Hawking...icon evaluation

"Hawking: Is He All He’s Cracked Up To Be?"

We all know that Stephen Hawking is the greatest living physicist—but what we all know may not be true

by

Michael D. Lemonick

February 3rd, 2014

Time

Partway through Hawking, a moving new PBS documentary on the life and work of British physicist Stephen Hawking, narrated via voice synthesizer by the man himself, Hawking raises a delicate point. “Sometimes I wonder,” he says, “If I’m as famous for my wheelchair and disabilities as I am for my discoveries.” He never offers a definitive answer, but it seems pretty clear that the filmmakers think it’s mostly about the discoveries.

Sure, the backstory is poignant, and even amazing—diagnosed with the muscle-wasting condition known variously as ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease and, in the U.K., motor neurone disease, Hawking was given just two years to live. Yet a full half-century later, after a distinguished career at Cambridge, the 71-year-old scientist, now utterly paralyzed, is still hard at work trying to solve the mysteries of the universe.

But it’s the discoveries that really catapulted Hawking into the pantheon of physics greatness, right? Trapped in an increasingly useless body, he could, as Caltech physicist Kip Thorne says in the film “move at lightning speed through the universe, seeing things nobody else could see.” He is, as most of us know, the greatest physicist since Einstein.

Except that he isn’t. “Rubbish,” Hawking himself responded, when I posed this proposition to him during a 1993 interview. “It’s mere media hype.” It’s undeniable that Hawking has made key contributions to both relativity and quantum physics. He came up with the insight that the Big Bang emerged from a singularity, a point so small and dense that the very laws of physics can’t describe it. He figured out what happened when black holes merge. He also came up with the startling and counter-intuitive notion that black holes can evaporate, slowly at first, then faster and faster until they explode—an idea that was at first ridiculed, but which is now mainstream. “This result,” says Bernard Carr, one of Hawking’s former PhD students, “unified relativity and quantum theory and thermodynamics.”

That would be positively mind-blowing—if true. But it’s really not: the so-called “Hawking radiation” that should emerge from black holes draws on those disparate areas of physics, but “unify” means something else entirely. Unifying relativity and quantum physics is something Einstein tried to do for the last two decades of his life, and failed. The best bet for unification these days is string theory—assuming it turns out to be correct, which we may never know.

You can’t blame Hawking for that over-the-top quote, but Hawking himself talks about the honor he felt being inducted into the Royal Society. “My name,” he says “sat alongside Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.” Well, yeah, and also along a lengthy list of other scientists you’ve never heard of.

Then there’s A Brief History of Time, Hawking’s mega-bestseller, first published in 1988. “I wanted the book to be read by millions of people around the world like a bestselling airport novel,” he says in the film. “I felt the mass market wanted to know how the universe began.” Fat chance, thought his agent and his publishers—but Brief History went on to sell millions upon millions of copies. The reason was that it explained some of the great mysteries of the cosmos in simple, digestible language. “It made this subject a topic of conversation among all walks of life,” says Caltech’s Thorne.

Surely you remember all those conversations. Or…maybe not. In fact, the book was nearly incomprehensible to people in all walks of life outside of theoretical physics. The real story, suggested Time book critic Paul Gray in a 2001 essay, is that “people buy a book for many reasons: either they want to read it, think they ought to read it, or want to impress people by making them think they have read it.” Whether they actually do read it is an entirely different question.

None of this should suggest that  Stephen Hawking is not one of the world’s leading physicists: he is, and would still be even if he were perfectly healthy. It’s the disability, though, and his fierce determination to carry on regardless, that makes the film so engaging and his life so uplifting—and perhaps makes people want to overstate his accomplishments. He is, one former student says, “the most stubborn person I know.”

Hawking chronicles that stubborn streak through Hawking’s own memories and through those of his sister, his first wife, and many, many colleagues. You don’t hear from his second wife, though: she was one of his former nurses, whom he ultimately divorced after 11 years of marriage amid scandalous rumors. “The press printed unsubstantiated allegations,” he says, “that I had been the victim of domestic violence. This was a gross invasion of our privacy.” (He doesn’t say, however, that it didn’t happen.)

The film is peppered with photos and videos of Hawking as a young boy, then a nerdy Oxford undergrad, then an increasingly disabled man who can now only twitch the muscles in his cheek to operate a computer and voice synthesizer. There’s also plenty of cheesy footage of actors recreating what Hawking might have looked like writing on a blackboard way back when—an unfortunate technique that’s now evidently de rigeur in historical documentaries.

You also see flashes of Hawking’s sense of humor. It shows in his willingness to spoof his own smartest-man-on-the-planet brand with appearances on The Simpsons and Star Trek, and with his collaboration with Jim Carrey on a stunt call while the comedian was on the air with David Letterman (“I’m watching Dumb and Dumber, Jim, and you’re a genius.” “No, Stephen, you’re a genius.” “No, Jim, you are”). He’s also pretty funny in real life. “It’s a pity,” he says to a huge audience at a public talk, “that nobody has found an exploding black hole. If they had, I would have won a Nobel prize.” He delivers the line for laughs, and gets them.

And then there’s something that doesn’t make it into the film, but which I saw myself when I interviewed him in 1993. It was in Seattle, where he’d gone to give some talks, and his aide let it slip that whenever he traveled, he would ask his hosts to set up a meeting with local children with disabilities.

These visits were totally unpublicized, but I was lucky enough to go along and watch the pretty-great physicist answered questions from a half-dozen or so kids for an hour, their wheelchairs arrayed around his in a semicircle. That’s when I became convinced that even when you strip away the hype, Stephen Hawing may not be the world’s greatest living physicist—but he’s a pretty extraordinary human being.

Redaction from Hawking

"Stephen Hawking says there is no such thing as black holes, Einstein spinning in his grave"

STEPHEN Hawking has rocked the world of physics by reversing his lifetime’s work to claim that black holes do NOT exist – insisting they’re more like 50 shades of grey.

by

Gareth Morgan

January 24th, 2014

EXPRESS

The wheelchair-bound genius has posted a paper online that demolishes modern black hole theory. He says that the idea of an event horizon, from which light cannot escape, is flawed.

