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1098	dbpedia	1	42	https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/1170625	en	Dennis William Sciama	https://en-academic.com/…_social_en.png?3	https://en-academic.com/…_social_en.png?3	[ "https://en-academic.com/images/Logo_en.png", "https://en-academic.com/images/Logo_h_en.png", "https://en-academic.com/pictures/enwiki/50/200px-Sciama2.jpg", "https://mc.yandex.ru/watch/70309897", "https://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=23600742&cv=2.0&cj=1" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Dennis Sciama Dennis William Siahou Sciama (1926–1999) Born 18 November 1926(	en	https://en-academic.com/favicon.ico	Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias	https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/1170625	Dennis William Siahou Sciama FRS (18 November 1926 – 18 December 1999)[2][3] was a British physicist who, through his own work and that of his students, played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War. He is considered as one of the fathers of modern cosmology.[4][5] Contents 1 Life 2 Books by Sciama 3 References 4 External links Life Sciama was born in Manchester, England. He was of Syrian Jewish ancestry, his father born in Manchester and his mother in Egypt, both tracing their roots back to Aleppo.[6] Sciama earned his PhD in 1953 at Cambridge University under the supervision of Paul Dirac, with a dissertation on Mach's principle and inertia. His work later influenced the formulation of scalar-tensor theories of gravity. He taught at Cornell, King's College London, Harvard and the University of Texas at Austin, but spent most of his career at Cambridge (1950s and 1960s) and the University of Oxford (1970s and early 1980s). In 1983, he moved from Oxford to Trieste, becoming Professor of Astrophysics at the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA), and a consultant with the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. During the 1990s, he divided his time between Trieste (and a residence in nearby Venice) and Oxford, where he was a visiting professor until the end of his life. His main home remained in his house in Park Town, Oxford. Sciama drew on his broad knowledge of physics to make fruitful connections among many topics in astronomy and astrophysics. He wrote on radio astronomy, X-ray astronomy, quasars, the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave radiation, the interstellar and intergalactic medium, astroparticle physics and the nature of dark matter. Most significant was his work in general relativity, with and without quantum theory, and black holes. He helped revitalize the classical relativistic alternative to general relativity known as Einstein-Cartan gravity. Early in his career, he supported Fred Hoyle's steady state cosmology, and interacted with Hoyle, Hermann Bondi, and Thomas Gold. When evidence against the steady state theory, e.g., the cosmic microwave radiation, mounted in the 1960s, Sciama abandoned it. During his retirement, Sciama pursued a theory of dark matter that consists almost entirely of a heavy neutrino, now disfavored. A number of the leading astrophysicists and cosmologists of our time completed their doctorates under Sciama's supervision, notably: George Ellis (1964) Stephen Hawking (1966) Brandon Carter (1967) Martin Rees (1967) Gary Gibbons (1973) James Binney (1975) John D. Barrow (1977) David Deutsch Adrian Melott (1981) Antony Valentini Sciama also strongly influenced Roger Penrose, who dedicated his The Road to Reality to Sciama's memory. The 1960s group he led in Cambridge (which included Ellis, Hawking, Rees, and Carter), has proved of lasting influence. Sciama was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982. He was also an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Academia Lincei of Rome. He served as president of the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation, 1980–84. In 1959, Sciama married Lidia Dina, a social anthropologist, who survived him, along with their two daughters. His work at SISSA and the University of Oxford led to the creation of a lecture series in his honour, the Dennis Sciama Memorial Lectures.[7] In 2009, the Institute of Cosmology at the University of Portsmouth elected to name their new building, and their supercomputer in 2011, in his honour[citation needed]. Books by Sciama 1959. The Unity of the Universe. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday. 1969. The Physical Foundations of General Relativity. New York: Doubleday. Science Study Series. Short (104 pages) and clearly written non-mathematical book on the physical and conceptual foundations of General Relativity. Could be read with profit by physics students before immersing themselves in more technical studies of General Relativity. 1971. Modern Cosmology. Cambridge University Press. 1993. Modern Cosmology and the Dark Matter Problem. Cambridge University Press. References The Renaissance of General Relativity and Cosmology, eds. G. F. R. Ellis et al., Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993. (Contains a Sciama Festschrift with Sciama's complete scientific genealogy). Short biography (source for much of this entry) "Dennis Sciama". Mathematics Genealogy Project. American Mathematical Society. http://www.genealogy.ams.org . Oral History interview transcript with Dennis W. Sciama 14 April 1978, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives Sciama, Dennis William (1926–1999), cosmologist. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
1098	dbpedia	0	9	http://www.sciama.icg.port.ac.uk/	en	SCIAMA HPCC	http://www.sciama.icg.port.ac.uk/assets/images/favicon.png	http://www.sciama.icg.port.ac.uk/assets/images/favicon.png	[ "http://www.sciama.icg.port.ac.uk/\\assets\\images\\search-icon.png", "http://www.sciama.icg.port.ac.uk/assets/images/sciama_cabinets.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	SCIAMA High Performance Compute Cluster	en	assets/images/favicon.png		https://sciama.icg.port.ac.uk/index.html	Latest News January/February IS are upgrading the Cisco network switches that SCIAMA uses to connect to the outside world. This upgrade will temporarily disrupt connection to SCIAMA's login nodes and Jupyterhub server for a few minutes. Actual date to be confirmed. 5th September We have a critical hardware failure on SCIAMA which requires urgent replacement. This requires us to stop lustre and take the users' home directories offline. We have scheduled this for Monday 5th September. During the outage you will not be able to log on to SCIAMA or read/write any data to /mnt/lustre so we suggest you hold off running any further jobs until afterwards. 6th May 2022 New Lustre storage has been installed and ready to use, please check the storage policy and contact sciama support to request disk space. The new compute and GPU nodes have also been installed, check the Using GPUs section for Slurm config. We will be carrying out maintenance on SCIAMA in June and schedule regular maintenance windows in the future so please keep an look out for any updates/news for details. Read more New SCIAMA hardware, comprising Lustre storage, CPU and GPU compute nodes, are being installed. SCIAMA will need to be updated to be able to use the new hardware. Read more Useful Links Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation SLURM Sciama High Performance Compute Cluster Sciama is a High Performance Compute Cluster (HPCC) which is supported by the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG), SEPNet and the University of Portsmouth, UK. It was built in 2011 and is currently in its fourth iteration. The cluster was named after Dennis Sciama, a leading figure in the development of astrophysics and cosmology, but it is also an acronym that stands for SEPnet Computing Infrastructure for Astrophysical Modelling and Analysis. It comprises: 4672 cores 1.8PB Lustre storage 8 login nodes 182 compute nodes 8 A100 GPUs 1 application (JupyterHub) node. Please remember to acknowledge your usage of SCIAMA in your research. Details can be found here. Cabinets housing Sciama hardware
1098	dbpedia	2	83	https://www.hawking.org.uk/biography	en	Stephen Hawking Estate	https://www.hawking.org.…20be%20alive.jpg		[ "https://www.hawking.org.uk/rails/active_storage/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBYdz09IiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--08a5aa9b643ae35e9d83236069d8066de6d9b458/1940's%20Birth%20and%20Childhood.jpg", "https://www.hawking.org.uk/rails/active_storage/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBYZz09IiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--5c0f8d865c8d51d98fe45a58cbb15ad870e36d22/1960's%20Graduation.jpg", "https://www.hawking.org.uk/rails/active_storage/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBZZz09IiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--6a03e5de101d006284f1a2c29eb7532dfdf72fa1/1970's%20Serious%20career%20work.jpg", "https://www.hawking.org.uk/rails/active_storage/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBZdz09IiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--ac9f0e02a4f4fc306c1ab8a625b44be0f8390e69/1970's%20Black%20hole.jpg", "https://www.hawking.org.uk/rails/active_storage/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBXZz09IiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--05660ca031049137143ebdfbba0641c085cd4645/A%20Brief%20History%20Of%20Time.jpg", "https://www.hawking.org.uk/rails/active_storage/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBZUT09IiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--02f7913f2e39a0e082574a3f5ad227cb53031fae/1990's%20Party%20that%20no-one%20came.jpg", "https://www.hawking.org.uk/rails/active_storage/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBZQT09IiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--54c32c66f8a14d63848accf29ac0ec734cf162a4/2000's%20Debates%20and%20bets.jpg", "https://www.hawking.org.uk/rails/active_storage/blobs/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBYQT09IiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--7225a1e322918f174387b3d7ca66e5c0f23ce1bb/2010's%20Glorious%20time%20to%20be%20alive.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			https://www.hawking.org.uk/biography	Somewhat reluctantly, Stephen agreed to apply to his father’s college, University College, Oxford. Stephen wanted to read mathematics but his father, tropical medicine specialist Dr Frank Hawking, was adamant that there would be no jobs for mathematicians and Stephen should read medicine. They compromised on Natural Sciences and Stephen went up to Oxford at the young age of 17 in 1959. Despite claiming to do very little work, Stephen performed well enough in his written examinations to be called for a ‘viva’ (an interview) to determine which class of degree he should receive. Stephen told the examiners that if they awarded him a first-class degree he would leave Oxford and go to Cambridge but if he got a second, he would stay in Oxford. They duly gave him a first, as of course, he hoped they would. Stephen went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1962. However, while still an undergraduate, Stephen had begun to realise all was not well. He had become increasingly clumsy, was struggling with small tasks such as doing up his shoelaces and his movements were erratic and ungainly. After an accident at a skating lake in St Albans, his mother took him to Guy’s Hospital in London for tests. Soon after Stephen’s 21st birthday, these tests showed he had a progressive and incurable illness. These tests were exhaustive although primitive by today’s standards. Even after these were completed, oddly Stephen was not told his diagnosis. Eventually, he discovered he had motor neurone disease which slowly and inexorably erodes muscle control but leaves the brain intact. He was given only two years to live. Stephen later recalled that he became desperately demoralised at this time but he did find two sources of inspiration and solace: the intense music of Wagner (a subsequent lifelong passion) and falling in love with Jane Wilde, the woman who would become his wife. The young couple vowed to fight Stephen’s illness together. Stephen now had someone to live for, and in the manner typical of his stubbornness, he threw himself into his research – “To my surprise I found I liked it”, he said later. Despite his renewed enthusiasm, Stephen’s early career progressed erratically. In Cambridge, he had hoped to study under the most famous astronomer of the time, Fred Hoyle, but Professor Hoyle had too many students already and sent him to physicist and cosmologist Dennis Sciama instead. Later, Stephen recognised this as a piece of luck which laid the foundation of his later career and said that he would have been unlikely to flourish under Hoyle’s supervision. In fact, the two clashed in public in 1964 when Stephen interrupted Fred Hoyle, during a lecture, to tell the famous scientist he had got something wrong. When Hoyle asked how he knew this, Stephen said, ‘Because I have worked it out’. Sciama also introduced Stephen to Roger Penrose in 1965 when Penrose gave a talk on singularity theorems in Cambridge. In that same year, Stephen received his Ph.D for his thesis entitled ‘Properties of Expanding Universes.’ This thesis was released in 2017 on the University of Cambridge’s website, causing the site to crash almost immediately due to the extraordinarily high demand. In 1965, Stephen applied for a research fellowship at Gonville & Caius College in Cambridge and was accepted. He was to remain a fellow there for the rest of his life. Marriage to Jane and children followed; Robert (1967), Lucy (1970) and Timothy (1979). Supported and cared for by his wife, his loyal PhD students, friends, family, colleagues and his children, Stephen settled into day to day academic life, and continued working right up until his death in March 2018. The 1970s were a prolific period of work. In 1970, shortly after the birth of his daughter and in a ‘eureka’ moment, Stephen realized, almost in an instant: ● that when black holes merge, the surface area of the final black hole must exceed the sum of the areas of the initial black holes, ● that this places limits on the amount of energy that can be carried away by gravitational waves in such a merger, ● there are parallels to be drawn between the laws of thermodynamics and the behaviour of black holes. In 1973, and at a bit of a loose end after the publication of his first book, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, Stephen decided the next step in his research would be to combine general relativity (the theory of the very large) with quantum theory (the theory of the very small). To his disbelief, it seemed that emissions could emanate from a black hole, that particles could escape, i.e. ‘radiate’ from a black hole’s event horizon, a revolutionary quantum effect that appeared to make a mockery of the laws of physics. This research was published in 1974 by Nature as ‘Black hole explosions?’. However, when announced at a conference in Oxford, his theory was seen as controversial and angrily disputed. Now widely accepted and known as Hawking radiation, Stephen’s proposal unifies the seemingly impossible – general relativity with quantum theory, the large with the small. Despite their names becoming joined in a formula, Stephen and Jacob Bekenstein never actually worked together. In 1972, Bekenstein proposed that black holes have an entropy. Bekenstein had a formula for entropy that said the entropy was proportional to the area of the event horizon but his numerical co-efficient was incorrect. Stephen did not believe this because black holes were thought to have zero temperatures. It was not until Stephen discovered black hole temperature that he came to believe that black holes have entropy. Stephen was able thereby to confirm the idea that black holes have entropy and fix the coefficient in Bekenstein’s formula. S = Entropy A = The area of the horizon c = The speed of light G = Newton’s constant of gravitation k = Boltzmann’s constant ħ = Planck’s constant Stephen’s equation reveals a ‘deep and previously unexpected relationship between gravity and thermodynamics, the science of heat’. But it also raises questions – where does the information about the previously existing matter go when matter ‘disappears’ into a hole? And if information is lost, this is incompatible with quantum mechanics at least in its usual form. This is Stephen’s black hole ‘Information Paradox’ that violates a fundamental tenet of quantum mechanics and has led to decades of furious debate. The late 1970s were a golden age for Stephen’s academic career and for the field of theoretical physics in general. After being promoted to Reader in Gravitational Physics at Cambridge in 1975, and subsequently Professor of Gravitational Physics in 1977, in 1979 he was appointed as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a position he held until 2009. The chair was founded in 1663 with money left in the will of the Reverend Henry Lucas who had been the Member of Parliament for the University. Previously held by Isaac Newton in 1669, this chair was awarded to Stephen in recognition of his ground-breaking scientific work on black holes. In 1979 Stephen was also awarded the first, prestigious Albert Einstein medal, in recognition of ‘scientific findings, works or publications related to Albert Einstein’. This was a period of intense speculation in physics and growing public interest in black holes. Journalists for print and television regularly interviewed Stephen - his name was becoming known. Stephen sought to understand the whole universe in scientific terms. As he said famously, ‘My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe.’ The singularity theorems proved by Stephen and Penrose had shown conclusively that the universe had a beginning in a Big Bang. But the singularity theorems did not say how the universe had begun. Rather, they showed something more sweeping: Einstein’s general relativity breaks down at the Big Bang, and quantum theory becomes important. Working with Jim Hartle, Stephen set out to use the techniques he had developed to understand the quantum dynamics of black holes, to describe the quantum birth of the universe. Stephen first put forward a proposal along these lines at a conference in the Vatican in 1981, where he suggested that the universe began with four space dimensions curled up as a sphere, without any boundary, which through a quantum transition gave rise to the universe with three space dimensions and one time dimension that we have today. Asking what came before the Big Bang, he famously said, `is like asking what lies South of the South Pole’. Stephen and Hartle aptly called their model the no boundary wave function, or no boundary proposal, the first scientific model of the origin of the universe. Stephen continued to study the no boundary proposal throughout his career. He discovered that there was a profound connection between the no boundary wave function and cosmic inflation – the idea that our universe started with a rapid burst of expansion. In a series of papers over many years Stephen and his students consolidated this connection, showing that the no boundary proposal predicts an early period of inflation. But the scientific importance of the no boundary proposal is not just as a successful theory of the origin of the basic structure of the universe. Perhaps even more important is the impact it has had on how we think about the universe, and our place in it. The no boundary proposal describes an ensemble of universes. Working with Thomas Hertog, Stephen showed this leads to what he called a `top-down approach to cosmology’, reconstructing the universe’s history backwards in time starting from our position within it. ‘The history of the universe depends on the question we ask,’ he used to say. In 1982, a letter from Buckingham Palace arrived at Stephen’s family home in Cambridge to tell him he had been honoured with the award of a CBE - Commander of the British Empire. Stephen, despite his anti-establishment leanings, still felt proud to accept it as a mark of his outstanding achievement. The award also heralded the first of what would turn out to be many meetings with Her Majesty the Queen over the decades to come. But neither Stephen nor his family could have known that at the time, as the great scientist was constantly aware that each day could be his last. Despite his condition, Stephen was an enthusiastic traveller, although his journeys did not always go smoothly. In 1985 Stephen contracted pneumonia on a trip to a science conference near Geneva. The Swiss doctors advised his wife, Jane, that recovery was impossible, and she should switch off Stephen’s ventilator which would have brought about his immediate death. Jane flatly refused and arranged for Stephen to be flown home to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. In order to save Stephen’s life, a tracheostomy was performed, which had the difficult side effect of taking away his natural speaking voice. After a frustrating period where he was only able to communicate with a spelling card and eyebrow movements, Stephen was relieved and delighted when technology came to his rescue. He worked closely with computer developers, latterly at Intel, to devise a computerised communication system and voice synthesiser that, with its famously flat American accent, quickly became his trademark. Stephen learned the art of brevity, of expressing complicated ideas and opinions in very few words. Using this system, Stephen not only wrote seven books and a number of scientific papers but developed his own style of dry, unanswerable wit. It was during this challenging period that Stephen began working on A Brief History of Time, an idea he first had in 1982. Determined to write a book about physics that would sell at airport book shops, sharing the excitement of science with a general audience, Stephen toiled over A Brief History of Time for six years. His hard work paid off as this book became a surprise runaway best seller which also propelled him into an ever-widening public sphere with, at times, intense media speculation. A Newsweek cover at the time described him as a ‘Master of the Universe’. Helpfully, A Brief History of Time turns complicated scientific theories and projections into (mostly) everyday language: as Stephen said, “I think it is important for scientists to explain their work, particularly in cosmology”. Its resounding success led to a spot on the UK best-selling list for a record-breaking 4.5 years, translation into over 40 languages and sales of over 20 million copies. It was said that Stephen had answered the most fundamental questions of existence. Stephen had always firmly believed that everyone should have a basic understanding of science in this increasingly scientific and technological world and dedicated an enormous amount of time and effort in order to engage the general public with science. He has also co-authored a series of six adventure novels about science with his daughter, Lucy Hawking, in order to make science entertaining and accessible to a young readership. The 1990s were another period of relentless work academically and now, increasingly, as a popular author and celebrity. In 1993 he published Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, a collection of works exploring ways in which the universe may be governed. This was followed in 1998 by Universe: The Cosmos Explained, clarifying the basis of our existence with more following in the 2000s – Universe in a Nutshell (2001), On the Shoulders of giants (2002) and The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe (2002). While these did not achieve the global accolade of A Brief History of Time, they all successfully contributed to our general body of scientific knowledge. Academically, Stephen continued his work in physics and in 1993 co-edited a book on Euclidean quantum gravity with Gary Gibbons. In 1994 Stephen and Roger Penrose delivered a series of six lectures that were subsequently published in 1996 as The Nature of Space and Time, and Stephen enjoyed several of his now-famous scientific ‘bets’ he had with colleagues, notably with Kip Thorne and John Preskill at Caltech, and Peter Higgs over the existence of the Higgs Boson (Stephen lost that one). Stephen also married again in 1995 to Elaine Mason, a former nurse. In 1990, with lifelong friend, the physicist Kip Thorne, Stephen approached the controversial notion of whether time travel is allowed by the laws of physics utilising the concept of wormholes, hypothetical tubes of space-time. Stephen concluded this serious analysis with the finding that although it may turn out that time travel is impossible, “… it is important that we understand why it is impossible.” As a later aside to this, nearly 20 years later Stephen planned a party for time travellers. He wrote invitations, set a date, time and venue and provided precise GPS coordinates. But he did not send out the invitations until after the party date was over. That way, only those who could genuinely travel back in time would know of it and be able to attend. On the due day Stephen sat politely and waited. But no-one came. And that was the point. “I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible”, he said afterwards. And the champagne went back on ice. In a sensational scientific U-turn in 2004, Stephen announced he had solved the black hole information paradox he had identified in 1974, stating that black holes do not destroy all that is sucked into them and that information can be retrieved. Conceding a bet with fellow scientists when he had previously argued to the contrary, Stephen and Kip Thorne awarded their American colleague, John Preskill, an encyclopaedia on baseball saying, that ‘(baseball) information can be retrieved at will’. At the time, Stephen confessed that saying information was lost in black holes was his biggest blunder. However, physicists continue to argue about whether information is lost in black holes or not. It is perhaps a tribute to Stephen’s genius that the discussion is still going on after almost half a century. The marriage to Elaine broke down and the couple divorced in 2006. In April 2007, Stephen undertook a zero-gravity flight in a Boeing 727 jet in order to promote public interest in space travel and raise money for research into ALS. He had been invited by space pioneer and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis who founded the X Prize. A keen advocate of the need for space travel to find alternative planets for human habitation, Stephen remained in the air for two hours and underwent eight zero-gravity dives, allowing him to experience weightlessness and to be freed from the frustrating restrictions of his wheelchair. One of the most iconic of all the images of Stephen shows him floating, weightless, with an apple hovering above his shoulder and a huge smile on this face. He quipped afterwards, “Space, here I come. A zero-gravity flight is the first step towards space travel.” Stephen always hoped to make it into space himself one day. He was invited by Richard Branson to travel on Branson’s first space flight. Such was Stephen’s pioneering spirit, he accepted immediately. Sadly, Stephen never got the chance to fly in space. Also in 2007, Stephen founded the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, based in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge, and set up to, ‘advance the scientific understanding of our universe, taking forward the vision of its founder.’ More recently, the Centre launched the Stephen Hawking Programme, a campaign to celebrate and memorialise Stephen's life and work through a programme of teaching, research and outreach. The programme will perpetuate Stephen's legacy and will ensure the vitality and excellence of its ongoing research in cosmology and gravitation. In 2009, Stephen was awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama, the highest civilian award in the United States. Received by very few scientists, it was given in recognition of his ‘persistence and dedication [which] has unlocked new pathways of discovery and inspired everyday citizens.’ In 2012, in a dazzling, star-lit ceremony, Stephen opened the Paralympics in London’s Docklands to a packed stadium. Entitled ‘Enlightenment’, Stephen compared the entire event with some 3,000 performers promising an ‘evening of exploration’, as he exhorted the 62,000 spectators to ‘look up at the stars’. As an addition to the fun-fest of the splendidly choreographed display by disabled athletes, Stephen’s appearance received loud applause when he said, “However difficult life may seem there is always something you can do and succeed at. Good luck to you all…”. In 2013, Stephen won one of the two Breakthrough Prizes in Fundamental Physics for his discovery of Hawking radiation from black holes, and for ‘his deep contributions to quantum gravity and quantum aspects of the early universe’. This award was especially treasured by Stephen as it validated his lifelong discoveries without the need for experimental confirmation that, in this case, is very difficult to achieve. So difficult in fact, that this lack of experimental confirmation of Hawking radiation and other of his theories excluded Stephen from winning the Nobel prize for physics – the major disappointment in his academic life and career. In 2014, Stephen revised his theory about the information paradox, even writing that, ‘there are no black holes’ – or at least in the way that cosmologists traditionally understand them. His theory removed the existence of an ‘event horizon’, the point where nothing can escape. Instead, he proposed that there would be an ‘apparent horizon’ that would alter according to quantum changes within the black hole. But the theory, too, remains controversial. That same year saw the release of The Theory of Everything, the film of Stephen’s life which opened to great critical acclaim. Based on the personal memoir of Stephen’s wife, Jane, the film garnered major awards, resulting in an Oscar for actor, Eddie Redmayne, who perfectly captured not only Stephen’s declining health but his wit, determination, stubbornness and single-minded pursuit of scientific knowledge. Stephen was initially cautious about the film but once he met Redmayne and read the script, he changed his view and allowed the film to use his synthesised voice. Overall both Stephen and Jane were pleased with the film although Stephen would have liked it to contain more physics. Its success brought Stephen’s academic discoveries to a wider public and further underlined his innate humanity. Stephen celebrated his 75th birthday in January 2017, an incredible achievement for someone who was told he had two years to live in 1962. Cambridge University marked this august occasion with an international conference entitled ‘Gravity and Black Holes’, held in July at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences. Twenty renowned scientists gave papers at the three-day conference. At the time, Stephen said, “It has been a glorious time to be alive and doing research into theoretical physics. Our picture of the Universe has changed a great deal in the last 50 years, and I’m happy if I’ve made a small contribution.” And he said he wanted others to feel the passion he has for understanding the universal laws that govern us all. “I want to share my excitement and enthusiasm about this quest. So, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious, and however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.” Also in 2017 Stephen co-authored a paper with Malcolm Perry (Cambridge) and Professor Andrew Strominger (Harvard) entitled ‘Soft Hair on Black Holes’, purporting to make progress towards an ultimate solution to the black hole information paradox. Refuting Stephen’s earlier argument claiming that information was irretrievably lost in black holes the paper identifies how information is not lost but is ‘contained’ within strands surrounding the black hole’s edge, the event horizon. In November 2017, Stephen made what would become his last public appearance to a packed Union chamber when he gave the inaugural speech for the Cambridge Union Society’s announcement of its Professor Hawking Fellowship. The Fellowship is designed to celebrate STEM disciplines and acknowledges those individuals who, according to Lord Smith of Finsbury, chair of the Union’s trustees, ‘… have changed the world through the application of science and technology’. In 2019, the choice of Hawking Fellow was Bill Gates. On 14th March 2018, Professor Stephen Hawking died peacefully at his home in Cambridge (in a strange tribute, this date is also the birthday of Albert Einstein). At the private funeral in Cambridge, the streets thronged with admirers and fans who saw Stephen as very much ‘one of their own’. His impressive but poignant memorial service held on 15th June 2018 in Westminster Abbey was a more formal affair with luminaries from academia around the world paying tribute to Stephen’s scientific legacy. However, at both ceremonies, there was much emphasis on Stephen’s humanity, his humour, his family (he was a devoted family man with three much-loved children and grandchildren) and his charitable work, mostly for the disabled community and education. His ashes are interred next to Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. The words on Stephen’s grave stone are a direct translation from the Latin of those on Isaac Newton’s grave – ‘Here lies what was mortal of…..’ There is a postscript. In October 2018, John Murray published Stephen’s posthumous popular book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions. This book was a project that Stephen had begun in his lifetime, to bring his writings for a general audience together into one definitive volume. While the manuscript remained unfinished at the time of Stephen’s death, his colleagues, family and friends collaborated in order to publish this collection of short essays on the questions that Stephen was so frequently asked during his lifetime. It felt important to those who had been close to Stephen for so many years that his theories, thoughts and ideas were published in order that he himself should define his legacy. Brief Answers to the Big Questions has been a best seller in 45 countries and sold 2.5 million copies since publication, showing that Stephen’s influence and brilliance remain undimmed, even though he is no longer with us. Finally, two posthumous papers appeared. The first in April 2018 was written with Thomas Hertog. Stephen details his last theory on the origin of the Universe, based on the concept of eternal inflation which lays the ground for the existence of parallel universes. It argues there are many universes other than our own. The paper is entitled “A Smooth Exit From Inflation” and its latest revisions were made on 4th March, ten days before Stephen died. When Stephen died, there was a paper in preparation with Sasha Haco, a graduate students, Malcolm Perry and Andrew Strominger. In this paper, an explanation of how black hole entropy arises at the microscopic level is proposed. If the ideas in this paper hold water, then it gives insight into the information paradox and how it might be resolved. As Stephen’s lifelong friend, the physicist Kip Thorne said at Stephen’s memorial service at Westminster Abbey ‘Stephen gave us big questions.” As more work is done on Stephen’s theories over the decades and centuries to come, we may find that Stephen gave us the answers as well. We just need to be smart enough to find them.
