The World (Score:2)
Still important for centuries to come (Score:2)
It was a privilege to have lived at the same time as such an amazing man. His work will still be relevant and important for centuries to come. Now he finally has the freedom to become one with the universe.
A posthumous joke for Dr. Hawking (Score:5, Funny)
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 [oxforddictionaries.com] radiation [wikipedia.org].
Let's be clear (Score:5, Insightful)
Met Stephen Hawking in Cambridge (Score:3)
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.
Slashdot then and now (Score:2)
Years ago when I first discovered Slashdot it was genuinely a place where interesting technology and scientific issues were discussed.
Nowadays a large and growing proportion of posts seem to be ad hominem attacks, political entrenchments and mud slinging, invective and general nastiness.
Is this representative of the audience - or of the society we've become?
That a world renowned physicist is the target of barbs and attacks?
Really?
(standing by for the barrage of 'you're a snowflake' comments that only underl
We are, all of us, diminished this day. (Score:2)
Died on a Pi Day (Score:2)
I am not sure what to make of it.
Please.. let's not forget this about him.... (Score:2)
Among all of his accomplishments, he wasn't so serious... here is just one of his appearances on The Simpsons... YouTube [youtube.com]. Hilarious!
A great man indeed. I am going to dust off my copy of A Brief History of Time now.
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that's more of a philosophical outing than saying that matter, time or whatever was there before that.
like what did big bang happen or from kinda.
Re:paywall (Score:5, Informative)
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.”
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Re:paywall (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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We all know how it happens [blogspot.com].
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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?
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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
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I enjoyed the book and it is in my collection, but it was too brief and did not reveal anything new.
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" 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.
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So go again and arrive earlier.
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How about anyone else? Everything Tyson has done publicly should be proof enough that he's the wrong person to fill the role of "celebrity scientist".
Re:Why do intellectuals fall for socialism? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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> 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
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You are conflating Herbert Spencer with Charles Darwin. You wouldn’t be the first.
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Except that competition is cooperation.
Naive to the point of silliness, but typical (Score:2)
It's interesting, Mr. Thoughtful, that you admit heterogeneous views, but then still carry on with typical western leftist chauvinism. To wit, your underlying thought seems to be that: "all various cultures really value the same things that westerners want, and any differences are just merely exotic window dressing without any meaningful substance, so we should be able to get along just fine if we can just move past those nasty conservative right-wingers."
In contrast, I maintain that there are real and subs
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Re: Finally (Score:3)
At least he wasn't a cunt that was too afraid to log in before trolling.