It is considered one of the pillars of physics that the incredible gravitational pull created by the collapse of a star will be so strong that nothing can break free...much of this is thanks to Hawking’s own work.

But Hawking smashes this idea by saying that rather than there being an inescapable event horizon, we should think of a far less total “apparent horizon”. And, at a stroke, he has contradicted Albert Einstein.

He sets out his argument in the paper, called Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting For Black Holes, which is likely to send his fellow scientists into a spin.

Hawking writes: “The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity.”

He suggests that light rays attempting to rush away from the black hole’s core will be held as though stuck on a treadmill and that they can slowly shrink by spewing out radiation.

Hawking told leading science magazine Nature: “There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory. [But quantum theory] enables energy and information to escape from a black hole”.

The professor’s grey hole theory would allow matter and energy to be held for a period of time before being released back into space.

The physicist admits that his idea requires a new theory that merges gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature. But he added: “The correct treatment remains a mystery.”

Hawking’s latest work was prompted by a talk he gave via Skype to a meeting at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, in August 2013.

He is attempting to solve what is known as the black-hole firewall paradox, which has puzzled scientists for almost two years. It stems from a “thought experiment” where scientists tried to imagine what would happen to an astronaut unlucky enough to fall into a black hole.

Event horizons are mathematically simple consequences of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Black hole expert Don Page, of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, admits: “The picture Hawking gives sounds reasonable.”

But theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski of the Kavli Institute is sceptical and insists: “In Einstein’s gravity, the black-hole horizon is not so different from any other part of space. We never see space-time fluctuate in our own neighbourhood: it is just too rare on large scales.”

Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and former student of Hawking's, admits many physicists will find Hawking’s work “abhorrent”.

He says: “The idea that there are no points from which you cannot escape a black hole is in some ways an even more radical and problematic suggestion than the existence of firewalls. But the fact that we’re still discussing such questions 40 years after Hawking’s first papers on black holes and information is testament to their enormous significance."

Stephen Hawking documentary

Errol Morris’ film about the life and work of Stephen Hawking.

Brilliant but unmotivated, Stephen Hawking was a 21-year-old PhD student at Cambridge when he first noticed something was wrong. He was falling down a lot, and dropping things. He went into the hospital for tests, and learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The doctors told him he would gradually lose control of every muscle in his body.

“My dreams at that time were rather disturbed,” Hawking said. “Before my condition had been diagnosed, I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed to be anything worth doing. But shortly after I came out of hospital, I dreamt that I was going to be executed. I suddenly realized that there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do if I were reprieved.”

The doctors gave the young man two and a half years to live. That was in early 1963. Over the next half century, Hawking defied all odds and went on to become one of the most celebrated scientists of the era, making major contributions to quantum cosmology and the understanding of black holes. Along the way, the wheelchair-bound Hawking became a cultural icon, a symbol of disembodied intellect and indomitable spirit.

This coming Sunday, 49 years after his grim diagnosis, Hawking will turn 70. A scientific conference in his honor got underway today at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, and will culminate on Sunday with a public symposium, “The State of the Universe,” featuring some of the world’s greatest astronomers and physicists, including Martin Rees, Kip Thorne and Saul Perlmutter. You can watch live streaming video of the events at the official website.

To help celebrate, we present Errol Morris’s 1992 film of A Brief History of Time ..., Hawking’s bestselling book.  Morris weaves biography in with the science, interviewing members of Hawking’s family–his mother, sister and aunt–along with friends and colleagues, including Roger Penrose, Dennis Sciama and John Archibald Wheeler.

A Brief History of Time was Morris’s first film as a director-for-hire (he was recruited by Steven Spielberg for Amblin Entertainment), which created some difficulties, but Morris was pleased with the outcome. He later said, “It’s actually one of the most beautiful films I ever shot.” The film won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Filmmaking and the Documentary Filmmaker’s Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival.

In 1992 Morris told the New York Times Magazine that A Brief History of Time was “less cerebral and more moving” than anything he had worked on before. “This feeling of time, of aging, of mortality combined with this search for the most basic and deep questions about the world around us and ourselves,” Morris said, “is pretty persuasive stuff.”

Forgiveness for Alan Turing by Stephen Hawking and others

"Alan Turing Pardon? Stephen Hawking, Other Scientists Urge Forgiveness For Gay Computer Icon"

December 14th, 2012

The Huffington Post

Stephen Hawking and other eminent scientists called Friday for the British government to pardon computer pioneer Alan Turing, who helped win World War II but was later prosecuted for homosexuality.

In a letter published in the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Hawking and 10 others urged Prime Minister David Cameron "formally to forgive the iconic British hero."

The letter, whose signatories also include Astronomer Royal Martin Rees and Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, called Turing "one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the modern era."

"It is time his reputation was unblemished," it said.

Turing worked at Bletchley Park, the wartime code-breaking center, where he helped crack Nazi Germany's secret codes by creating the "Turing bombe," a forerunner of modern computers.

He also developed the "Turing Test" to measure artificial intelligence.

After the war, Turing was prosecuted for having sex with a man, stripped of his security clearance and forcibly treated with female hormones. He killed himself in 1954 at age 41 by eating an apple laced with cyanide.

Sex between men remained illegal in Britain until 1967.

In 2009, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a public apology on behalf of the government for Turing's "inhumane" treatment, saying: "We're sorry, you deserved so much better."

"Stephen Hawking Calls for Alan Turing's Pardon"

by

Rebecca J. Rosen

December 18th, 2012

The Atlantic

The popular physicist has joined with other scientists and British leaders to ask Prime Minister David Cameron to "formally forgive this British hero."

At the end of World War II, mathematician and early computer scientist Alan Turing was a hero. He had led the British in breaking the Engima code, an effort that was hailed for bringing the war to a close.

But not long after the war, in 1952, he was arrested for what was then a crime in England: his sexuality, or, in legalese, "acts of gross indecency between adult men." He had a choice: imprisonment or estrogen. He chose the hormone treatment, which made him impotent and caused him to grow breasts. Two years later, he died in what is widely believed to have been a suicide.