1098	dbpedia	1	39	https://whatelseisonnow.com/2014/11/20/a-look-at-the-theory-of-everything/	en	A Look at The Theory of Everything	https://whatelseisonnow.…ing-spinning.jpg	https://whatelseisonnow.…ing-spinning.jpg	[ "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/cropped-alex-ross.jpg", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-poster.jpg?w=202&h=300", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-biking.jpg?w=300&h=200", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-jane-and-stephen-talk-at-party.jpg?w=300&h=199", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-with-professor-dennis-sciama-played-by-david-thewlis.jpg?w=300&h=157", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-gala.jpg?w=300&h=212", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-and-jane-play-croquet.jpg?w=300&h=199", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-first-child.jpg?w=300&h=168", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-plays-with-kids.jpg?w=300&h=168", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-marriage.jpg?w=300&h=210", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-spinning.jpg?w=300&h=167", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-speaks-through-device.jpg?w=300&h=177", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-works-on-his-theory.jpg?w=300&h=199", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-eddie-redmayne-as-stephen-hawking.jpg?w=300&h=199", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-felicity-jones-as-jane-wilde.jpg?w=300&h=152", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-and-jane-in-bed.jpg?w=300&h=193", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-wedding.jpg?w=300&h=154", "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2014-11-20T00:00:00	The Theory of Everything looks at the lives and relationship of Jane and Stephen Hawking. It spans years after the two year death sentence that Hawking had been given after his accident that would eventually confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Based off of a book written by Jane Wilde…	en	https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico	What Else is on Now?	https://whatelseisonnow.com/2014/11/20/a-look-at-the-theory-of-everything/	The Theory of Everything looks at the lives and relationship of Jane and Stephen Hawking. It spans years after the two year death sentence that Hawking had been given after his accident that would eventually confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Based off of a book written by Jane Wilde Hawking herself, the film takes care with its subjects and gives us a close at how their relationship developed as Stephen’s condition worsened. The film focuses more time on the family man as opposed to the physicist and shows how, despite not feeling whole, we still find hope in our lives. The film begins in Cambridge, England, 1963. We’re introduced to two pals biking to a party: Brian, played by Harry Lloyd, and our protagonist, Stephen Hawking, played by Eddie Redmayne. Also at the party is Jane Wilde, played by Felicity Jones. From a friend, she learns that this Hawking is strange, but very clever. Jane and Stephen talk. He tells her that she’s a cosmologist and is looking for that one equation that explains everything in the universe. Sounds like a simple enough task. We get a look at the busy life of Mr. Hawking. The next day, he and his colleagues are given a 10 question exam by professor and advisor, Dennis Sciama, played by David Thewlis. Stephen is also a member of the university’s rowing club as well. At a pub that night, Stephen considers calling Jane, but no need for that since she’s just a few seats over. He plucks up the courage to talk to her and asks if she plays croquet. Typical pick-up lines. When Brian returns to their dorm, he finds that Stephen hasn’t been working on the exam. Stephen has bigger things in mind: he’s applied for a PhD in Physics. He soon gets to work on the questions. He soon returns to class, but was only able to get through nine of the questions. Professor Sciama takes Stephen into a room once occupied by greats like J.J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. It’s a room full of possibility and Stephen looks on in wonder at what he sees. Professor Sciama has a great opportunity for Stephen: travel with him to see Roger Penrose speak. Elsewhere, Jane leaves church and finds Stephen waiting for her. It’s time to meet Stephen’s parents: Isobel, played by Abigail Cruttenden, and Frank, played by Simon McBurney. The parents ask about Jane’s passion- she loves art. More than that, she’s studying Spanish poetry. Jane and Stephen are also very different. After all, she goes to church, but Stephen doesn’t believe in that sort of higher authority. A physicist cannot allow his belief to be molded in the supernatural. Later that evening, they attend a gala. Stephen is not a dancer, but he is very observant. For example, he tells Jane to take a good look at the men’s shirts. They’re glowing in the light. The reason for that is due to Tide. As the two discuss their lives, Jane tells Stephen that she chose to major in Spanish poetry because she loves to travel. Soon, she refers to the creation of the Heaven and the Earth by quoting the first few scriptures of Genesis. The two join hands and dance. Professor Sciama and Stephen attend Roger Penrose’s lecture on black holes. Penrose, played by Christian McKay, tells his audience that black holes are created when stars collapse. There’s no light whatsoever in a black hole and the stars become denser and denser. The end result is a space-time singularity. When he returns, Stephen then relays this lecture to Jane, but with one change: what if you applied the theory of singularity to the entire universe? What if you reversed the process to see the beginning of time? It would be like winding back a clock. Stephen gets to work on his equation, with Professor Sciama advising him on the mathematics. Stephen is flying high right now, but as he leaves class and makes his way across campus, he trips and hits his head hard on the pavement. Stephen is brought to a doctor for examination. The impact is immediate: Stephen has little to no movement in his legs and is unable to push in when the doctor asks him to. Then Stephen learns: he has a motor-neuron disease that destroys the cells that control the muscles, breathing and anything related to movement. In time, his muscles will begin to decay and he’ll have no voluntary movement. His life expectancy is two years and the doctor, unfortunately, cannot help. Stephen asks if his brain will be affected, and it won’t be, but soon, no one will know his thoughts. Brian learns of Stephen’s disease when he returns to their dorm and Stephen tells him about Lou Gherig’s disease, though Brian isn’t up to date on baseball. Since Stephen isn’t taking Jane’s calls, she first learns about it when she runs into Brian at a pub. She comes to his dorm again- as he’d hidden from her the first time she stopped by- and tells him how much she missed him. He doesn’t discuss his condition, though. In fact, he wants her gone. Jane doesn’t leave that easily, though. She still owes him a game of croquet. If he doesn’t come, she’ll never come back. The two play, though Stephen’s movement is inhibited due to the fall. His feet drag and he’s not as mobile as he had been. Croquet comes to a quick end. Stephen returns to his dorm and begins to wreck it. He still wants Jane gone, as he needs to work. Stephen is still able to attend class, but now with the assistance of a cane. Stephen’s father tells Jane that she doesn’t realize what lies ahead. She has the weight of science against her and this is a huge defeat for everyone. Jane is defiant. Everyone thinks that she doesn’t look strong, but if there’s still love, she and Stephen can and will fight this. They do. The two are soon married following this, have a child and even move in together. Stephen now uses two canes to get around and must shuffle himself down the stairs at home. However, some good news comes when he comes before Professor Sciama and two other professors who have been looking over his theory. There are holes and unanswered questions in a few chapters. But the section regarding black holes is just brilliant. Well done, Dr. Stephen Hawking. So what’s next for Dr. Hawking? Prove that time has a meaning. At a celebratory dinner, everyone is ecstatic at Stephen being the first in his family to receive a doctorate. More problems arise. It’s hard enough for Stephen to eat, but now his hearing begins to go. Not feeling so hungry anymore, he excuses himself and struggles to make his way up the stairs. The next day, Jane presents Stephen with a wheelchair. He makes his way into the chair and it does make moving around a lot smoother. That evening, as Jane is helping him with his sweater, he finds inspiration as he stares into the fireplace. Following this, Stephen speaks with Professor Sciama about his revelation: what if a black hole wasn’t black at all, but just heat radiation. Once a star becomes a black hole, the hole itself will soon vanish. Jane and Stephen eventually move up too an electric wheelchair, but the care begins to take its toll on Jane as she must contend with Stephen and not one, but now two children. Despite Stephen’s occasional issues, he wants no doctors. Frustration is clear in her tone, but she doesn’t let it consume her. Jane’s mother suggests that she return to church since she used to love singing. She does and begins a friendship with the choir director, Jonathan Jones, played by Charlie Cox. Stephen’s work continues. He has a new project: disprove his own PhD and show that the Earth itself has no boundaries or beginning. Therefore, God must die. And on that note, we’ll stop. Telling a story based on a real life figure can be challenging. You want to be respectful of the original source and people, but also not just tell what could be explained in a documentary. You also want to stay as close to the person’s life and not add in unnecessary drama for the same of tension. That’s the big problem I had with Jimi: All is By My Side. In concept, it sounds like an interesting film, but on-screen, the history was far from flawless. Stephen Hawking has been around for a long time and is still alive. There have been films made about his life already- none of which I have seen- and if The Theory of Everything just told us the same story, there’d be no point to trying to tell us a story we’ve already seen before. We know Stephen Hawking is a physicist. We know that he had been diagnosed with a motor neuron disease and confined to a wheelchair. However, there’s a lot more in-between that. What was his personal life like, before and after his accident? What drives him? The film doesn’t answer all of these questions, but it does give us a look at how Hawking and his family dealt with the disease that took more and more control of his body. Some folks say that the movie comes off too much like a melodrama instead of a close examination of Stephen Hawking, the physicist. Others say too little time is spent on Hawking’s life before his accident. I understand these perspectives, but I feel this movie is less about Hawking the physicist and more about his relationship with Jane Wilde. Screenwriter Anthony McCarter and director James Marsh based this film primarily off of Jane Wilde Hawking’s book: Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking himself has called the film “broadly true” and while there are some changes between fact and fiction, most of them don’t change my opinion of the movie. I repeat, most of them. For example, Jane first met Jonathan while caroling, not at a church. She felt that any wrong move could impact her marriage with Stephen. In the book, Jane and Stephen’s differences over religion and science started off as not a major problem, as was the case in the film, but over time, they became contentious. These changes aren’t too big of a deal to me personally. A lot of the film’s messages and themes are handled very well. The movie examines how we overcome massive obstacles in our lives- obstacles that completely change us. It deals with the pain of loss, both physically and mentally, as seen through Stephen’s deteriorating condition and Jane’s growing frustration at having to be there for him while putting her life on hold. Though Stephen worsens over time, I never felt that the film treated him like a victim. We see a glimpse of his rage early on when he initially doesn’t want to see Jane anymore after he receives his diagnosis, but even as his condition worsens, he trudges on with his work. Much of what he wants and desires must be conveyed through facial expressions, which is where Eddie Redmayne’s performance shines. It also comes through in the direction, where some scenes are even set up and filmed like math equations- this comes at the hands of cinematographer Benoit Delhomme, who also worked on A Most Wanted Man earlier this year. Faith is also another central theme. Hawking believes in science and not, as he puts it, in a celestial dictatorial premise. He acknowledges that we are all different and, at one point, dose mention God in one of his works, but for the most part, he is a man of science, not religion. His helps come from those around him, but also through his own willpower. For example, during a family outing, Jane and Stephen’s father insist that he seek medical attention, but Stephen wants no doctors. Sure, I found it odd for a moment that a man of science wouldn’t trust modern medicine, but this is all a part of his struggle. He has challenges, but he never lets them deter him. The same applies to Jane, who does believe in a higher authority. Her faith pushes her, but also because she wants to prove, as she stated early on, that love and marriage could persevere, despite Stephen’s condition. So while I agree with the criticism that the movie doesn’t spend a lot of time on the actual science and mathematics behind Stephen’s theory, I find that this movie is more about his personal life. If people come into this expecting a deep look at Hawking’s philosophies and theories, this movie is not for them. But if they’re looking for a film in which an actor transforms himself into Stephen Hawking with such an uncanny resemblance, look no further than the fantastic job done by Eddie Redmayne. It’s scary how Redmayne embodies Hawking. When Hawking is confined to a wheelchair and must army crawl his way up stairs, you can tell what he’s feeling and going through just by watching Redmayne’s facial expressions. Whether it’s the slightest twitch of his lip or the way his lead limps to the side when in a wheelchair, Redmayne isn’t just playing Stephen Hawking- he becomes him. Even before the accident, Redmayne’s eyes are full of wonder and possibility when he explains and works on his black hole theory. When he and Professor Sciama walk through a laboratory, Redmayne looks like a kid in a candy store, but instead of wanting to play with everything, he wants to pull it all apart to see what makes it work. There’s so much wonder and fascination when he talks about the universe that I felt Hawking would be fine spending the rest of his days exploring the wonders of the universe. Having never seen the other films about Stephen Hawking, I won’t try to compare Redmayne’s performance to them, but this was a very strong portrayal. And just as powerful in her performance is Felicity Jones as Jane Hawking. She’s not reduced to being a common housewife and she doesn’t have any sort of unnecessary angst or anger toward Hawking after having to help him so much. Jones shows a lot through her facial expressions and I could feel Jane’s growing frustration at having to put her life on hold. There’s a great scene near the middle where Jane is doing housework while Stephen and the kids play around. It’s brief, but she has a look on a face that defines what her life has become: a life put on hold. Jane has aspirations and wants to make something in her life, but she has to put that on hold and go at a slower pace because she has to be there for Stephen. Stephen, though his movement is limited, doesn’t stop with his studies and theories. By contrast, Jane has to care for him, meaning she must devote less time to her own life and needs. But what’s great about Jones’ performance is that she never lets Jane be consumed by the growing dissatisfaction in her life. When we first meet Jane, she’s fully confident about who she is and what she believes. She maintains her devotion to her faith and to Stephen, despite his illness, and never feels like she’s made the wrong choice in marrying him. This is both a strike for and against the film, but I’ll address that in a bit. I like the fact that Jane doesn’t see Stephen as the typical nerd because he’s into physics and she never looks down upon or thinks differently of him because of his devotion to science. In fact, it’s their differences that make them such a good fit for one another. Yes, their dance under the fireworks feels a bit cheesy and Hallmark for my taste, especially since they had not known each other for that long, but for the purpose of getting them together before Stephen’s accident, I’m fine with it. Once the two are married, however, Jane almost becomes a background character, only there to help Stephen when he needs it. He doesn’t treat her like a servant and we know that he didn’t want any doctors, so it’s up to her to be there for him. She’s struggling, but I never got the sense that she was overwhelmed. As burdensome as it may be, Jane never treats Stephen like a burden. She made a choice to marry him and she’s going to stick with him…for as long as the narrative allows. Now I don’t have too many issues with the film, but I do want to address a few qualms. I do agree that this film kind of skips over a lot of events too fast. Whether that’s for the sake of moving the plot along or the film just wanted to focus more on Jane and Stephen’s relationship, I don’t know. Yes, this is based off of a book written by Jane Hawking, but we never really get that much into Stephen’s head. Where did his interest in physics come from and how did he become so intelligent? That’s probably asking the film to start a lot earlier than it did, and that’s not necessary, but I do wish we got to learn more about Stephen Hawking: the physicist alongside Stephen Hawking: the married man. A lot of his theories and the discussions on black holes are limited to a few scenes, but we never spend an extensive amount of time with him developing his theories. When Professor Sciama and his colleagues review Stephen’s theory, they tell him that parts of it are full of holes and unanswered questions. Okay, so what happened? As soon as we learn that they think his black hole theory is brilliant, the scene moves on and the story continues. The point I’m trying to make is that I wish the film had a bit more focus on his passion for physics. As is, we only get glimpses of it. Now I argue against this because the film’s focus seems to be on Jane and Stephen’s relationship, but given how impactful Stephen’s research became throughout the course of the film, I wish we saw he came to came up with these theories and what the public thought of them. The few times we see Stephen discussing his work, it’s during a group presentation. Smaller scenes of Stephen just working would have been nice. I also feel that the filmmakers chose to take the safe route when it came to Jane and Stephen’s relationship. Again, to go back to Wilde’s book, Jane and Stephen’s relationship sometimes became a power struggle. Those sorts of struggles were toned down for the film and anything that could have been serious or damaging to their marriage is handled like a delicate glass sculpture. Jane develops feelings for Jonathan, but the most we see her do is approach his tent during an outdoors trip while Stephen is elsewhere. Stephen also develops a friendship with a caretaker, Elaine Mason, played by Maxine Peake, but this happens so late in the film that any fallout feels inconsequential. Having to put your life on hold while taking care of your significant other is sure to cause tension at some point, but the film doesn’t touch on that. In fact, Jane and Stephen seem to weather their relationship almost too much like a fairy tale. During their wedding, the ceremony is filmed like a home movie, for example. The two rarely argue or go to bed angry at one another. At most, Jane blows off some steam, but she doesn’t explode. I’m not saying the two needed to be at each other’s throats, but a little tension would have been nice because I can’t imagine Jane enduring all of this without the slightest issue. As I mentioned, Jane never feels like she made the wrong choice. I’m glad she’s showed commitment, a bit of friction would have made this marriage a bit more interesting. What we got is still good, but their love is far from perfect and I wanted the film to explore both the positives and negatives in more detail. These strikes do not detract from my enjoyment of the film. The biggest strength of The Theory of Everything comes through the amazing chemistry and believability of Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones as Stephen and Jane Hawking. Redmayne in particular becomes Hawking and instead of just playing the man, he embodies him. Despite Stephen’s accident and Jane having to sidetrack her life, their devotion to one another exemplifies what Hawking meant when he tells an audience that there is no boundary to human endeavors. A minor setback is not the end of the world. We adjust and keep on moving forward.