In more recent times, England has sought ways to repent for what it did to Alan Turing. In 2009 Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a formal apology. But official forgiveness remains in the offing: Earlier this year, members of parliament introduced legislation to pardon Turing. Now, several of the nation's top scientists, including Stephen Hawking, and other leaders have penned a letter to the Telegraph, throwing their support behind the bill.

They write:

    SIR - We write in support of a posthumous pardon for Alan Turing, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the modern era. He lead the team of Enigma codebreakers at Bletchley Park, which most historians agree shortened the Second World War. Yet successive governments seem incapable of forgiving his conviction for the then crime of being a homosexual, which led to his suicide, aged 41.

    We urge the Prime Minister formally to forgive this British hero, to whom we owe so much as a nation, and whose pioneering contribution to computer sciences remains relevant even today. To those who seek to block attempts to secure a pardon with the argument that this would set a precedent, we would answer that Turing's achievements are sui generis. It is time his reputation was unblemished.

    Lord Currie of Marylebone
    Lord Grade of Yarmouth
    Lord Faulkner or Worcester
    Lord Rees of Ludlow
    Astronomer Royal
    Lord Sharkey
    Lord Smith of Finsbury
    Baroness Trumpington
    Sir Timothy Gowers
    Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics, Cambridge University
    Dr Douglas Gurr
    Chairman, Science Museum Group
    Professor Stephen Hawking
    Sir Paul Nurse
    President, the Royal Society

Various arguments of, not surprisingly, varying strengths have been made against the pardon. The justice minister, for example, has argued that pardons are not meant for people who were properly convicted of what was then a crime, no matter if we today look back on those laws with opprobrium. To pardon Turing would, in a sense, take England off the hook for its shameful history. Others, such as gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell, have questioned the wisdom of singling out Turing, when perhaps as many as 100,000 men were convicted under that same statute.

But these arguments lose sight of the point of the pardon. What good is it to pardon a man who has been dead nearly six decades? It is not for his benefit, and it does not undo the past, somehow redeeming England through its words. No, its value is symbolic, a statement that England recognizes the error of its ways and champions its progress since. As for the other 100,000 convicted men, heck, pardon them all -- and let Turing be once again the man who has led the way to victory.

Biography...

Alan Turing Home Page

Alan Turing [Wikipedia]

Not enough humiliation for Sheldon Cooper

Well, the anticipated meeting between Sheldon Cooper and Stephen Hawking on The Big Bang Theory was a dismal failure. The episode provided humiliation [not enough] via Howard and finally by Hawking. Only the last few minutes provided the meeting between the two and it was a split screen encounter. Sheldon was done in by a simple arithmetic statement.


Hawking vs Cooper...April 5th

Hawking vs Cooper...April 5th

A milestone for the sex sitcom. May Cooper be reduced to ashes.

"'The Big Bang Theory' Enlists Stephen Hawking"

He'll guest star on the April 5 episode for a meeting of the minds with Jim Parsons' Sheldon.

by

Lesley Goldberg

March 12th, 2012

The Hollywood Reporter

CBS' The Big Bang Theory can check off another guest star perfectly suited to the nerdy comedy.

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking will guest star on the April 5 episode of the geeky comedy, the network announced Monday.

The renowned brainiac has been a frequent target for the series about four lovable science nerds, with the Chuck Lorre/Bill Prady series first making a nod to the guys' Hawking hero worship in the pilot.

Subsequent references have included Leonard (Johnny Galecki) impersonating a colleague's Hawking impersonation on the phone and, most notably, during Big Bang's fourth season, Jim Parsons' Sheldon is notoriously tricked into going to the airport in the middle of the night to meet him.

"When people would ask us who a 'dream guest star' for the show would be, we would always joke and say Stephen Hawking -- knowing that it was a long shot of astronomical proportions," Prady said in a statement announcing the news. "In fact, we’re not exactly sure how we got him. It’s the kind of mystery that could only be understood by, say, a Stephen Hawking."

The Hawking casting comes mere weeks after the Thursday night series added dream guest star Leonard Nimoy -- another of Sheldon's famed heroes -- to its ranks for a unique guest gig in which the voice of Spock comes to Sheldon in his dreams.

The series also featured astronaut Mike Massimino in a cameo as himself earlier this season.

The Big Bang Theory airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on CBS.

S. Hawking is moving closer to philosophy

"Stephen Hawking tackles Creation on 'Curiosity'"

by

Dan Vergano

July 31st, 2011

USA TODAY

The most famous scientist in the world, Stephen Hawking, has never avoided the big questions, from the nature of time to the fate of the universe.

But that was just a warm-up. Now he is squaring off with God.

Hawking will kick off Curiosity, the Discovery Channel's weekly look (Sunday, 8 p.m. ET/ PT) at what research says about life's big questions. It starts on Aug. 7., with an episode entitled, "Is There a Creator?" Afflicted with a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease) while young and now paralyzed, Hawking speaks with the aid of a voice synethesizer, and a narrator on the show.

"I recently published a book that asked if God created the universe. It caused something of a stir," Hawking, 69, begins on the episode. (The "stir", in fact, was religious leaders denouncing his book's conclusion that God was unnecessary to the universe.) On the show, he takes viewers on a walk through humanity's history of appraising our place in the universe, from Vikings facing down eclipses to the laws of modern cosmology, which explain the origin and structure of universe. "I believe the discovery of these laws is mankind's greatest achievement," he says.

Much of the show revolves around themes from last year's look at the cosmos, The Grand Design, written by Hawking with physicist Leonard Mlodinow. Pictured on the cover of the Oxford Dictionary of Scientists with Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, Hawking is scientifically best known for "Hawking radiation," his revelation that black holes are hot (or very cold for the big ones) and small black holes rapidly radiate away their heat to finally evaporate.

In a short, exclusive interview with USA TODAY, Hawking e-mailed his answers to why he is taking on religion to start off the show, and discussed his life and legacy. Here are his answers to some of the questions:

Q: First, we wonder if you could comment on why you are tackling the existence of God question?

A: I think Science can explain the Universe without the need for God.

Q. What problems you are working on now, and what do you see as the big questions in theoretical physics?

A: I'm working on the question, why is there something rather than nothing, why are the laws of physics what they are.

Q: What do you see as your legacy in science or for the people who have become enthusiastic about physics as a result of your work and writing?

A: I think my most important discovery is the fundamental relation between gravity and thermodynamics (the study of how heat moves through matter) which gives a black hole a temperature and causes it to evaporate slowly.

Q: Was there ever anything besides theoretical physics that tempted you as a lifetime pursuit?

A: My father would have liked me to do medicine but from the age of 13 or 14 I knew I wanted to do research in physics.

Essentially on "Is There A Creator?," Hawking notes that on the sub-atomic scale, particles are seen in experiments to appear from nowhere. And since the Big Bang started out smaller than an atom, similarly the universe likely "popped into existence without violating the known laws of Nature," he says. Nothing created the universe, so in his view there was no need for a creator. That is his explanation for "why there is something rather than nothing."

An apologetic for Hawking?

"To adapt a quotation by Kant in a different though related context: philosophy of science without scientific input is empty, while science without philosophical guidance is blind. At any rate it is rendered perilously apt to mistake the seductions of pure hypothetical invention for the business of formulating rationally warranted, metaphysically coherent, and – if only in the fullness of time – empirically testable conjectures."

Hawking is better off writing about the adventures of George.

"Hawking contra Philosophy"

Christopher Norris presents a case for the defence.

July-August 2011

Philosophy Now

Stephen Hawking recently fluttered the academic dovecotes by writing in his new book The Grand Design – and repeating to an eager company of interviewers and journalists – that philosophy as practised nowadays is a waste of time and philosophers a waste of space. More precisely, he wrote that philosophy is ‘dead’ since it hasn’t kept up with the latest developments in science, especially theoretical physics. In earlier times – Hawking conceded – philosophers not only tried to keep up but sometimes made significant scientific contributions of their own. However they were now, in so far as they had any influence at all, just an obstacle to progress through their endless going-on about the same old issues of truth, knowledge, the problem of induction, and so forth. Had philosophers just paid a bit more attention to the scientific literature they would have gathered that these were no longer live issues for anyone remotely au fait with the latest thinking. Then their options would be either to shut up shop and cease the charade called ‘philosophy of science’ or else to carry on and invite further ridicule for their head-in-the-sand attitude.

Predictably enough the journalists went off to find themselves media-friendly philosophers – not hard to do nowadays – who would argue the contrary case in a suitably vigorous way. On the whole the responses, or those that I came across, seemed overly anxious to strike a conciliatory note, or to grant Hawking’s thesis some measure of truth as judged by the standards of the natural science community while tactfully dissenting with regard to philosophy and the human sciences. I think the case needs stating more firmly and, perhaps, less tactfully since otherwise it looks like a forced retreat to cover internal disarray. Besides, there is good reason to mount a much sturdier defence on principled grounds. These have to do with the scientists’ need to philosophize and their proneness to philosophize badly or commit certain avoidable errors if they don’t take at least some passing interest in what philosophers have to say.

Science is Philosophical

Professor Hawking has probably been talking to the wrong philosophers, or picked up some wrong ideas about the kinds of discussion that currently go on in philosophy of science. His lofty dismissal of that whole enterprise as a useless, scientifically irrelevant pseudo-discipline fails to reckon with several important facts about the way that science has typically been practised since its early-modern (seventeenth-century) point of departure and, even more, in the wake of twentieth century developments such as quantum mechanics and relativity.

Science has always included a large philosophical component, whether at the level of basic presuppositions concerning evidence, causality, theory-construction, valid inference, hypothesis-testing, and so forth, or at the speculative stage where scientists ignore the guidance offered by well-informed philosophers only at risk of falling into various beguiling fallacies or fictions. Such were those ‘idols of the theatre’ that Bacon warned against in his New Organon of 1620, and such – albeit in a very different philosophic guise – those delusive ideas that, according to Kant, were liable to lead us astray from the path of secure investigation or truth-seeking enquiry. This was sure to happen, he warned, if the exercise of pure (speculative) reason concerning questions outside and beyond the empirical domain were mistakenly supposed to deliver the kind of knowledge that could be achieved only by bringing sensuous intuitions under adequate or answering concepts. While in no way wishing to lumber science with the baggage of Kantian metaphysics I would suggest that this diagnosis, or something like it, applies to a great many of the speculative notions nowadays advanced by theoretical physicists including proponents of string theory (Hawking among them) and some of the more way-out quantum conjectures. These thinkers appear unworried – blithely unfazed, one is tempted to say – by the fact that their theories are incapable of proof or confirmation, or indeed of falsification as required by Karl Popper and his followers. After all, it is the peculiar feature of such theories that they posit the existence of that which at present, and perhaps forever, eludes any form of confirmation by observation or experiment.

True, science has achieved some of its most notable advances precisely by venturing beyond the furthest limits of evidential proof. It has often broken new ground by following some speculative line of thought that involves a readiness, at least for the time being, to make do without the props and securities of ‘good’ scientific method. Indeed, this reliance on theoretical commitments that exceed the utmost scope of empirical testing is something that some philosophers would attribute even to basic physical laws or widely taken-for-granted scientific truths. On their view there is no such thing as plain empirical self-evidence, since observations are always to some degree theoretically informed. By the same token, scientific theories are always ‘underdetermined’ by the best evidence to hand, meaning that the evidence is always open to other, equally rational interpretations given some adjustment of this or that ‘auxiliary hypothesis’ or negotiable element of background belief. All the same, I don’t want to push that line of argument too far, because among some philosophers of science it has now become an article of faith; a dogma maintained just as fixedly as any precept of the old, unreconstructed positivist creed. Moreover it has given rise to a range of relativist or ‘strong’ sociological approaches which use the theory-ladenness and underdetermination theses to cast doubt on any distinction between true and false theories, valid and invalid hypotheses, or science and pseudo-science.