1098	dbpedia	0	22	https://www.setdecorators.org/%3Fname%3DJames-MarshTHE-THEORY-OF-EVERYTHING%26art%3Ddirectors_chair_James_Marsh	en	James Marsh: THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING	https://www.setdecorator…s/../TTOE_1d.jpg	https://www.setdecorator…s/../TTOE_1d.jpg	[ "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/images/2023/SetDecor-Logo-1050w.png", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/articles/TTOE_2_301.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/articles/TTOE_3_302.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/articles/TTOE_4_303.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/articles/TTOE_5_501.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/articles/TTOE_6_502.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/articles/TTOE_7_503jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/articles/TTOE_8_505.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/articles/TTOE_9_505A.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/articles/TTOE_10-506.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/articles/TTOE_11_507A.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/articles/TTOE_12_508.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/articles/TTOE_13_509.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/articles/TTOE_14_509A.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_15_520.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_16_520A.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_17A_521B.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_18_521C.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_19_523.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_20_530.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_21_531.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_22_532.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_23_534.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_24.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_25_555.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_26_557.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_26_557.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_27_558.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_28_559.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_29_560.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_30_561.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_31_562.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_32_563.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_33_563A.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_34_564.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_35.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_36.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_37.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_38.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_39_703.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_40_704.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/information/TTOE_41_750.jpg", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/images/2023/SDSA-Footer-Original-from-Kim-2023-07-25-TRIMMED-450x236.png", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/images/social/gray/x.png", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/images/social/gray/instagram.png", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/images/social/gray/pinterest.png", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/images/social/gray/facebook.png", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/images/social/gray/vimeo.png", "https://www.setdecorators.org/sites/setdecorators/images/social/gray/youtube.png", "https://www.setdecorators.org/images/magnifying-glass.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "set decorators society of america", "sdsa", "set decorators", "set decoration", "set design", "television set design", "movie set design", "tv set design", "design film set", "prop houses" ]	null	[]	null	Set Decorators Society of America, a professional organization for Decorators of Film and Television. The secrets of Set Decoration from the people who furnish the sets.	en	sites/setdecorators/images/logos/SDSA-Browser-Icon.png	SDSA Set Decorators	https://www.setdecorators.org/?name=James-MarshTHE-THEORY-OF-EVERYTHING&art=directors_chair_James_Marsh	"However bad life may seem, where there is life there is hope..." —Stephen Hawking THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, directed by James Marsh, is the extraordinary and uplifting story of one of the world’s greatest living minds, the renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, and of two people defying the steepest of odds through love… In 1963, as a physics-cosmology student at the storied U.K. university Cambridge, Stephen [Eddie Redmayne] is making great strides and is determined to find a “simple, eloquent explanation” for the universe. His own world opens up when he falls deeply in love with an arts major, fellow Cambridge student Jane Wilde [Felicity Jones]. But, at 21 years of age, he receives an earth-shattering diagnosis: motor neuron disease will attack his limbs and his abilities, leaving him with limited speech and movement, and will likely take his life within two years. Yet Jane’s love, fierce support and determination are unwavering, and they wed. With his new wife fighting tirelessly by his side, Stephen refuses to accept his diagnosis. Jane encourages Stephen to finish his doctorate, which includes his initial theory of the creation of the universe. They start a family and Stephen embarks on his most ambitious scientific work, studying the very thing he now has precious little of—time. As his body faces more limits, his mind continues to explore the outer limits of theoretical physics. Together, he and Jane defy impossible odds, breaking new ground in medicine and science, and achieving more than they could ever have dreamed... Director James Marsh talks with SET DECOR about the making of this beautiful film about two extraordinary people, the love they shared and the lives they led…
1098	dbpedia	3	2	https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/33994	en	American Institute of Physics	https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/favicon_1.ico	https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/favicon_1.ico	[ "https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/aip-logo-180.png", "https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2022-01/esva-image-not-available.jpg?itok=09xDxOQh", "https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/aipcorp/images/sitewide/aip-logo-fullname-400.png", "https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/aipcorp/images/sitewide/1383075471_twitter.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2021-09-24T10:08:33-04:00	Lightman: I wanted to start by asking you a few questions about your childhood. Can you tell me a little about what your parents were like, what they did?	en	/sites/default/files/favicon_1.ico		https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/33994	Lightman: I wanted to start by asking you a few questions about your childhood. Can you tell me a little about what your parents were like, what they did? Sciama: My father was a businessman. Actually you have taken me slightly aback because lots of things are rather personal, and I don't know if I would like to talk about them for publication. But certainly he was a businessman in Manchester. I grew up in Manchester. I then went to what we in England call a public school — that means a private school — from which I got a very good mathematical training. Those schools could afford to pay for the better teachers. In fact, my main teacher was a man who these days wouldn't go into school teaching. He got first-class honors in all three parts of the mathematical tripos in Cambridge, and he went into school teaching, and he helped me to get a scholarship to Cambridge. Lightman: Were either of your parents interested in science? Sciama: No, not at all. The atmosphere was entirely a business one. It rather surprised my father when I had this interest in science, which was outside his orbit. He was a very clever man, but he had left school at the age of 12 because his father had died, and he wasn't therefore used to higher education or anything like that. Although he had a fine brain, it hadn't been trained. He was trained in the world, but not trained in institutions. He therefore didn't particularly know about higher education until I told him. I told him Cambridge was great and Trinity was great, and he accepted that. But it wouldn't have been anything in his world. Lightman: When he knew that you had an interest in science, when he became aware of that, did he discourage you or encourage you? Sciama: He tried to discourage me because he thought that I ought to go into his business. Lightman: What about your mother? Sciama: She helped me a little bit, but he was much the stronger personality. It was just that I was so motivated to do science and mathematics. I suppose at that age I didn't even distinguish them. I originally thought of myself as a mathematician, and only later did I move first toward physics and then to cosmology. Lightman: Do you remember in your childhood, do you remember any particular books that you read that had a strong influence on you? Sciama: Yes, I can't remember how old I was when I read them, but I think it must have been in school. So many people of several generations were around then — Eddington,[1] in particular. Although I did read Jeans[2] a bit, I found Eddington more challenging. Lightman: He had several popular books. Sciama: He had several popular books. Perhaps now they've faded out a bit. I don't know. At that time they were very well known and considered the leading books of that kind. I don't know if you have read them — they are very imaginative. Lightman: I have read one or two of his books, and I think he is a beautiful writer as well as a good scientist. Sciama: So that certainly appealed to me, although at that time I wasn't thinking of myself as an astronomer. There were other people, mainly connected with Trinity. G.H. Hardy, the pure mathematician, wrote a lovely little book called A Mathematician's Apology.[3] Lightman: That is one of my favorites. Sciama: Then you may remember how he says from an early age his one ambition was to become a Fellow of Trinity. Again, this reads a bit old-fashioned now, and some people would even say it is no longer [impressive] and so on, but at the time it thrilled me. Lightman: Did you read Hardy's book when you were a youngster? Sciama: Yes. I also read some Bertrand Russell, who again was associated with Trinity. Lightman: So you were interested in philosophy? Sciama: I've always had a mild interest in philosophy. In fact, I'm giving a talk on the philosophical aspects of the anthropic principle in a week or two. So, I have had an interest in philosophy. When I went up to Trinity in 1944, I attended a whole course of lectures by Wittgenstein, who was then still a professor and giving lectures. That was a very good experience. So, while I was basically doing mathematics, I had this interest in philosophical things, and it just so happened that many of the leading people at the time were Fellows of Trinity, or had been. Trinity was the most prominent college. That was all part of the image of what a youngster would be attracted to, to strive, as it were, because there was this goal. So that played an important part. Lightman: At this age, before you went up to Cambridge, did you have an intention to go into science or mathematics? Sciama: Yes, from about the age of 15 or 16, I suppose. Before that, I was very young, and I naturally said I would go into my father's business because that was the obvious thing to say. I don't remember precisely, but roughly from the age of about 15 or 16, when I was beginning to be coached to take the scholarship to Cambridge, I realized [science and mathematics was] what I wanted to do. Lightman: One thing you said in your interview[4] with Spencer Weart in 1978 was that at this age you developed a passion for mathematics and science. Do you have any idea how that passion developed or what caused you to be so taken with this subject? Sciama: I think in retrospect I can answer that question perhaps, but it's a bit wisdom after the event. In fact, I came to cosmology and astronomy relatively late. When I was doing my Ph.D., for instance, I started out in statistical mechanics. Only in the middle, partly under the influence of people here like Fred Hoyle and Hermann Bondi, and Tommy Gold, did I start getting interested in cosmology and Mach's principle and so forth. Rather unusually, in the middle of my Ph.D., I switched to relativity and Mach's principle and so on. They had to give me a new supervisor as a result. They gave me no less than [Paul] Dirac, in order to try and cope with this rather alarming change of subject from the point of view of the authorities. So, something inside of me must have burst out at that point. Although the statistical mechanics problem — it was about the Onsager, Ising type of work — is very attractive theoretical physics. But it doesn't, of course, have the connotations of understanding the origin of the universe. Once I started doing things beginning with Mach's principle, I then realized my real passion was for understanding the fundamental nature of the universe. Some people, and perhaps the majority, do that by particle physics, and a few of us do it by cosmology. Of course, as I dare say you will discuss later, now the two things are linked together. So, then I said "ah, hah, it's clear to me what it's all about, and I want to understand the way the world is made, where it comes from, and what it means in the scientific sense." That's my passion. Therefore, always I've tended not so much to work on very technical detailed problems — although some of my students have — but rather on problems that in some way help to understand the great questions. So, that's obviously what my real passion is. But at 15, I didn't say all that. It expressed itself then as an interest in, say, mathematics. I remember enjoying projective geometry at school. I thought it was very beautiful and well ordered, and so on. Cosmology came much later. Lightman: Did you like well-ordered things? Sciama: Yes. Because, you see, if you do understand the universe... I mean, if Mach's principle had been true and sensible and worked well, or if superstrings or something are right, you are imposing order on the universe. And no doubt a psychoanalyst would have his own views as to why one wants to do that. Again, I think I mentioned this to Spencer. If you impose order on [the universe], then you help to achieve it yourself. Roughly speaking, what I like to say is that the universe is enormous — it is much stronger than you are — and your only way of hitting back at it is to understand it. No doubt, a psychoanalyst would use psychoanalytic jargon to describe [that idea], but that's what it amounts to, I guess. Lightman: Do you think that kind of motivation was something you sensed at a young age, or was it something that developed later? Sciama: I don't think I sensed it as explicitly as that. When I was enjoying projective geometry, I just said "how beautiful, and what a nice intellectual challenge, and what lovely theorems you get when you use your intellect, and that's great fun." I didn't realize all that I am now saying, probably until I made that switch in the middle of my Ph.D. But no doubt it was underneath. Lightman: Can you tell me a little about your undergraduate and graduate work at Cambridge? I don't want you to go into too much length because you said quite a bit to Spencer Weart but just give me some of the high points. Sciama: The high point is that I was a disastrously bad student. No, that's putting it too strongly. I did get a minor scholarship in mathematics at Trinity, which was a great achievement. A large part of that was due to very good coaching by the particular school teacher I mentioned earlier. Lightman: Did you say his name? Sciama: I didn't. His name was R.H. Cobb. Anyway, it's a bit like training for a race or something, learning how to solve these problems. It's all book work. You learn how to prove these things. You've been through this yourself, I'm sure. You remember how to prove book-work theorems, and you do many, many "riders," as we used to call them — examples based on the theorems. And so you trained. I was good enough to be trainable to get even a minor scholarship at Trinity, which was the great place in maths at Cambridge. But then I did extremely badly in exams here, so badly that when I finished I had to go into the army. This was just after the war, but there was still conscription, and I couldn't remain to be a research student. I got a lower second in finals, and two thirds in my earlier exams. So I was in disgrace. However, during the two years that I had to be in the army, for 18 months of it I managed to get sent to a government research lab, which was called TRE in those days. [That lab] originally had done a lot of radar work in the war. One was still concerned with detecting enemy airplanes, detecting infrared radiation. They were studying photoconductors, or semiconductors — they become conducting when the light hits them. And I with a team — of course I was guided by the senior people — worked on the quantum mechanics of the band structure in the lead sulfide group of elements. Lightman: So you got to do physics. Sciama: Yes, I wrote internal reports. Hartree was one of the professors here at the time. You know his name, I'm sure. He I had seen just as I was leaving as a student, and I told him I wanted to get back into research. He helped me to get transferred to this government lab and then accepted me back as a research student when he had seen these internal reports. It was all about the group theory, and the levels, and so on. So, that is how I got back in to the system. Lightman: So they thought you might have been dismissed out of hand from Trinity? Sciama: Well, I wouldn't take a student on with my exam records. It's all rather embarrassing when I now have to take students on. If it were a question of a grant, I wouldn't be allowed to give a grant, because you’ve got to get a first or an upper second to get a grant. But he took me back without a grant, and that's where my father being a businessman came in. I was able to live through the help of my father, despite his early discouragement. Lightman: How did he feel about supporting you in this intellectual pursuit? Sciama: Well, he was still terribly upset that I had rejected business, but he saw that I was so determined that he let me do it. Later, I agreed with him whether I would continue depended on certain things. It was a crazy thing to do, because clearly if I was going to be a tenth-rate researcher, then maybe it's better to earn a lot of money in a good firm. So, I agreed with him that [I would stay in scientific research] only if I got the research fellowship at Trinity — the thing Hardy had written all about. That would be a sign that it was worth the sacrifices, and otherwise not. That was a crazy [agreement], because even if I were very good — which I didn't know really at that time — it's very chancy whether you get a [fellowship]. You're competing with a whole group of people in a whole range of all subjects. Lightman: Was this his proposition or your proposition? Sciama: I think I said at one point, "well look, the natural thing for me to do is go in for a Fellowship." It's such a prestigious thing to get, which I explained to him, and he accepted that. Because if I did get [the Fellowship], that would be the sign that it would be worth the sacrifices. Lightman: Then did you also complete the proposition and say that if you didn't get [the Fellowship]; you would put your [fate] in his hands? Sciama: Yes. If I didn't get it, then that would show that it wasn't justified to give up these good prospects in the textile business. Lightman: So you made him a business proposition. Sciama: I made him a business proposition. Exactly. But a very bad one. [Lightman and Sciama laugh.] Arnold Weinstock would never do that today. Perhaps you don't know him. He is the chap in GEC here, and they've just been trying to take him over with clever tricks. Yes, so by sheer luck I did get the damn thing, so I was able to remain in an academic career. Lightman: When you decided to do cosmology, you said that you came under the influence of Hoyle and Bondi. Sciama: And Gold. They were all here. They were senior to me, but I got a bit friendly, particularly with Tommy Gold, and to some extent with Hermann Bondi. Hoyle was still older than that. They were all playing a strong part here. You probably know that they were all considered sort of rebels at that time. Hoyle was not Sir Fred Hoyle, Plumian Professor. He probably had a lectureship then, and I think Bondi did. But Bondi wasn't Sir Hermann Bondi, et cetera, et cetera. Lightman: This was in the early fifties? Sciama: Yes. I got my fellowship in 1952, and I actually got the degree of Ph.D. in 1953. I started being a research student in 1949. The steady-state theory,[5] which was one of the dominating ideas in cosmology at that time, was published in 1948. So at that time it was far too soon for the hostile evidence to arise. [The steady state] was a very attractive idea to some of us. Also, [Hoyle, Bondi, and Gold] were concerned with astronomical questions. But in a lot of their work, they were introducing rather new points of view, which tended to be the kinds of points of view that got resistance from the establishment. They were the young rebels, and they were an exciting influence at the time for a younger person like myself. Even when I was doing the statistical mechanics, I must have gone to their lectures and realized that their personalities were robust and exciting. I suppose that played a part. I don't remember waking up one day and saying "no more Ising [models], I will now do distant galaxies or something." I can't remember the precise details, but it's clear that I started thinking about questions of that kind, and then I proposed a change of subject, and they got very agitated because you don't normally make such a big change. And then there are questions like "have you been working long enough at the new topic?" As I say, they gave me [Dirac], because there weren't many people around at the time. I don't know why they didn't give me Bondi. Lightman: Yes, why did they give you Dirac instead of Bondi? Sciama: I don't know. It's not that I can't remember. I wasn't privy to the discussion. They may have felt that since it was a slightly delicate matter — this big change — they ought to give me a very senior person. But I'm only guessing. Lightman: Dirac didn't really work in general relativity, did he? Sciama: Well, he had done things in cosmology, like the large number business.