Very likely it is notions of this kind – ideas with their home ground in sociology, or cultural studies, or on the wilder shores of philosophy of science – which provoked Professor Hawking to issue his pronouncement. However they are in no way germane to my point about the speculative element involved in many episodes of major scientific advance and how philosophy has played its jointly enabling and regulative part in that process. By this I mean its role as a source of new ideas or creative hypotheses and also as a source of guiding precepts with respect to such matters as empirical evidence, logical validity, inductive warrant, corroboration, falsification, hypothesis-testing, causal reasoning, probability-weighting, and so forth. These serve to keep science securely on track and prevent it from taking the seductive turn toward pure, evidentially unanchored speculation or sheer science-fiction fantasy. That scientists can mostly do this for themselves is no doubt true enough although, I should add, it is very largely the long-term result of the work of philosophers. Ever since Aristotle there has existed a close though historically fluctuating relationship between the natural sciences and those branches of philosophy that took it as a part of their task to provide science with a clearer grasp of its own methodological bearings. Moreover it has sometimes been primarily a shift of philosophical perspective that has brought about some epochal change of scientific paradigm such as those whereby, in the insouciant phrase of American philosopher W.V. Quine, “Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle.”

I have no quarrel with Hawking’s aversion to philosophy of science in so far as it is provoked by the kind of wholesale paradigm-relativism that Quine was seeking to promote. On Quine’s account (and that of Thomas Kuhn) we should think of scientific theory-change as involving so radical a shift of conceptual schemes as to render the history of science rationally unaccountable and philosophy of science a poor (since entirely dependent) relation of sociology and behavioural psychology. If that were the sole position available to present-day philosophers owing to some large-scale failure of intellectual nerve then Hawking would be fully justified in launching his anti-philosophy salvo. However this ignores the strong turn toward a realist and causal-explanatory approach that has been the single most conspicuous feature of philosophy of science during the past two decades. In place of that earlier relativist drift these thinkers advocate a robust conception of natural kinds along with their essential structures, properties, and causal dispositions. Crucially in the present context their approach offers a critical purchase on the issue of what properly counts as scientific enquiry and what should more aptly be classed as metaphysical conjecture or (at the limit) mere invention.

So philosophy of science now looks set to reoccupy its native ground by getting back in touch with physics. This is not just a relatively trivial semantic point about the physical sciences having been described as so many branches of ‘natural philosophy’ until quite recently. Rather it is the point that scientific theories – especially theories of the ultra-speculative kind that preoccupy theoretical physicists like Hawking – involve a great deal of covert philosophising which may or may not turn out to promote the interests of knowledge and truth. This had better be recognised if we are not to be taken in by a false appeal to the authority of science as if it possessed the kind of sheer self-evidence or indubitable warrant that could rightfully claim to evict ‘philosophy’ as a relic from the pre-scientific past.

Least of all should philosophers carry their justified respect for science and its many impressive achievements to the point of ceding all authority over issues that lie within their own sphere of competence. Thus it is counter-productive for everyone concerned, philosophers and physicists alike, when Quine and others suggest that we should always be willing to change the ground-rules of logic so as to help us find room for certain otherwise puzzling, anomalous, or downright baffling results. Perhaps the seeming quantum paradox of wave/particle dualism can have its sting temporarily removed by lifting the classical rules of bivalence or excluded middle, i.e., those that would require that we accept either the statement ‘light propagates as waves’ or the statement ‘light is a stream of particles’ but surely not both on pain of logical contradiction. However the revisionist ‘solution’ gives rise to yet more intractable problems since it leaves both scientists and philosophers stuck with a huge normative deficit. After all, if they accepted Quine’s proposal then they would lack the most basic conceptual resources for assessing statements, theories or hypotheses in point of their internal (logical) consistency or even concerning the extent to which they hung together properly with other items of scientific lore.

Here again philosophers would do much better to stick to their guns, reject this particular line of least resistance, and hold out for the indispensability (on empirical as well as ‘purely’ rational grounds) of a due respect for the classical rule of bivalent truth/falsehood. Not that it could ever achieve what Hawking seems to envisage in the final paragraph of his book when he marvels at the thought of how ‘abstract logic’ could have thrown up the sheer wondrous profusion of present-day scientific knowledge. Here the point needs making – one to which his own book bears ample witness – that the knowledge in question has resulted from a disciplined yet often highly inventive project of enquiry wherein ‘abstract’ reasoning plays a crucial though far from all-encompassing or self-sufficiently productive role. This project combines the basic procedures of logical, e.g., hypothetico-deductive thought and inductive reasoning on the evidence with a whole range of ancillary resources such as analogy, thought experiments, rational conjecture, and – subsuming all these – inference to the best, most adequate explanation.

Hawking offers numerous examples of the use of each of these philosophical tools in the course of his book, along with other cases where their joint operation is the only thing that could possibly explain how science has been able to achieve some particular advance. All the same he is compelled by the ‘abstract logic’ of his own doctrinaire science-first approach to push that evidence temporarily out of sight when declaring the total irrelevance of philosophy for anyone possessed of an adequate (i.e., scientifically informed) worldview. Indeed it may be good for philosophers occasionally to remind scientists how their most productive thinking very often involves a complex interplay of empirical data, theories, working hypotheses, testable conjectures and even (sometimes) speculative fictions. Likewise absent from Hawking’s account is philosophy’s gatekeeper role in spotting those instances where science strays over without due acknowledgement from one to another mode, or – as frequently happens nowadays – where certain evidential constraints are lifted and empirically informed rational conjecture gives way to pure fabulation.

Besides this, there are supposedly cutting-edge theories which turn out, on closer inspection, to unwittingly replicate bygone notions from the history of thought that have been criticised and eventually laid to rest. Hawking’s book puts forward two such theories. One is his linchpin ‘M-theory’ having to do with the multiple dimensions – eleven at the latest count – that are taken to constitute the ultimate reality beyond appearances despite our sensory perception being limited to the three-plus-one of our familiar spatio-temporal world. On this account there cannot be a single, comprehensive ‘Theory of Everything’ of the kind favoured by sanguine types like Steven Weinberg but we can hope to get a whole range of specially tailored, region-specific theories which between them point toward the nature and structure of ultimate reality. The other, closely related to that, is Hawking’s idea of ‘model-dependent realism’ as an approach that makes allowance (as per orthodox quantum mechanics) for the effect of observation on the item observed but which nonetheless retains an adequate respect for the objectivity of scientific truth.

Here Hawking’s argument shows all the signs of a rudderless drifting between various positions adopted by different philosophers from Kant to the present. He spends a lot of time on what seems to be a largely unwitting rehash of episodes in the history of idealist or crypto-idealist thought, episodes which have cast a long shadow over post-Kantian philosophy of science. That shadow still lies heavy on Hawking’s two central ideas of M-theory and model-dependent realism. They both look set to re-open the old Kantian split between a ‘noumenal’ ultimate reality forever beyond human knowledge and a realm of ‘phenomenal’ appearances to which we are confined by the fact of our perceptual and cognitive limits. So if Hawking is right to charge some philosophers with a culpable ignorance of science then there is room for a polite but firm tu quoque, whether phrased in terms of pots calling kettles black or boots on other feet. For it is equally the case that hostility or indifference toward philosophy can sometimes lead scientists, especially those with a strong speculative bent, not only to reinvent the wheel but to produce wheels that don’t track straight and consequently tend to upset the vehicle.

A firmer grasp of these issues as discussed by philosophers during the past few decades might have moderated Hawking’s scorn and also sharpened his critical focus on certain aspects of current theoretical physics. My point is not so much that a strong dose of philosophic realism might have clipped those speculative wings but rather that philosophers are well practised in steering a course through such choppy waters, or in managing to navigate despite all the swirls induced by a confluence of science, metaphysics, and far-out conjecture. After all, physics has increasingly come to rely on just the kind of disciplined speculative thinking that philosophers have typically invented, developed, and then criticised when they overstepped the limits of rationally accountable conjecture. Such are those ‘armchair’ thought-experiments that claim to establish some substantive, i.e., non-trivial thesis concerning the nature of the physical world by means of a rigorous thinking-through that establishes the truth (or, just as often, the demonstrable falsehood) of any statement affirming or denying it.

No doubt there is room to debate whether these are really (and remarkably) instances of scientific discovery achieved through an exercise of a priori reasoning or whether they amount, as sceptics would have it, to a species of disguised tautology. However there are just too many impressive examples in the history of science – from Galileo’s marvellous thought-experiment showing that Aristotle must have been wrong about falling bodies to a number of crucial quantum-related results – for anyone to argue convincingly that results obtained in the ‘laboratory of the mind’ can only impress philosophers keen to defend their patch. Indeed, there is a sense in which the scientific enterprise stands or falls on the validity of counterfactual-conditional reasoning, that is to say, reasoning from what necessarily would be the case should certain conditions obtain or certain hypotheses hold. In its negative guise, this kind of thinking involves reasoning to what would have been the outcome if certain causally or materially relevant factors had not been operative in some given instance. Hawking constantly relies on such philosophical principles in order to present and justify his claims about the current and likely future course of developments in physics. Of course he is very welcome to them but he might do better to acknowledge their source in ways of thinking and protocols of valid argumentation that involve distinctly philosophical as well as scientific grounds.

This brings us back to the point likely to provoke the most resistance from those scientists – chiefly theoretical physicists – who actually have the most to gain from any assertion of philosophy’s claim to a hearing in such matters. It is that scientists tend to go astray when they start to speculate on issues that exceed not only the current-best observational evidence but even the scope of what is presently conceivable in terms of testability. To speak plainly: one useful job for the philosopher of science is to sort out the errors and confusions that scientists – especially theoretical physicists – sometimes fall into when they give free rein to a speculative turn of mind. My book Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism found numerous cases to illustrate the point in the statements of quantum theorists all the way from Niels Bohr – a pioneering figure but a leading source of metaphysical mystification – to the current advocates (Hawking among them) of a many-worlds or ‘multiverse’ theory. To adapt the economist Keynes’ famous saying: those scientists who claim to have no use for philosophy are most likely in the grip of a bad old philosophy or an insufficiently thought-out new one that they don’t fully acknowledge.

There is a large supply of present-day (quasi-)scientific thinking at the more – let us say – creative or imaginative end of the scale that falls into just this hybrid category of high-flown metaphysical conjecture tenuously linked to certain puzzling, contested, or at any rate far from decisive empirical results. Nor is it mere hubris for philosophers to claim a special competence in judging when thought has crossed that line from the realm of rational, scientifically informed but so far unproven conjecture to the realm of unanchored speculation or outright science fiction fantasy. One has only to pick up a copy of New Scientist or Scientific American to see how much of the latest thinking inhabits that shadowy border-zone where the three intermingle in ways that a suitably trained philosopher would be best equipped to point out. Nowhere is this more evident than in the past hundred years of debate on and around the seemingly paradoxical implications of quantum mechanics. Those paradoxes include wave/particle dualism, the so-called ‘collapse of the wave-packet’, the observer’s role in causing or inducing said collapse, and – above all since it appears the only way of reconciling these phenomena within anything like a coherent ontology – faster-than-light interaction between widely separated particles.

I shall risk the charge of shameless self-advertisement and suggest that readers take a look at my book for the case that these are pseudo-dilemmas brought about by a mixture of shaky evidence, dubious reasoning on it, fanciful extrapolation, and a flat refusal to entertain alternative theories (such as that of the physicist David Bohm) which considerably lighten the burden of unresolved paradox. At any rate we are better off trusting to the kinds of advice supplied by scientifically-informed philosophers with a well-developed sense of how speculative thinking can sometimes go off the rails than the kinds – including the advice ‘let’s put a stop to philosophy’ – issued by philosophically under-informed scientists.