[6] And he had one something in general relativity. He had done this Hamiltonian theory for quantization purposes. It was all part of his theory of constraints in quantum mechanics, when you have theories with invariants. Electrodynamics is the first example, when you have gauge invanance. [It becomes] coordinate invariance in the relativity case. This gives rise to a lot of technical problems when you try and quantize. He had a whole theory of first-class constraints and second-class constraints designed to deal with that. Then he decided to apply that to general relativity. It was quite important work actually, in a way. Nothing like his greatest work, but it's very considerable. He found[7] a Hamiltonian for general relativity, as distinct from the Lagrangian. He tried to quantize it. And he wrote other papers on general relativity. So, while [general relativity] is obviously not the first thing you would think of with Dirac, he had done quite a bit. Maybe the mere fact that he was a major theoretical physicist was taken into consideration. But by the time I got Dirac, as I think I explained before, I had already worked out this Mach's principle thing that I wrote my thesis on.[8] So, he didn't particularly help me — not through any fault of his. But I did have access to him, and that was fascinating. Lightman: You mentioned steady state a moment ago. Obviously that was extremely important during this period. Can you tell me a little bit about why you were so attracted to the steady state theory? Sciama: I suppose because of its simplicity and predictive power. The big bang — even now, of course, we're struggling to understand the big bang. [I accept the big bang], although Fred Hoyle still doesn't. But I accept now that basically the big bang picture is clearly correct. But, it's a naturally very complicated physics that goes on near the bang. There were even questions like: can you be sure the laws of physics are the same in a changing universe. You see, there might be philosophical reasons for worrying about that. This was all part of the original discussion. Lightman: That was in the original papers. Sciama: Whereas it's at least reasonable to say that if the universe always has the same large-scale appearance, it's less of an assumption that the laws are unchanged. And there were various arguments of that kind. The whole picture you got of the universe was a rather simple, appealing one. And [the steady state theory] did have predictive power, and therefore that was good. All those things didn't mean I believed it, as it were, but just that it was so attractive that I felt in a small way to try and make it work. When hostile evidence started to appear, you weren't sure what to make of it. I remember writing various papers at the time and having arguments with Martin Ryle about whether the evidence against the steady state was good or not. It was worth trying to save [the steady state theory], but as the evidence mounted, there came a point where one couldn't. But the reason for supporting it was not, as I say, that it had to be right, but just that it was to me very attractive and the penalty of having creation of matter didn't seem to be such a terrific penalty. It was rather an interesting process to study. As they used to say at that time, [continuous creation of matter] is even less of a thing to introduce than the creation of a whole universe at one go. Lightman: Was that an argument that you talked about at that time? Sciama: I suppose. I recognized that the standard theory didn't in fact have a creation moment. What we later came to call the singularity was not well understood. But, I never felt then and I don't now feel so alarmed about outrageous proposals in physics, unless they're easily disposed of by experimental evidence. I never felt creation of matter was something disturbing. It was a rather interesting phenomenon, and the bang was obviously even more interesting. It was very remarkable. But I wasn't frightened by saying "let's not have a bang, let's have a steady, continuing process which is subject to physical investigation because it's repetitive." Lightman: You said that you felt that steady state had predictive power, and that appealed to you. Did you feel that it had more predictive power than the big bang model? Sciama: It did in some respects, because by denying the possibility of evolution of the average properties of galaxies, you could make much more specific predictions about, for instance, the number of sources as a function of redshift. Whereas, indeed as we all know now, the [big bang model] requires evolution. You don't just get a distribution of these quantities that is different from steady state because the metric of the universe is different. There is very strong evolution, which, of course, does occur. I accept that. But, from the point of view of making predictions, [in the steady state model] you are denied evolution, which would have many parameters. Then you can be very specific. So, that was certainly appealing in the sense of being useful. Then you decide very quickly, perhaps with luck, whether this proposal was reasonable or not, because you couldn't keep cheating every time there was hostile evidence. At first, you could worry about whether the evidence was accurate or not and so on, but you couldn't say "oh well, we’ll introduce this fudge factor and that fudge factor." Lightman: At this time, during the 1950s, when you did think about the big bang model, did you have any preference for a particular model in the big bang, say open versus closed or that kind of thing? Sciama: I did, and that was linked to my interest in Mach's principle, although this was never fully worked out. But, as did other people perhaps for similar reasons, I preferred the Einstein-de Sitter model, the one that only just expands forever, the k = 0 model. That's the Machian thing, because k, in the Newtonian analogue of these models, is the energy-kinetic plus gravitational. If the energy is due to gravitation, ala Mach, rather than having a kind of spontaneous existence, then at least it might seem as though it would be rather natural to have one [energy] balance the other. One made the other. Therefore, that would be the attractive model. But that turned out not to work later, because I had a student, Derek Raine, now a lecturer at Leicester University, who worked later on Mach's principle, producing a much better theoretical statement of the principle. The principle is a kind of boundary condition. He produced, as far as I'm concerned, still the best discussion of what boundary condition you're really groping for. But when he did that, he found that because of feedback effects in the different models, all the cosmological models of the Robertson- Walker type, with the exception of Minkowski, are Machian. Essentially, if you were to use technical language, you introduce a Green's function to tell you how much a particular piece of source influences the metric here. In relativity, that's got to be a functional of metric. It can't be a fixed quantity. I wrote a paper,[9] with others, which I was quite pleased with, in which I showed that general relativity could be written as an integral equation to represent the metric here as a sum of contributions from the energy momentum tensor everywhere. [That formulation] used a propagator or Green's function, which itself was a functional of metric but had certain structural properties that made it rather attractive. Derek Raine used that idea to make a Machian boundary condition. He has written an article[10] on this by the way. So, he used those ideas and generalized them a bit to say that if you want a Machian boundary condition in addition to the propagator, which is entirely implied by GR itself, you need some statement about boundary conditions somewhere. When he made the most Machian statement he could — a statement that I approved of — he then found that all the Robertson-Walker models except the empty one would count as Machian. Owing to the fact that the Green's function itself depended on the metric. If you chose a non-Einstein Sitter case, there would be adjustments. Lightman: To make itself consistent. Sciama: Each one was self-consistent. The sources were doing their job. The way they did their job was different in each case. I had to accept that, but it was disappointing. But, until that was done, I would have preferred the Einstein-de Sitter model. Lightman: I think the Brans-Dicke theory,[11] which partially incorporates Mach's principle through the scalar field, much more than general relativity, also allows all Roberton-Walker metrics (flat, open, and closed) for cosmology. Sciama: It probably does. I suppose, in a way, the Brans-Dicke theory was at least partly stimulated by my own writings. But I never quite liked that theory. I preferred to [incorporate Mach's principle] within GR [general relativity] if I could, rather than introducing extra fields. Of course, one now introduces extra fields for other purposes. They are very likely. But at that time, I didn't really quite like that. So when [the Brans-Dicke theory] ran into difficulty from observations, I wasn't sorry. I'm sure Bob Dicke was sorry. But I wasn't. Lightman: I know that he was certainly influenced by Mach's principle in designing that theory, and probably your work as well. Sciama: Well, also John Wheeler had seen my work and had written many things himself on it,[12] and we all influenced each other. I suppose of the three of us, I was slightly the first, but we all had different ways of incorporating the principle. Naturally, I like my way the best. But in the end, that hasn't been terribly successful. It all sort of went into the sand, I believe. Lightman: We have been talking about Mach's principle, which has been a theme of a lot of your work starting with your Ph.D. thesis. Do you remember why you got interested in Mach's principle in the first place? Sciama: I have a vague memory that I was thinking about other cosmological questions and steady state questions — how one could make a field theory of steady state. I remember one time writing an article or variation of the thesis that actually pointed out that the scheme I was developing was not consistent with Mach's principle. I then started to attack Mach's principle, [because] I wanted my scheme to be a good one. Then, at a certain moment, I got converted and said, "No, I've got it the wrong way around. The nice thing is Mach's principle, and I'm missing the point." Lightman: Why were you thinking about Mach's principle at all? I didn't know that that was something on people's minds at the time. Sciama: There is a simple answer to that. I probably picked up the idea from Bondi. Lightman: Was he discussing Mach's principle? Sciama: If you look at the Bondi-Gold paper[13] on steady state and you look at Bondi's very lovely book[14] on cosmology that came out in 1952, there was a lot about Mach's principle in both of them. You see, in the steady state, the idea was whatever makes Mach's principle work in the steady state would be happening all the time. So, the arrangement of the world let Mach's principle apply. Also, I went to a course of lectures Bondi gave on cosmology. In fact, I was telling him the other day — because I'm at the college here where he is master now — that I still have the notes from that course. His book came out a little later, but I would have heard about it from the course. I found the idea extremely attractive, and this has something to do with my psychology. I like simple ideas with very great power in physics — the idea that centrifugal forces and Newton's rotating bucket is mainly due to galaxies. As I have pointed out in my books,[15] the main contribution came from galaxies beyond what you can see with telescopes — suggesting that the whole universe acts one unit in this way. That seemed to me to be a mind-blowing idea, as one might say. I realized quite soon that most physicists thought I was not quite a crank, but at least peculiar. Despite the tradition of Mach and Einstein about Mach's principle, most of my contemporaries would have said it was a will of the wisp, a semi-crank [idea]. Yet, after all, the little calculations I did then would show that if an object accelerates towards you, it produces a 1/r force, just like an accelerating [electrical] charge does. Lightman: This is gravitational. Sciama: Gravitational. And you know very well that if you have a 1/r force, distant [sources] are more important than near ones. It's worse than Olber's paradox. It's no good saying it's cranky to talk about distant galaxies, they just dominate. You just do a sum of two lines, and they dominate. The other question is: do they dominate so completely that they do the whole job? That's the boundary condition problem. But, to me it was clear that you had to worry about that. It was no good saying this is cranky. If it's a long-range force, then distant [sources] dominate. As I say, it was the power and the sweep of the idea — the idea that the whole universe was acting as a mechanism. Indeed, my first book was called The Unity of the Universe.[16] That was my [belief]. That's why I liked [Mach's principle], once I learned the idea. And I was very disappointed when it all went into the sand. Lightman: Let me ask you about another project that you worked on somewhat later. Do you remember what motivated you to work[17] with Martin Rees on plotting the distribution of quasar redshifts versus intensities? Sciama: Oh yes! I have probably told Spencer [Weart] this. That was very funny. That was typical of a lot of my work, where the student really does it much better. At that time, the hostile evidence [against the steady state theory] was accumulating, but it was in the early days, and you could still try to save the steady-state theory. So I was tittling around with these various things. The microwave background had just been discovered. But at that stage you couldn't be sure it wasn't due to [things other than the big bang]. In fact, I wrote a paper[18] saying that there might be a type of radio source whose integrated radiation would mimic a black body spectrum over at least a limited range of wavelengths — which was all that could be measured at that time. Lightman: So you were defending the steady-state. Sciama: The idea was to defend the steady-state, and also I learned astrophysics in the process. It was an interesting thing for various reasons. I knew from the great battle between [Martin] Ryle and Hoyle about the radio source counts that questions of counts would be crucial, or might be crucial. Quasar data was beginning to come in during that period. Of course, quasars were just three years old or something. In fact, in 1965 was the great discovery by Maarten Schmidt of a quasar with a redshift of 2. So, I started plotting out the number of quasars as a function of redshift. Lightman: Why did you do that? Sciama: To see whether it agreed with the steady state. This relation between number and red shift is a unique prediction of steady state. You [don't have] to worry about whether [the quasars] evolve at different redshifts. So there was a specific formula, which I knew. I think it probably was in the original Bondi-Gold paper. Anyway, it was a known formula, a straight-forward formula. So, the question was: is there enough data accumulated to test this? You see, today there are far more people in the field, and this sort of thing would be done instantly. But at that time there were fewer of us, and therefore it still had to be done. So I plotted out the number-redshift relation. The way I do these things, it was sloppy. And lo-and-behold, it fit the steady state [prediction]. I remember going to Martin and saying "Martin, Martin, look. I have plotted out N [number] as a function of z [redshift] and the steady state is supported." Martin was then a research student of mine, with whom I discussed all the more astrophysical types of questions involving cosmology. He was always a bit skeptical about my enthusiasm for steady state. He is a very well balanced chap. He said, "well, I'll have a look at it," and he went away to have a look at it, and he did it better. Two days later — I forget how long it took him — he came back and said, "I've done it properly, and it's very bad for steady state. The [observed] relation is quite different [from that predicted by steady state.]" It was the same general kind [of relation] as what I was finding for the regular radio sources. I looked at what he'd done, and I agreed that he'd done it properly. That was the thing, as I probably told Spencer, that for me made me give up steady state. I wasn't prepared. You see, there was a conceivable let-out from people like Hoyle and [Geoffrey] Burbidge, who were then saying that quasars are local. I didn't like that — it was piling one thing on top of another. I have a bit of a conscience, somewhere along the lines, and I couldn't play that game. It really wasn't reasonable. So, I said "okay, the quasars are cosmological, and therefore this decides it." At that time, the blackbody thing was still debatable. So, for me at least — though not for most people... it was this study that was decisive, and I had a bad month giving up steady-state. Then, of course, Maarten Schmidt did a much better job,[19] and it's now always attributed to him, and I think quite rightly. He did a much better job of getting this evolution, about a year later - much better data and more details. But we were the first to actually point out that quasars evolve, so I'm quite proud of that. But, it was Martin, not me. Lightman: This is what convinced you? Sciama: That's what convinced me. Lightman: Martin Rees, and some others, brings up an interesting question: You have been the advisor of a number of students who have gone on to brilliant careers. Can you tell me a little bit about your approach to advising students? Sciama: Let me first say, as I probably said in my last interview [with Spencer Weart],[20] I always feel that I've been in a false position, particularly by being at Cambridge, and to some extent also in Oxford. We've had the best students in England, because of the structure in England. And so, if you have a very good student, you just sit back and let him go, and he does wonderful things, you see. So, that's what's happened in quite a numb~r of cases. My only role was enabling them to do relativity and cosmology. That required a certain structure and someone who is willing to take them on, but then they did their own thing. Lightman: Did you talk to them on a regular basis? Sciama: Oh yes. Well, let's say I'm the kind of person who suggests problems to people. A good example, actually, is Brandon Carter, who did some very important work[21] on the uniqueness of the Kerr solution and other such things. I remember saying to him one day early on when he was my student - and he still remembers this and he says he's grateful for it — I said to him, "Brandon, why don't you do axisymmetric collapse. I think there is a lot of richness and interesting [things there]." And he went away and did[22] axisymmetric collapse. [Sciama laughs] So, therefore, I provoked them a little bit in some cases. In Steve Hawking's case — as Steve himself has recorded now I think in his book[23] and elsewhere for the first year or two he was struggling for a good problem. At that time, in the more relativistic side of cosmology, as distinct from astrophysical, there wasn't too much to do that was] high-class. Then in 1965, Roger Penrose produced the singularity paper[24] — a bombshell, but for a star, a collapsing star. I know there are articles which credit me with saying one ought to look at the singularity theorems more generally. I can't honestly remember doing that. My memory is that Steve came to me one day and said "I can adapt Roger's arguments for the whole universe and get the singularity of the big bang." I said "Yes. Good. Do that." The last chapter of his thesis is his first singularity theorem.[25] Although, in fact, in an article[26] by George Ellis, Chris Clark and Frank Tipler, whom you may know, about the singularity theory, there is a footnote or something that says I insisted that people work on singularity theorems. Perhaps I did. I can't remember. But mainly, it's that they [my students] are gifted to that extent, and there are problems lying around worthy of their gifts, but "do-able." Lightman: Do you think about whether a problem is "do-able" before you suggest it to one of your students? Sciama: Well, I can't necessarily tell. In the case of axisymmetric collapse, it seemed to me that not much had been done on it. I think in the case of the uniqueness of Kerr, I can remember Hawking saying around the department, after [Werner] Israel's proof[27] of the uniqueness of the Schwarzschild [solution], that we should be able to do Kerr. That probably helped Brandon — who was already in that area because of my original suggestion — but I remember Steve saying that. I don't think I would have had the technical understanding to see that it was do-able. So, I regard it as a matter of sheer luck that I've been associated in a minor way with all these students. Lightman: Let me go back to the 1950s again, when you were here among the young Turks — Bondi, Gold, and Hoyle and so forth — and the steady state was in the air. Can you tell me a little bit about the general attitude in the larger community towards cosmology — cosmology in general, not steady state in particular. How did people regard cosmology? Sciama: Physicists regarded it very badly, I think. Physicists generally, and in particular particle physicists, would have said that [cosmology] is highly speculative — everything is uncertain. They were very scornful. I remember Murray Gellman was once a visitor at Cambridge, and he came to dinner — it must have been in the mid-1960s — and he said to me "there has been no progress in cosmology since Friedmann in 1922."