Conclusions

No doubt there is a fair amount of ill-informed, obtuse, or ideologically angled philosophy that either refuses or tries but fails to engage with the concerns of present-day science. One can understand Hawking’s impatience – or downright exasperation – with some of the half-baked notions put around by refuseniks and would-be engageniks alike. All the same he would do well to consider the historically attested and nowadays more vital than ever role of philosophy as a critical discipline. It continues to offer the sorts of argument that science requires in order to dispel not only the illusions of na ïve sense-certainty or intuitive self-evidence but also the confusions that speculative thought runs into when decoupled from any restraining appeal to regulative principles such as that of inference to the best explanation. To adapt a quotation by Kant in a different though related context: philosophy of science without scientific input is empty, while science without philosophical guidance is blind. At any rate it is rendered perilously apt to mistake the seductions of pure hypothetical invention for the business of formulating rationally warranted, metaphysically coherent, and – if only in the fullness of time – empirically testable conjectures.

[Christopher Norris is Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University.]

Further Reading:

Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design: new answers to the ultimate questions of life (Bantam Press, 2010)

Christopher Norris, Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism: philosophical responses to quantum mechanics (Routledge, 2000)

David Papineau (ed.), The Philosophy of Science (O.U.P., 1996)

Thanks to stringer Tim for the article.

Astronomers and public perception

Abstract:

Society's view of astronomers has changed over time and from culture to culture. This review discusses some of the many ways that astronomers have been perceived by their societies and suggests ways that astronomers can influence public perception of ourselves and our profession in the future.

Michael J. West's "Public Perception of Astronomers: Revered, Reviled and Ridiculed" .

Use this blog's search engine with any of the following names: Ralph Alpher, Robert Stawell Ball, Herber Curtis, Arthur Eddington, Galileo Galilei, George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, Stephen Hawking, Percival Lowell, Carl Sagan, Harlow Shapley, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

S. Hawking...better

"Stephen Hawking expected to make full recovery"

Doctors say condition of scientist, 67, is improving after he was taken to hospital 'very ill'

by

Ian Sample and Robert Booth

April 21st, 2009

guardian.co.uk

The family of physicist Stephen Hawking said today they were looking forward to him making a full recovery after he fell ill and was admitted to hospital yesterday.

Hawking, 67, was taken by ambulance to Addenbrooke's hospital, Cambridge, for tests after he fell "very ill", but his condition appears to have improved and he was said to be in a "comfortable" condition today.

"Professor Hawking is being kept in for observation at Addenbrooke's hospital this morning," a spokesman for Cambridge University said. "He is comfortable and his family is looking forward to him making a full recovery."

Hawking has been unwell for a couple of weeks, and earlier this month pulled out of a headline appearance at a science conference in Arizona to recover from a chest infection.

A Cambridge University spokesman said Hawking was still having tests for a condition that was not related to his respiratory infection, and was not life threatening.

The scientist, who rose to wider public prominence in 1988 with the publication of his bestselling A Brief History of Time, began to develop the symptoms of incurable motor neurone disease in the 1960s, gradually losing the use of his limbs and voice.

He has worked at the university's department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics for over 30 years, but is due to step down as Lucasian professor of mathematics, a post once held by Sir Isaac Newton, at the end of the academic year. It is customary to retire from the post at 67, though Hawking intends to continue as professor emeritus.

In a career spanning almost 50 years, Hawking has wrestled with some of the most puzzling questions in cosmology. With Sir Roger Penrose, at Oxford University, he used the physics of collapsing stars to argue that space and time could begin at points in the universe called "singularities".

In a lecture he gave in 2007 in honour of Nasa's 50th anniversary at George Washington University in Washington DC, Hawking suggested primitive alien life might be common.

In 2002 Hawking, one of the most recognisable figures on the streets of Cambridge, drove his high-powered wheelchair into a wall while in a rush to get into town. He broke his hip and almost missed his 60th birthday celebrations.

In 2007 he became the first disabled person to experience weightlessness aboard a Boeing 727 that replicates the freefall conditions of being in orbit. The plane, which flew from Nasa's Cape Canaveral site in Florida, performed eight steep dives over the Atlantic, allowing the physicist to float freely for 25-second spells.

Hawking has since signed up to fly to the edge of space next year as one of Sir Richard Branson's first space tourists aboard the Virgin Galactic spacecraft.

His progressive disease has left Hawking reliant upon a computer screen and a voice synthesiser to communicate. His cultural reach has led to appearances in The Simpsons, Futurama and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Motor neurone diseases steadily destroy the nerves that control muscles. Doctors usually give patients three years to live after their first symptoms appear. Hawking, who is thought to have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is one of the world's longest-surviving MND patients and has round-the-clock care from a team of nurses.

Brian Dickie, director of research at the Motor Neurone Disease Association, said only 5% of people diagnosed with ALS survive for 10 years or longer. Hawking "is at the extreme end of the scale when it comes to survival", Dickie said.

Peter Haynes, head of the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics, said: "Professor Hawking is a remarkable colleague. We all hope he will be amongst us again soon."

Hawking was born in Oxford and grew up in St Albans, Hertfordshire. He studied at Oxford University before moving to Cambridge to carry out research in cosmology. He was awarded the CBE in 1982, made a Companion of Honour in 1989 and is a fellow of the Royal Society.


Stephen Hawking ill

Stephen Hawking ill

Just in...

"Scientist Hawking ill in hospital"

Leading scientist Stephen Hawking is "very ill" in hospital, his employer Cambridge University has said.

April 20th, 2009

BBC

A spokesman said Professor Hawking was undergoing tests at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge.

The spokesman said the 67-year-old, who has motor neurone disease, had "been unwell for a couple of weeks".

Prof Hawking has worked at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University for more than 30 years.

Prof Hawking, who speaks with the aid of a voice synthesiser, has three children and one grandchild.

He became a CBE in 1982 and a Companion of Honour in 1989.

Prof Peter Haynes, head of the University's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, said: "Professor Hawking is a remarkable colleague."

"We all hope he will be amongst us again soon."

"Stephen Hawking Hospitalized"

April 20th, 2009

The Associated Press

LONDON (AP) -- Famed mathematician Stephen Hawking was rushed to a hospital Monday and was seriously ill, Cambridge University said.

The university said Hawking has been fighting a chest infection for several weeks, and was being treated at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, the university city north of London.

''Professor Hawking is very ill,'' said Gregory Hayman, the university's head of communications. ''He is undergoing tests. He has been unwell for a couple of weeks.''

Later in the afternoon, Hayman said Hawking was ''now comfortable but will be kept in hospital overnight.''

Hawking, 67, gained renown for his work on black holes, and has remained active despite being diagnosed at 21 with ALS, (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), an incurable degenerative disorder also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

For some years, Hawking has been almost entirely paralyzed, and he communicates through an electronic voice synthesizer activated by his fingers.

Hawking was involved in the search for the great goal of physics -- a ''unified theory'' -- which would resolve contradictions between Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which describes the laws of gravity that govern the motion of large objects like planets, and the Theory of Quantum Mechanics, which deals with the world of subatomic particles.

''A complete, consistent unified theory is only the first step: our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence,'' he wrote in his best-selling book, ''A Brief History of Time,'' published in 1988.

In a more accessible sequel ''The Universe in a Nutshell,'' published in 2001, Hawking ventured into concepts like supergravity, naked singularities and the possibility of a universe with 11 dimensions.

He announced last year that he would step down from his post as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a title once held by the great 18th-century physicist Isaac Newton. However, the university said Hawking intended to continue working as Emeritus Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.

Hawking had canceled an appearance at Arizona State University on April 6 because of his illness.

''Professor Hawking is a remarkable colleague. We all hope he will be amongst us again soon,'' said Professor Peter Haynes, head of the university's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.


On the Net: http://www.hawking.org.uk

[Be patient...the website is being overwhelmed.]

Welcome to the website of Professor S.W. Hawking

Monday 20th April, approx. 19:00 UK time

Due to very high demand, the website has been simplified to keep the server online. We apologise for the lack of in-depth content, which would normally be available here.

Professor Hawking is comfortable, but will be spending the night in hospital. The Cambridge University Press Office have a statement to this effect, and do not expect to have any further updates until mid-morning tomorrow.

Tuesday 21st April, approx. 12:00 UK time

Professor Hawking is being kept in for observation at Addenbrooke's hospital this morning. He is comfortable and his family is looking forward to him making a full recovery.

"Living popular scientist" poll

Who is your choice for living "popular" scientist?

Brian Greene...0
Freeman Dyson...3
Lawrence Krauss...0
Neil deGrasse Tyson...2
Stephen Hawking...3

Somewhat surprised. I suppose Hawking would lead...he is quite an icon. I expected Krauss to be at the bottom...claim to fame mostly with the physics of "Star Trek". But I did think that Greene would be favored with his "Elegant Universe" material. Tyson may have shot himself in the foot with the Pluto statement. Dyson is for older individuals expressing a little more wisdom.

Brian Greene:

"Put a Little Science in Your Life"...please

Freeman Dyson:

A birthday celebration today-- Freeman Dyson...#85

Freeman Dyson--optimist

Lawrence Krauss:

Krauss & Jeremijenko on a date and discuss science

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Neil deGrasse Tyson...new representative

Neil deGrasse Tyson..."NOVA scienceNow"--2nd season

Pluto, Tyson, CNN lecture

"The Pluto Files" by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Tyson, Weintraub, Tombaugh & Pluto

Tyson's interview with "Time" on Pluto and planets

Stephen Hawking:

Another review of Stephen and Lucy Hawking's children's book

"George's Secret Key to the Universe"--Stephen Hawking & daughter Lucy

Hawking, Einstein, Africa

Hawking--England or Canada...makes no difference

Job application...Lucasian professor of mathematics

Peter Higgs vs Stephen Hawking

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

S. Hawking documentary

S. Hawking to Canada

Stephen Hawking's warnings

Space exploration?...Stephen Hawking's perspective

Stephen Hawking..."Master of the Universe"--documentary


Popularization of science

Pluto, Saturn, Hawking, Earth's gravity

Just in.

Stephen Hawking released data today indicating an issue with Earth's gravity.

On March 31st 2009, Stephen Hawking announced on BBC Radio that at 9:47 PM the planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth's own gravity.

Moore later.

Additional information...

Hawking told the listeners that "if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurs, they would experience a strange floating sensation."

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics "...is an independent, resident-based research institute devoted to foundational issues in theoretical physics...." And I read that Stephen Hawking will participate soon. What happened to "experimental physics"? This is not a "balanced think tank".

"Top scientists join Hawking at Perimeter Institute"

by

Michael Banks

February 10th 2009

physicsworld.com

Nine leading researchers are to join Stephen Hawking as visiting fellows at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada. The researchers, who include string theorists Leonard Susskind from Stanford University and Asoka Sen from the Harisch-Chandra Research Institute in India, will each spend a few months of the year at the institute as "distinguished research chairs". They will be joined by another 30 top scientists to be announced at a later date.

The Perimeter Institute was founded in 1999 by Mike Lazaridis, chief executive of Research in Motion – the company that makes Blackberry wireless handheld devices. Home to more than 60 resident researchers, the institute focuses on areas such as cosmology, particle physics and quantum gravity. Hawking was made the institute's first distinguished research chair last November, while his Cambridge University colleague Neil Turok was appointed as the executive director of the institute last May.

There has been criticism though that the institute focuses too heavily on particle physics and cosmology and does not carry out any research in theoretical condensed-matter physics. However, one of the new chairs -- condensed-matter physicist Xiao-Gang Wen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – thinks that the subject will increase in prominence at the Perimeter Institute.

"The methods used in condensed-matter physics and other areas in the institute such as quantum gravity are very similar," says Wen, who will spend every summer at the institute. "I get the impression the institute is looking for people in condensed-matter physics whose work overlaps with the research already performed there."

The other new chairs, who will all keep positions at their home universities, include Yakir Aharonov from Chapman University and Tel Aviv University, who shared the Wolf Prize in 1998; Juan Ignacio Cirac, director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Germany; and Harvard University condensed-matter theorist physicist Subir Sachdev.

They will be joined by string theorist Nima Arkani-Hamed of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study; the Princeton University cosmologist Neta Bahncall at Princeton University; and Gia Dvali at the New York University's center for cosmology and particle physics.

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics


S. Hawking to Canada

Hawking--England or Canada...makes no difference

Philanthropy and science

Theoretical physics...philosophy/sci-fi?