[28] [Sciama laughs.] Generally, I think, it was then [regarded] as just speculation — not because of its intrinsic nature, but because of the lack of good observational evidence. [Cosmology] was not quite respected. Lightman: How would a general astronomer have regarded cosmology at that time? Sciama: I think an astronomer would not have had those particular feelings that the particle theorists did. Someone like Hubble was regarded as a great man. Astronomers would have been even more aware of the uncertainties of the data, but they would recognize it as a worthy enterprise, I suppose. The intellectual scorn was more characteristic of the particle theory-type of person. Lightman: What about an astronomical theorist who was not particularly aware of the observational problems? Sciama: An astronomical theorist would have been. Someone like Martin Schwarzschild, say, would have been enough of a general astronomer to know. Well, everybody tried to do things like decide the deceleration parameter, or even the value of the Hubble constant. It was known how uncertain those things were. But I don't think they would have felt, [not quite] the spite and the scorn, but the attitude that this was a low-grade activity that [is undertaken] by people who can't solve problems in particle physics. Astronomers didn't feel that because they were already astronomers. They might have had a few smiles at the passions with which cosmologists argued. But there wouldn't have been the contempt. I don't think contempt is too strong a word in those early days, among physicists. That changed, bit by bit, as the new era came in and particle physics [ideas] became important. Maybe we will talk about that later. [Things changed] particularly when, [for example, the physicists realized] that cosmologists could do much better than the particle physicists at restricting the number of neutrino types.[29] All that came in later. Then they [the physicists] had to admit that maybe the cosmologists have got something. Lightman: Do you think that's when physicists began taking cosmology seriously? Sciama: I believe so. Lightman: Grand unified theories,[30] and so forth? Sciama: Well, slightly earlier maybe than that, because the business of the number of neutrinos slightly predates that. That was perhaps the first sign that you could say something that couldn't be said just from particle physics]. A different example comes more from astronomy than cosmology, though it's linked up. Willie Fowler, who of course by now has won the Nobel Prize for nuclear astrophysics, came in to the subject through the influence of Fred Hoyle. It was partly the famous story about the level of carbon twelve. Here was Willie Fowler, a down-to-earth nuclear physicist at Caltech, being told by this madman that this crazy nonsense could tell him a specific level in a particular nucleus, which was only suspected to exist then by laboratory experiment. Then they do a careful experiment and find out it's there, bang on at the [predicted] energy. [Fowler] said, "it's fantastic that astronomy can do that." And it was taken seriously, and that was one of the major factors, plus the personal attitude, that brought Willie into the fold. Although that's astrophysics and not cosmology, there is a relation, because if you believe in the steady-state theory, you have to make heavy elements in stars. And that actually is one of the great selling points of the steady state theory. Now we know it's wrong. [But] it forced people like Fred to make elements in stars. That was very successful. So actually there is a link. The fact that Fred was studying that problem was directly due to the fact that steady state theory required [that elements be made in stars]. Do you know the old joke of Eddington about a hotter place? Lightman: No. Sciama: In early days, people had vague ideas that the elements had to be made by high-temperature nuclear reactions, and Eddington must have had some kind of primitive theory of this long before the supernova theory of Hoyle. People said to him that the stars he was dealing with weren't hot enough to do this job, and he said "then go and find a hotter place." But, in fact, there is a direct link back with cosmology, so Fred was working on these problems because steady state required some hot place, not the big bang, to make at least the major range of elements like carbon, etc. Supernovae were the obvious choice. And then Willie came into it for the reason I said. Lightman: I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you about your reactions to some recent theoretical and observational discoveries. As background for that, let me ask you I first, do you remember when you first heard about the horizon problem, the causality problem, or thought about it on your own? Sciama: Just about, because the person who wrote the key paper[31] on horizons is a great personal friend of mine, Wolfgang Rindler. Lightman: Yes, as I understand it [however], he didn't discuss the puzzle. He didn't raise the issue of why there is a problem with the current universe in that paper. Sciama: That's correct. Lightman: So, I want to ask you, when did you first hear that there was a problem with the current universe, that there are regions that are causally disconnected according to the big bang theory, and yet have the same temperature and the same properties, and so forth? Sciama: I do understand. I think that the answer to that question is that I am vaguely aware that [Robert] Dicke had raised[32] that point, but it was not in the forefront of, certainly, my consciousness until Alan Guth's paper.[33] Although the history of inflation is complicated. There were people[34] before Guth, who now never get mentioned, and that, I think, is not fair. But then we are not discussing that. Lightman: We will in a moment. Sciama: Okay. I am not very well informed about the fine details, but we can come to that in a moment. As far as I'm concerned, it was, in practice, [Guth's] paper which emphasized that [the horizon problem] had to be taken very seriously. And the business about the flatness. In fact, it was the flatness, perhaps, that Dicke had referred to[35] even more than the communication problem, the horizon problem. Maybe I'm getting them slightly confused. So, perhaps that was what I was referring to a moment ago... Lightman: Do you remember when you became aware of Dicke's discussion of that? Sciama: Well, I was vaguely aware of it because I knew him personally already by then — if only because of our mutual interest in Mach's [principle]. But it's not something I would have given a talk about or gone shouting about. It was just vaguely in my mind that he had said something at that time. Lightman: When you did become vaguely aware of it, did it worry you as a serious problem? Sciama: No, I don't think so. This was probably my concern with other matters or my lack of being smart enough to spot that it really was rather important. I would not have been in a position to say this is so important that I've got to tell people about it and worry about it. No. You're asking about me, and I'm not sure that I'm representative or not. Lightman: I'm just asking about you. Sciama: As far as I'm concerned, it was only very vague. I wouldn't have even known off-hand the formula you would use to show how the density parameter scales with time. I was just vaguely aware that [Dicke] had made some remarks that something was a bit worrisome. That's all that was in my mind. Lightman: You mentioned that you became much more aware of these problems [the horizon and flatness problems] after Guth's paper. When you read that paper, did you take these problems seriously in the sense that they were important problems that demanded solutions? How did you feel about them after Guth's work? Sciama: I do remember that I was a bit slow to appreciate the significance of what Guth had done — perhaps again because I had other things to attend to. When his paper came out, I glanced at it and I didn't say to myself, "ah, hah, here is a great breakthrough. Whether true or not we must attend to this thing." I didn't quite even know fully what it was all about. It was only a few months later, I suppose, when other people started talking a lot about it, that I said "ah, hah, I'm getting left behind, I better find out what this is all about." Then I either read his paper again or read something by Mike Turner or heard a talk, or something. I learned the stuff. I did my book work. Then, it all fell into place and I saw how potentially important it was. In fact, Guth came to the Royal Society in London for some meeting. He spoke, and at lunch I remember saying to him "do you realize that your inflationary epoch is just the steady state theory?" And he said, "What is the steady state theory?" He hadn't even heard of it. So that is just one of many reminders about culture gaps, or time gaps and culture gaps. So I explained to him the way the steady state theory worked. Even things now like the so-called "no hair" theorem, you see with de Sitter. Many, many of the ideas were just steady state, but only for this shortish [epoch], at this early time. I was very amused that it occurred in that way. Fred has recently tried to make more of it than is justified. Lightman: Yes, I saw a recent paper [of Hoyle's to that effect] in Comments on Astrophysics.[36] Sciama: Yes. In that sense, I could understand what Guth had done. Lightman: Once you understood the horizon and flatness problems, or thought about them more deeply, did they seem to you to be serious, fundamental problems? Sciama: Yes. Now we get on to slightly delicate ground because there is still a bit of debate about these things, and I'm one of those who thinks that inflation is getting a bit oversold. I'm sure Roger Penrose talked to you about that. Lightman: I want to ask you about inflation separately in a moment, but I just wanted to ask you now about these two particular problems: the flatness problem and the horizon problem — whether or not inflation ever arrived. Sciama: Yes, I think they are genuine problems, and the reason we weren't all worrying about [them] is partly because until recently there were so few people in the field. What was worked on or worried about at that time was it very sensitive function of who happened to be in the field and what their interests happened to be. It's the same when you look at the history of cosmology and black holes, where rather strange views were peddled by top people like Eddington. They only got away with that because there weren't an army of technically equipped people to say the correct thing and push him aside. It's interesting when a subject depends for its development on so few people that it depends on their individual attitudes and what interests them. Whereas when hundreds of people do it, you very rapidly get a kind of streamlined view. Now, there is a whole army [of researchers]. For any new idea about particle physics, there are hundreds of people ready to apply it to the early universe. In those days there were only a handful of us, you see, and if this handful hadn't paid attention to these problems, then they weren't in the literature or currently debated. I think that's the reason. I suppose once they are thoroughly pointed out to you and your nose is rubbed into it, then yes, they are very important problems. Whether inflation has solved them or not is a separate, technical question. But clearly they are important problems. Lightman: Putting aside inflation, do you have any view as to how the flatness and horizon problems might be solved? Sciama: There's a third problem that's also very important — and I agree with Roger Penrose that inflation doesn't solve it — and that's the smoothness. It's related to the horizon problem. One argument is that the early wrinkles get pulled out by inflation. But that is not a correct argument. What inflation does, if it works well, is provides a possibility for a transport process being slower than light to equilibrate different regions and remove temperature gradients. And that was all that was claimed originally. Then there was a kind of shift of view that came in almost surreptitiously, [which said] that, in addition, inflation already does the smoothing out for you automatically, because of pulling out the smaller scales to larger scales. But if the small scales are very rough and they're pulled out to larger scales, the larger scales are rough. Or, to put it more mathematically, given any state now with a regular differential equation, there's some early state that matched it. This point had been made earlier, in fact, by John Stewart, about [Charles] Misner's mixmaster model.[37] The same idea had been attempted: that, independent of the initial conditions, by mixing processes [you arrive at the present universe]. But it's strictly speaking not true. However, that's perhaps not what you wanted me to talk about. Lightman: That's certainly relevant. Let me ask you about inflation itself, since we have referred to that. You already mentioned the history. When the paper first came out, you were thinking about other things and it took you a few months to read it. What is your view about the inflationary model now, either in the original form or one of the derivatives of it? Sciama: Well, in the end I think it's turned out a bit disappointing. It was a marvelous idea. It had various difficulties, as you know. You referred to the various variants that were produced.[38] It's now in what I call a Baroque state. There are so many variations, and there is no formalism, there is no reasonable grand unified theory and a cosmological formalism that gives a scheme that really does all that is required of it. There are many sub cases. Half a dozen people in the field have produced their own variations. A related question has also ended up rather disappointing, and that's baryosynthesis, which would occur, perhaps, just after inflation. Again, it was a glorious idea, and again it has not worked out in a kind of definitive way. There are many variations of the possibilities. Perhaps this is the nature of scientific research. I'm not saying therefore the idea is wrong, but it's a mess at the moment. I do think that it is oversold by some of the pundits, who no doubt find it an advantage to them, being a highly regarded theory, and it has all these virtues. I do have to say I think it's oversold. But it's still potentially a marvelous idea we just need more particle physics first, to get a grand unified theory that we might have faith in. Lightman: Let me ask you a sociological question: Why do you think that the inflationary idea has caught on so widely? Sciama: Two reasons, I suppose. One is the very elegant link with the most advanced questions of particle physics. Cosmologists like me are happy that particle physics plays a key role, but also the particle physicists enter the arena. And partly that [inflation] doubly delivered what it advertised. To some extent it does. It solves great problems. Those are two perfectly adequate reasons. Plus, it's not every day that there is a great new idea in cosmology. [There is the] fighting for recognition. So therefore people jump at it. And that's fine. It's only if then it's oversold, it's a shame. One ought to be rational. Lightman: Let me ask you about an observational discovery. Do you remember when you first heard about the work[39] of Geller, de Lapparent, and Huchra on the bubble-like structure of the distribution of galaxies? That was a few years ago. Sciama: Yes. Lightman: How did you react to that work? Sciama: I was very excited. That seems to me extremely important. I’ve talked to Margaret Geller about it. She visited Trieste where I work mainly now, and she spoke to the summer school I was organizing. She was saying quite rightly that the irregularities she's finding. [continue] to the largest length scale that she observes, and therefore why shouldn't it go on forever, and maybe the whole idea of a homogeneous universe is lousy. Lightman: How do you feel about that? Sciama: I said to her afterwards, over a meal, "look Margaret, there is one constraint that you have got to recognize, and that is the isotropy of the microwave background. If you put too much irregularity on too large a scale you conflict with that, and that's therefore an overall constraint, although it doesn't come in at 100 megaparsecs." Lightman: Unless our interpretation of that is wrong. Sciama: She said "what would you do if we go on making the studies, and we keep finding this effect, let's just say out to 1,000 megaparsecs?" I said, "Well, that would be the most devastating thing in physics and astrophysics. I don't know what I would do." There is no obvious, easy way out. To say we've totally misinterpreted the microwave background ... We considered that in the early days. There were jokes that if it's so isotropic, that's because your box which is measuring the thing is isotropic. But by now, it would be very, very difficult to reconcile a bumpy universe on a scale of 1,000 megaparsecs with the isotropy of the microwave background. Lightman: Does that worry you? Did that worry you? Sciama: No. I therefore feel confident that the universe has to smooth itself out on that scale. Obviously you can ask me a hypothetical question: "What would you do if it didn't?" But that would just be a crisis in physics. It's silly to speculate. Lightman: No, I don't want to ask you that hypothetical question. I would rather ask you about what your attitude is right now about the thing. Sciama: Well, my attitude is that it's an extremely important discovery because, of course, galaxy formation has to be understood. And it's related to the nature of the dark matter that we haven't talked about — how galaxies form and so forth. It was totally unexpected from a theoretical point of view. Therefore, it's a very, very important scientific discovery. Lightman: I gather from what you have just said, though, that it doesn't shake your belief in the large-scale homogeneity. Sciama: Well, fortunately, up to the scale that's now been found, it wouldn't conflict with the isotropy, although it's interestingly coming close to it. Lightman: A factor of five or six or something [in distance]. Sciama: That's right, and there are plans afoot to improve the measurements of the isotropy another factor of ten. If they don't find anything then, that would also be worrying, even from other points of view. Just structures you can see in the sky would then work at the one in a million level. Therefore, I'm confident they will find something. I think that's reasonable. But if not, then we will have this crisis. So, I just have to suppose that they have almost reached the limit [where the two types of observations are consistent]. It's a numerical matter. Obviously, there is some lumpiness on the scale of 1,000 megaparsecs. It's a matter of the numbers. But I would suppose that you wouldn't find the same effect [inhomogeneities in the distribution of galaxies] at a much larger scale. Perhaps a bit larger, but not ten times larger. So, I'm not worried about this. I'm very much excited because it's got to be understood. Lightman: You mentioned the dark matter. I guess there are two kinds of dark matter: there is the dark matter that we know is there, that takes omega from .01 to .1; and then there is the missing matter that would have to be there if inflation is right, that takes omega from 0.1 to 1. What is your belief in that range of possibilities? Sciama: Well, as a matter of fact, there is an argument going on at the moment between two of my old students, — George Ellis and Martin Rees — as to whether inflation does require an omega of 1. That's a rather technical matter, and I don't want to go into that. But the statement that [inflation] requires omega close to 1 is at least up for argument. Lightman: I see. Sciama: But let us suppose for the purpose of this discussion that inflation does require that. Then, of course, we have to identify that matter. But we still [also] have to identify the matter in galactic haloes. If you are just asking me about my view of the present position, I don't have a particularly individual view. We all agree that any proposal made never seems to work out quite nicely. In fact, just recently, with some colleagues, I have shown[40] that a particular candidate can probably been ruled out because of the supernova in the Magellanic cloud. This is the case of certain super symmetry particles, like photinos, if they have low mass, like 100 eV or something. They've been very seriously considered as candidates [for the missing mass]. I liked [those particles] for various reasons, such as when they decayed and made photons, these photons might show up in astronomy. I've written a number of papers about that recently.[41] But we've just shown that the neutrino data from the supernova and the energetics involved in that and in the neutron star that formed in the supernova — using the very latest ideas about the coupling between photinos and nucleons — can rule out the existence in nature of these [hypothesized] low-mass photinos. Otherwise, the supernova would radiate more energy than it could tolerate in that form. So that's a particular candidate that's gone. Then, of course, with the recent upper limit on the electron-type neutrino mass, both from the lab and from the supernova, [that neutrino] almost certainly can't be responsible [for the missing mass]. There are still candidates left, but I think perhaps the best candidate is the tau-type neutrino. Or a GeV mass photino. Lightman: Something that we have the least data on. Sciama: Well, strictly speaking, I believe that neutrino hasn't yet been detected, although there was a claim from CERN some while ago that, at last, it had. But I think that claim is not substantiated. I'm not seriously suggesting that it doesn't exist. Anyway, it's certainly not clear. Lightman: I gather that since you're not necessarily a strong proponent of inflation, you are not convinced that this missing matter has to be there. Sciama: With an omega of one? Lightman: Yes. I don't want to state your position; I'm just trying to understand it. Sciama: No, I take inflation very seriously. I was only saying — it's an objective fact, I think — that the theory is in a bit of a mess. That is objective. But some form of inflation may very well be correct. It's a marvelous idea. Whether it requires omega as 1, I'm still trying to join in this argument with my colleagues, and I'm not completely sure. I don't want my view to go on record, with two of my good friends next. No, seriously, if there were a decisive argument I would accept it. And, linking with our earlier discussion, since I can no longer claim that [the universe] has to be Einstein-de Sitter [flat] because of Mach, there is no requirement for omega being one. Therefore, it is an open question. Of course, there might be other reasons we don't yet understand why omega equals one. It's a nice thing from the point of view of theoretical physics. So I would be very happy with an omega of one on these vague grounds of fundamental theoretical-physics. It's great fun looking for a form of the dark matter, although equally you have to worry about galactic haloes anyway. Lightman: Yes, we know that's there. Sciama: We know that is there even though, in that case too, it's sometimes been slightly exaggerated how much there is. But I think even the skeptics agree that there is some [dark matter] there. We have to make this identification [of the dark matter], and that's still an unsolved problem. It's very embarrassing. Lightman: How do you feel that theory and observations have worked together in modern cosmology, let's say in the last 15 or 20 years? Sciama: I think extremely well. One example, which I mentioned, is this business about the number of neutrino types. It fits almost too well. If you take the present abundances of the helium-4 and the other light elements and do the theory of it and so on and worry about the neutron half-life, which isn't quite as well in line, you still find that you are only allowed three or four neutrino types. Whether it's 3 or 4 even depends on what you take as the errors of the observation. In particular, a very good friend of mine, Bernard Pagel, who has got the latest measurement of the helium abundance, puts a very low error on his work - and is, perhaps, a little optimistic about that — but he insists that you can't even have 4 neutrino types. Also, you can't have a low mass photino, unless there are tricks for suppressing it. If you don't suppress it, you can't even be allowed that. When this was first realized, the best limit from the lab on the number of neutrino types was several thousand. Now, with the data from CERN on the Z0 particle, it's down to about five. But that, by the way, was one of the things that, I believe, made the particle physicists take cosmology seriously — the fact that we could, ahead of them, make a very stringent constraint on this number. We really stuck our neck out, and then when they do the necessary experiment with their best equipment they get the same result. Now amazingly, as I am sure you know, the supernova, from the same kind of argument about how much energy is emitted, limits the number of neutrino types to perhaps five or six. So all this involves observations of all different kinds — both particle physics and astronomical. It all fits together. I think that's very remarkable. I don't know if that is the kind of thing you had in mind when you asked me. It's not the same as things like great big bubbles and so on, but it's a cosmological thing which involves a variety of arguments — from measuring helium abundances in compact galaxies, to measuring the half-life of a neutron, to measuring things about the Z0 particle, to measuring neutrinos from a supernova. Everything fits together in a consistent way. Lightman: Let me ask you this. Some of modern cosmology in recent years has extrapolated backwards in time to very close to the big bang. What is your attitude about those theoretical extrapolations? Do you think that they are justified? Do you think that's a good way we should be working right now in cosmology? Sciama: Well, I think asking "is it justified?" is not quite the same question as "is it a good way to proceed?" I think it's a good way to proceed, because we have got to proceed in some ordered way. Justifying it would mean I can try and argue and say you've got to do this. Clearly you can extrapolate back to the [period of] nuclear reactions. I know that you are talking about much earlier. Lightman: Much earlier, yes. Sciama: And it's clear that if, say, Linde's ideas[42] are right, where you get these different domains and so on, you might not extrapolate the simplest Robertson-Walker system right back to a very early [time]. But that's part of this kind of theory — whether this domain structure occurs or not. You can't say, "Okay, things got hot enough to make helium, but we won't discuss what it was like when it was hotter or denser." You've got to extrapolate back. Something unexpected or something you overlooked may occur, but this is the nature of the business, at least in astrophysics and cosmology. You proceed by making a natural extrapolation unless you have a strong reason for not doing so. Steady state would say I have another reason, which I bring in, which prevents me going to the densest state, but then if you have a good point to make you are allowed to consider that as an alternative. If that is not present, then of course you would say density, temperature, time relations are so and so in the simplest models; they would imply such and such parameters in the early stages, and that's important to the particle physics. So all that must be done. If you can actually find an explanation of why there is more mater than anti-matter in that process, it's fantastic. Clearly one must proceed that way. Lightman: You have mentioned some of this already, but let me ask you what you consider to be the major outstanding problems in cosmology right now? Sciama: I suppose it depends a bit if you are more interested in astrophysics or fundamental physics. For your fundamental physics — and I'm only saying what everybody says — the essential vanishing of the cosmological constant, because the grand unified theory type of discussion will rather naturally throw out a cosmological constant of 10120 times bigger than any value you have astronomically. With the possible exception of last week's paper on superstrings, which attempts to claim that their particular model gives you a zero cosmological constant, it's completely not understood why that fine tuning occurs. So I think — and I agree with what everybody says — from the point of view of fundamental physical theory, the [problem in] cosmology that is the most glaringly obvious and outstanding is [the question of the vanishing of the cosmological constant]. If you think more astronomically, there is a clutch of problems. Some of them are quite old, like is the universe going to expand forever or collapse or what? That is clearly still not settled. The nature of the dark matter is not settled. The way galaxies form is not settled. We don't even know, observationally, the ultimate scale of [the universe]. I would have said all of those are important problems. Plus the problems that inflation aims to solve. I don't know that there is one outstanding problem. That whole group of problems would be high on everybody's list. In the case of the cosmological constant, one could say that fundamental physicists would feel that is the key. The fact that they can't explain as simple a thing as that means that their grandest theories are still hopelessly missing something, in spite of all the things they might do. But, astronomically speaking, this whole set of problems is about equal in importance. I think most people would say the same. Lightman: Let me end with a couple of philosophical questions. Here you might have to put some of your scientific caution aside a little bit. If you could design the universe any way that you wanted to, how would you do it? Sciama: Can I first answer evasively? I have a view, which I am giving a talk on here in Cambridge in a couple of weeks, and I talked about at a meeting on the anthropic principle. I have a view which by-passes that question. So let me explain it to you, very briefly. The problem of course, as the phrase anthropic principle indicates, is that the universe has to be very fine-tuned to bring about the possibility of intelligent life and human beings, or if you like, myself. That is probably not controversial at all. The controversy is: what is the significance of that [statement]? Very rapidly, there seem to me three possibilities. The one I favor relates to your question. The first is just chance, which I think is really unpalatable. You can't disprove it. The second is purposiveness, or God or something. God exists and regards us as the highest point of creation. He wants us to come about, so he fine-tuned the universe to make jolly sure that we came about. And I find that unpalatable, although many people accept that. And then there is the third proposal, which I didn't invent, but I favor very much. Incidentally, Brandon Carter, when he was working with me, did one of his early, very influential things[43] on the anthropic principle. [According to this third proposal], there are many disjoint universes, where the laws and constants of nature are different from one to another. In fact, I would put it even stronger: any logically possible universe exists, not just for anthropic reasons. Of course the anthropic theory clearly [leads just to the type of universe] we're in. Lightman: Yes, the anthropic principle singles out the universe we're in. Sciama: And the whole problem is trivial. But there is another reason why I favor all these universes. People might say to me, "what about Ocam’s razor? You're crazy." But, on the other hand, I believe that [this third proposal] in a sense satisfies Ocam’s razor, because you want to minimize the arbitrary constraints which you place on the universe. Now, if you imagine all these logically possible universes, then you've got to think there is a committee, or maybe just a chairperson, who looks at this list and says "well, we're not going to have that one, and we won't have that one. We'll have that one, only that one." Now, that could have happened, but it seems to me a remarkable thing that that happened. It's much more satisfying to say that there is no constraint on the universe. All logically possible cases are realized, and we're in one of the few that allow us. So, that's not quite answering your question, but I prefer to say it that way. Lightman: That is an answer. Let me ask you this question: It could turn out, could it not, that when we find a theory of everything — if such a theory is possible — we will discover that there is only one way that the universe could have been formed, consistent with most general notions of relativity theory and quantum theory. That is a possibility, isn't it? Sciama: I would put it slightly differently. In my view, relativity wouldn't hold in some of these universes, or quantum theory wouldn't hold, as long as they're logically possible. Now there is a possibility, which is an extension of what you have asked and which I believe Spinoza advocated, which is that there is only one logically possible universe, period. Lightman: If that were the case, then one wouldn't have all these different branches involved with your third possibility. Sciama: That's correct. I mentioned that in an article I've written on my talk[44] at Venice, so I recognize that that would be a very attractive [possibility] in a way, and yet it doesn't solve this problem, because it's still puzzling why the one logically possible [world] should be just the one that has the fine-tuning that leads to us. That is still unexplained, although it is possible that there is this unique case, right? Lightman: Yes, so that would then go into the same as your first category: that [our universe] is an accident. Sciama: Yes, it's still an accident that the one logically possible case has this very remarkable structure — that doesn't seem to be part of what goes into showing that it's logically possible. Lightman: So you prefer the third possibility? I asked you which universe would you design. You would prefer the third case, where there are many different logically possible universes and there are no constraints, and we happened to be in one of those that allows life. Sciama: Could I add [something], in case you or anyone would think that this is an untestable proposal. It's not like Linde's chaotic inflation.[45] He has something a bit like that, but where [the regions with different physical properties] are all part of this universe. [In the possibility I have mentioned], these would really be disjoint universes. So people might say, "If it's disjoint and there is no way you get a message from it, what are you talking about? It's empty." Now, the whole point is it's not empty, and I make a prediction which is testable. So let me just explain this very rapidly to give some sort of [idea]. Lightman: Go ahead. I want to check the tape, but I have another, so talk as long as you wish. Sciama: Except that we ought to go for coffee at some point or I will fade out. Let's consider all the cases which do lead to me. Now we would not expect that we're in a very special one of those. All I know is that I exist, and I'm happy enough with that. If the universe is unique, however, you might expect a very special initial condition, and Roger Penrose and differently Steven Hawking have both made proposals[46] for the special initial conditions, which I'm sure you know. Lightman: Yes. Sciama: Now my view, or my prediction — and I'm very proud of this sentence which more or less ends my talk — my prediction is that Penrose is wrong and Hawking is wrong, because if there are these other universes, and ones very close to ours, equivalent to ours, then we should be in a generic universe of the set that could lead to me. Therefore, I would not expect a beautiful, elegant, mathematical ersatz, like the Penrose one or the Hawking one, to apply to the initial universe. The initial conditions would be messy, but not too messy, or I [life] wouldn't emerge. But a bit messy. Therefore, when you do a measurement, in principle, of the initial conditions — and in Roger's case you can even make it the isotropy of the background because his statement that the Weyl tensor vanishes at the origin of the universe makes the universe isotropic, and in Steve's case it may be a bit more complicated — I would predict them to be messy, and not describable by a simple, mathematical, elegant statement. Lightman: You would predict that [the initial conditions] would be as messy as possible and still allow life. Sciama: Of course, to make real sense of that you need a measure theory of metrics, and that measure theory is very difficult and hasn't yet been achieved, so I can't do a technical job on this at the moment, but the fact that I make a physical prediction means that there is physics in my proposal. It's not just empty metaphysics. Lightman: If you have a measure of what messiness is and uniqueness is and what a generic metric is, and all of that, if you can make some quantitative measure of that. Sciama: That's right. So if you measure the early anisotropy and it's so and so — delta T over T is some number — does that favor me or [Penrose]. Lightman: You would also have to know what range of anisotropy would allow life, to know whether you have the generic amount of anisotropy, which you are sort of in the middle. Let's suppose that at the Planck time, delta T over T has to be less than a certain value to allow life. You have to know what the value is. Sciama: That's right. Lightman: So you are saying that in principle, what you are saying is testable. Sciama: That's good enough for the moment. My proposal, therefore, is a proposal of physics. That's the idea. Lightman: There is a place in Steve Weinberg's book, The First Three Minutes, where he says that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.[47] Sciama: I remember. Lightman: Have you ever thought about this question of whether the universe has a point? Sciama: I have thought about it, and I can't think of any point it has. It's the old question about why there is something rather than nothing. In fact, Sidney Coleman has written a recent paper[48] called “Why there is Nothing Rather than Something”, referring to the cosmological constant. If you're going to have some logically possible cases, even one, you ought to have the whole lot. But why have any? I find that quite inscrutable. Of course, the very concept of a meaning is perhaps too anthropomorphic. I don't know. But I have nothing to contribute to that. Obviously I have thought about it, but I have nothing to contribute. Lightman: Your explanation number two for your anthropic idea was not unrelated to this. Sciama: But it doesn't really explain. I'm allowing that when I talked in Venice, I permitted that as a conceivable explanation. In fact, it was a Jesuit astronomer who spoke after me, and he said "I am prepared to have all Sciama's universes. I don't mind that these days. But there is God in all of them." But as far as I'm concerned, I'm afraid — and I'm not a professional here — the word "God" is just a word. When this Jesuit spoke after me, he knew so much about God. It was amazing. God was a person, he said. So we have to say "he," "she" or "it," because those are the only personal pronouns in English — not just that God was some force that made the world, it was a person. How can he possibly know such things? It's ridiculous. As far as I'm concerned, it's just a word, and I sometimes argue with my friends and I jokingly say, "Suppose I asked you does the "spongula" exist?" In other words, using a word doesn't mean that there is something that correlates with it. If you had — and this is a schoolboy argument — if you had a concept of something that made the world, and it was needed in order that the world be made, then who made that person or thing or whatever it was, and so on. These are old, standard arguments, but they still have force as far as I'm concerned. It's true that people have, internally, a religious feeling, which they use the word God to express, but how a feeling inside of you can tell you that a thing made the whole universe? There is no relation between the two matters of concern. Therefore, while I'm prepared for and I can't rule out that there is another order of structure than ordinary matter, I know nothing about that order. There could be many orders, and so on. Therefore, the word God just doesn't denote any structure. Lightman: That's a good place to end the interview.
1098	dbpedia	1	81	https://researchandinnovationportsmouth.com/2018/03/14/professor-stephen-hawking-a-tribute/	en	Professor Stephen Hawking: a tribute	https://researchandinnov…to-use-image.jpg	https://researchandinnov…to-use-image.jpg	[ "https://researchandinnovationportsmouth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/white-line-linear.png?w=224", "https://researchandinnovationportsmouth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/stephen-hawking-free-to-use-image.jpg?w=816", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/ffeba4a2fae73b20abfe429b6a87f034eb9333ebbce84d5f93fb73f5269f3f73?s=100&d=monsterid&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/d128dee2756a46092a1f252c8352a90fc38b8a4a92406af466014d69fb77afff?s=32&d=monsterid&r=G", "https://researchandinnovationportsmouth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/cropped-filetodownload199986en.jpg?w=50", "https://researchandinnovationportsmouth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/cropped-filetodownload199986en.jpg?w=50", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Suzi Edwards" ]	2018-03-14T00:00:00	Members of the University’s Institute of the Cosmology and Gravitation pay tribute to Physicist Professor Stephen Hawking, who died this morning. Professor David Wands Director, Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation “Stephen Hawking was one of the great scientists of our time. He had the ambition and the ability to tackle fundamental questions about gravity and quantum mechanics, their…	en	https://researchandinnov…99986en.jpg?w=32	Research and Innovation	https://researchandinnovationportsmouth.com/2018/03/14/professor-stephen-hawking-a-tribute/	Members of the University’s Institute of the Cosmology and Gravitation pay tribute to Physicist Professor Stephen Hawking, who died this morning. Professor David Wands Director, Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation “Stephen Hawking was one of the great scientists of our time. He had the ambition and the ability to tackle fundamental questions about gravity and quantum mechanics, their role in black holes and the origin of the universe. He realised that black holes can emit radiation, which we now call Hawking radiation, which eventually leads them to evaporate. He also discovered that the same quantum effect in the very early universe can lead to small fluctuations in the density of the hot thermal plasma, a fraction of a second after the big bang, and this could lead to all the structures that we observe in the cosmos around us, galaxies, stars and, ultimately planets and people. “He was a huge inspiration to me personally when I was a student at Cambridge. At the time he was just writing the first draft of his book “A Brief History of Time” and he gave a series of lectures for undergraduates. The lectures were optional, not part of any exam, but we turned out in droves to hear him speak. Sitting on the steps in the lecture theatre to hear the words of the great man. He was already a celebrity in Cambridge but he soon became a global phenomenon. “I was also lucky enough to attend several scientific meetings which Hawking organised in Cambridge, where many of the world’s leading scientists would gather to present their work argue about science and enjoy Stephen’s hospitality. Last year he celebrated his 75th birthday with a series of talks, but also a reception back at his house where he opened his home to scientists from around the world.” Professor Claudia Maraston Professor of Astrophysics “When I was awarded the Eddington medal for theoretical astrophysics this year, my immediate thoughts went to Stephen, the real symbol of such an award. Stephen got the Eddington medal for his studies on black holes in 1975, when I was a little girl. This feeling of sharing the award with such an eminent scientist and a symbol of my generation gave me a feeling of infinite professional accomplishment and internal peace. “I have admired Stephen since I was a teenager, also because of his condition. His work showed to me the infinite power of mind and strong will. We should also remember Stephen for this. “When I was approaching the end of grammar school, I could not decide whether to study literature and history, or astrophysics. My mother gave me his book ‘A Brief History of Time’ as a present and I read it over a weekend – I decided.” Dr Marco Bruni Reader in Cosmology and Gravitation “This is sad news for ICG, for astrophysics and cosmology, and physics as a whole! Stephen Hawking was the second PhD student of Dennis Sciama (our building is named after him), following George Ellis, my supervisor and that of Roy Maartens, and was mentored by Roger Penrose. Together with Penrose, Hawking developed a new understanding of singularities in General Relativity: in essence, the generality and unavoidability of a Big Bang in any cosmology within General Relativity is due to their theorems. With Ellis, Penrose, Martin Rees and other Sciama students, Hawking promoted a renaissance of General Relativity and its application in astrophysics. With Ellis, Hawking wrote what became one of the most influential books on General Relativity, ‘The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time’. “But the work that really promoted Hawking to stardom among physicists at large is his study of black hole evaporation, or simply Hawking evaporation, a phenomenon where he was the first to marry quantum mechanics and gravity, at least in this specific context. Hawking evaporation is today studied even in lab experiments, thanks to “analog gravity”, the use of other physical systems, such as sound waves in a moving fluid, to model general relativity phenomena. Later, he became famous within the public at large with his book ‘A brief history of time’. “Hawking has been, and always will be, an inspiring scientist, not only for his imagination, but also for his resilience in pursuing a scientific career despite his illness.” Professor Bob Nichol Director, Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation
1098	dbpedia	1	97	https://www.tiktok.com/%40escape.to.orbit/video/7186818197583056170	en	Make Your Day			[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null
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"https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/emily-reeves-sm-128.jpg", "https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/granville-sewell-landscape-e1536564387332-64x64.png", "https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Robert_F_Shedinger-64x64.png", "https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/gsimmons-tn-128-128-64x64.jpg", "https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/wesley-j-smith-2021-cropped-128.jpg", "https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/rob-stadler-small.png", "https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Neil-Thomas-2021-scaled-128.jpg", "https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/jonathan-wells-paradigm-still-square-128.jpg", "https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/John-West-headshot-64x64.jpg", "https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Jonathan-Witt-2022-128px-64x64.jpg", "https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/physics.png", "https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/uploads/mt-import/COBE_cmb_fluctuations.jpg", "https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/uploads/mt-import/Science-Fictions-square.gif", "https://www.discovery.org/m/2023/06/Denyse-OLeary-2023-03-09-smaller-600x600.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Denyse O'Leary", "Denyse O'Leary" ]	2013-10-20T16:21:41+00:00	What help has materialism been in understanding the universe’s beginnings?	en	https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/themes/evolutionary/bases/images/favicon/favicon.ico	Evolution News	https://evolutionnews.org/2013/10/big_bang_exterm/	What help has materialism been in understanding the universe’s beginnings? Many in cosmology have never made any secret of their dislike of the Big Bang, the generally accepted start to our universe first suggested by Belgian priest Georges Lemaître (1894-1966). On the face of it, that is odd. The theory accounts well enough for the evidence. Nothing ever completely accounts for all the evidence, of course, because evidence is always changing a bit. But the Big Bang has enabled accurate prediction. In which case, its hostile reception might surprise you. British astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) gave the theory its name in one of his papers — as a joke. Another noted astronomer, Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), exclaimed in 1933, “I feel almost an indignation that anyone should believe in it — except myself.” Why? Because “The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural.” One team of astrophysicists (1973) opined that it “involves a certain metaphysical aspect which may be either appealing or revolting.” Robert Jastrow (1925-2008), head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, initially remarked, “On both scientific and philosophical grounds, the concept of an eternal Universe seems more acceptable than the concept of a transient Universe that springs into being suddenly, and then fades slowly into darkness.” And Templeton Prize winner (2011) Martin Rees recalls his mentor Dennis Sciama’s dogged commitment to an eternal universe, no-Big Bang model: For him, as for its inventors, it had a deep philosophical appeal — the universe existed, from everlasting to everlasting, in a uniquely self-consistent state. When conflicting evidence emerged, Sciama therefore sought a loophole (even an unlikely seeming one) rather as a defense lawyer clutches at any argument to rebut the prosecution case. Evidence forced theorists to abandon their preferred eternal-universe model. From the mid 1940s, Hoyle attempted to disprove the theory he named. Until 1964, when his preferred theory, the Steady State, lost an evidence test. In 1965, an unexpected discovery both confirmed and publicized the Big Bang: Two physicists at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, accidentally discovered the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the radiation apparently left over from the origin. Then in 1990, NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite confirmed Big Bang cosmology with more accurate measurements. A 2011 discovery of gas generated minutes after the Big Bang further confirmed predictions. That wasn’t good news for those who track the progress of science by the progress of atheism. “These men and women have built their entire worldview on atheism,” says cosmologist Frank Tipler: “When I was a student at MIT in the late 1960s, I audited a course in cosmology from the physics Nobelist Steven Weinberg. He told his class that of the theories of cosmology, he preferred the Steady State Theory because ‘it least resembled the account in Genesis.'” So disapproval snowballed along with evidence rather than with disconfirmation. In 1989, Nature‘s physics editor John Maddox predicted, “Apart from being philosophically unacceptable, the Big Bang is an over-simple view of how the Universe began, and it is unlikely to survive the decade ahead.” In 1992, Geoffrey Burbidge of the University of California at San Diego taxed his colleagues with rushing off to join “the First Church of Christ of the Big Bang.” Stephen Hawking opined in 1996, “Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. … There were therefore a number of attempts to avoid the conclusion that there had been a big bang.” Hawking himself offered one such attempt: He tried designing a design-free universe. To make his cosmology work, he relied on imaginary time rather than real time, explaining, “Maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.” Cute inversion of imaginary vs. real. The problem is that one must convert one’s results back to real time to say anything meaningful about the real world. Another alternative was an oscillating universe that swings back and forth, into and out of existence. Quantum cosmologist Christopher Isham recalls, Perhaps the best argument in favor of the thesis that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas, such as continuous creation or an oscillating universe, being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his/her theory. In any event, the Maddox obituary (“unlikely to survive the next decade”) was certainly premature. Though disliked, the Big Bang has accounted well enough for the evidence that it can’t just be dismissed, exploded, or destroyed. The Big Bang stubbornly refused to provide obvious support for materialism. Worse, things got worse. Not only, on the evidence, does the universe look like it was suddenly created, it also looks finely tuned. New Scientist‘s Marcus Chown notes: … it seems as if the strength of any of the fundamental forces or masses of the fundamental particles were different by even a small amount, they would not have created a universe with galaxies, stars, planets and life. Or as cosmologist Max Tegmark explains: If the cosmological constant were much larger, the universe would have blown itself apart before galaxies could form. A reasonable explanation would be design in nature. But materialism operates on the principle that reason and the human mind are an illusion. So that explanation can’t be true, by definition. There has to be a more acceptable alternative. As we shall see, it is remarkable what people determined to explain something away will see as an acceptable alternative.
1098	dbpedia	2	95	https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/inertia/	en	Inertia	https://static.scientifi…627F1_source.jpg		[ "https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/1413FE4F-6505-4A8C-B5FFED5D45F627F1_source.jpg", "https://www.scientificamerican.com/static/assets/footerProductImg-f6732134.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Dennis Sciama" ]	1957-02-01T05:00:00+00:00	Newton supposed that inertia was an independent property of matter. Some later physicists have argued that it is due to the interaction of all the matter in the universe	en	https://www.scientificamerican.com/account/sciam-favicon.ico	Scientific American	https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/inertia/
1098	dbpedia	3	37	https://www.instagram.com/science._.a2z/reel/Ck85s4Vhpmg/	en	Instagram	https://static.cdninstag…/VsNE-OHk_8a.png	https://static.cdninstag…/VsNE-OHk_8a.png	[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	https://static.cdninstag…/VsNE-OHk_8a.png		null
1098	dbpedia	2	94	https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2017/thorne/biographical/	en	Kip S. Thorne – Biographical	https://www.nobelprize.o…ull-width-2x.jpg	https://www.nobelprize.o…ull-width-2x.jpg	[ "https://www.nobelprize.org/images/thorne-15223-content-portrait-mobile-tiny.jpg", "https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2020/01/thorne-bio-1.jpg", "https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2020/01/thorne-bio-2.jpg", "https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2020/01/thorne-bio-3.jpg", "https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/10/nobelprizes_2023-1024x676.jpg", "https://www.nobelprize.org/wp-content/themes/nobelprize/assets/images/spinner.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 was divided, one half awarded to Rainer Weiss, the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves"	en	https://www.nobelprize.o…avicon-50x50.png	NobelPrize.org	https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2017/thorne/biographical/	Kip S. Thorne Biographical My youth I was born in 1940 in Logan, Utah, USA, a college town of 16,000, nestled in a verdant valley in the Rocky Mountains. My father, David Wynne Thorne, was a professor of soil chemistry at the Utah Agricultural College (since renamed Utah State University). Over his lifetime he had a major impact, through research and consulting, on arid-land agriculture, not only in the USA but also in the Middle East, Pakistan, and India. He was an intellectual inspiration to me. My mother, Alison Comish Thorne, with a PhD in economics, aspired to be an academic, too. However, her career was thwarted by Utah’s nepotism law that forbad the wife of a University employee from also working for the University; so she devoted most of her life to community organizing and community activism, and to raising and mentoring five children. Her lifetime impact on the community led the University to award her an honorary doctorate in 2000, when she was 86; and in 2004 when she died, a giant headline in the local newspaper, the Herald Journal, read “Old Radical Dies”. Our parents encouraged my siblings and me to pursue our own interests, treasure our individuality, think for ourselves, and not automatically accept the dictates of the culture in which we lived. This and much more about my youth are described in my Mother’s autobiography, Leave the Dishes in the Sink: Adventures of an Activist in Conservative Utah. As a small boy, watching plows create snowbanks as high as 3 meters in front of our home, I aspired to become a snow plow driver. Then, when I was eight, my mother took me to a lecture about the solar system at the local Mormon church (Logan’s fifth ward), a lecture by a professor from the University. I was enthralled, so my Mother suggested we make a model of the solar system on the sidewalk alongside our home. We drew the sun as a circle four and a half feet in diameter (about a meter), and then she showed me how, mathematically, to take the solar system’s actual dimensions and scale them down to this 4.5-foot sun. With our calculations completed we drew each planet as a circle at the appropriate distance from our sun. It was amazing to me: the Earth was a half-inch diameter circle a bit beyond the fourth home north of ours; and Pluto was a tiny circle about 3 miles away, in North Logan. I was hooked. I began to devour everything I could find about astronomy in local libraries and bookstores. Five years later I discovered, in a bookstore in Salt Lake City, a paperback edition of One, Two, Three, …, Infinity by the physicist George Gamow. It dazzled me. It revealed the role of astronomy as a subfield of physics, the role of mathematics as the language of physics, the beauty of Einstein’s relativity, and the power of physical laws to explain the universe. I read it three times and decided I wanted to become a physicist, pursuing a quest to understand the universe. Fourteen years later, when I had started publishing my own research, George Gamow sent me a letter inquiring about ideas in one of my publications. Thrilled, I wrote back, telling him I was a physicist because of having read his book three times. In response, he sent me a copy of One, Two, Three, … Infinity in Turkish, with an inscription “To Kip so that he would not be able to re-read it a 4th time”. That book remains one of my most treasured possessions. My mother encouraged each of her other children to pursue their own chosen dreams. My sister Barrie, two years younger than I, became a professor of sociology. My sister Sandra, eight years younger, became one of the first female forest rangers for the US Forest Service. My sister Avril, nine years younger, became a professor of psychology. And my brother, Lance, eleven years younger, became an artist in wood. Our ancestors, on all genealogical lines, joined the Mormon church and migrated to Utah on foot, on horseback, or in covered wagons before the railroad arrived (1869). Throughout my youth, our parents, Alison and Wynne, taught an adult Sunday school class, focusing on comparisons between Mormon thought and culture, and other religions and the ideas of great philosophers. For me as a youth, Logan and its Mormon culture and history provided an idyllic environment, and I still treasure my Mormon roots. However, in my teenage years, as I learned more and more about science and discovered its power for explaining Nature and the Universe in testable and tested ways, and for producing technology that can improve dramatically the lives of people, and as I contrasted this with the more magical and less verifiable character of religion, I gradually lost interest in religion and even in whether God exists. (Much later, when my mother was 75 years old, at her urging, she and all her children resigned our membership in the Mormon Church, because of the church’s discrimination against women. My sister Barrie had already been excommunicated for her feminist activities.) As a teen ager in the 1950s, I had an active social life. I played saxophone and clarinet in a dance band, participated in exhibition dancing, edited the high school yearbook, and was on the high school debate squad, partnering with the future All-American and All-Pro football player Merlin Olsen. But my deepest passion continued to be physics. While others were building telescopes, I – having been captivated by Mr. Thomas’s high school course on axiomatic Euclidean geometry in two and three dimensions – formulated it in four dimensions. I recall my excitement upon discovering, through a sequence of lemmas and a theorem, that in four dimensions the intersection of two planes is generically a point, not a plane. In the summer of my eighth birthday I was at loose ends, so my mother sent me to typing school at Logan High School. “This may be useful to you someday,” she said; and indeed it became very useful decades later, in the era of computers. In my fifteenth summer my parents enrolled me in a geology course and an analytic geometry course at the University, opening my eyes to phenomena I had not dreamed existed. Thereafter, throughout high school, I continued taking an occasional university course. My university student years Despite my university experience as a teenager, when I arrived at Caltech as a freshman in September 1958, I found myself overwhelmed. I had had no calculus, I was a slow reader, and it quickly became evident that my thinking was slower than that of most other Caltech freshmen. I stumbled and struggled for a year and a half, but gradually developed my own ways of mastering the physics and mathematics that were coming at me like water from the proverbial fire hose. Most valuable of all was a series of notebooks that I developed for myself – one for each major class that I took. In each I wrote down the most important ideas and results I was learning, in my own words and equations, and formulated my own mathematical proof and/or physical explanation for each major result. I continued this through graduate school, then abandoned it for about 15 years, and then started up again in the late 1970s, when I was trying to master new topics and tools relevant to astrophysics and to gravitational-wave experiment. I still find myself consulting those old notebooks from time to time. By the middle of my sophomore year at Caltech, I got my feet under myself and started enjoying my studies thoroughly, and started moving through difficult material at a reasonable pace. In the summers before my first, second, and third years of college (1958, 1959, and 1960), I worked as an engineer’s assistant in the Great Salt Lake Desert, designing solid propellant rocket engines for the Thiokol Chemical Corporation’s Minute Man Intercontinental Ballistic Missile – engines that would later power the space shuttle. This gave me my first taste of “big science”, it showed me how various components of an R&D program should come together on a predefined time schedule, and it showed me how Nature can confound a research program: hot, turbulent gas swirling near the entrance to the rocket nozzles kept eroding the slowest-burning solid propellant (the “inhibitor”) so rapidly that the turbulence ate into the rocket casing, blowing the nozzles off the engine. The explosions, in test after test of our evolving design, were spectacular and frustrating. In the summer before my fourth college year (1961), I got a job doing theoretical astrophysics research under the inspiring mentorship of the astronomer Jesse Greenstein. The result was my first published paper, on “The Theory of Synchrotron Radiation from Stars with Dipole Magnetic Fields”. Ever since reading One, Two, Three, … Infinity, I had been fascinated by relativity. During my fourth year at Caltech I decided that was the direction I wanted to go for my PhD, so I spent many hours in the Caltech physics library trying to read relativity articles in research journals such as Reviews of Modern Physics. It soon became evident that by far the most interesting research on general relativity was being done by John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton University and his students, so I applied there for graduate school – despite Jesse Greenstein’s warnings that the only significant application of relativity was the expansion of the universe. In Jesse’s view, and that of many other eminent astronomers and physicists of the era, relativity was a dead end. At Princeton, John Wheeler was an even more inspiring mentor than I expected, and his young associate Charles Misner added to the inspiration. From Wheeler and Misner I learned about black holes, neutron stars, singularities, and geometrodynamics (the ill-understood nonlinear dynamics of curved spacetime). In parallel, I sat in on the weekly research group meetings of Robert Dicke, whose focus was experiments to test general relativity; and there I met and admired postdoc Rainer (“Rai”) Weiss. In that era, when relativity theory was far ahead of experiment and was only weakly tested, I somehow understood that the interface of the theory with experiment could become a fruitful and exciting area of research, so I not only immersed myself in Dicke’s experimental-gravity milieux; I also spent much of my first year at Princeton getting hands-on experience with experiment. In the bowels of the Princeton physics building there was a cyclotron (particle accelerator) on which, under the mentoring of assistant professor Edwin Kashy, I explored the internal structure of the nuclei of Rhodium atoms. This was rather far from relativity, but that experience (like my earlier experience with big science at Thiokol) would turn out to be extremely useful later, when I embarked on gravitational wave research. In the summer of 1963, I spent eight weeks in a relativity summer school at the École d’Été de Physique Theorique in the French Alps. There Wheeler and Dicke gave inspiring lectures, and I met gravitational waves in depth for the first time, in lectures by Rainer Sachs (University of Texas) on the elegant, mathematical theory of the waves, and by Joseph Weber (University of Maryland) on his pioneering experimental effort to discover gravitational waves from the distant universe. I hiked with Weber in the surrounding Alps, we talked at length about his experimental program, I became a convert to the importance and possibilities of gravitational wave experiments, and I became rather fond of Weber himself. I completed my PhD in June 1965 and spent one more postdoctoral year at Princeton, honing my theory research skills. In 1966 Willy Fowler (who would win the 1983 Nobel Prize for explaining the origin of the elements in stars) invited me back to Caltech as a postdoc, and I jumped at the opportunity. In May, while driving from Princeton to Caltech to start my new job, I stopped in Chicago for discussions with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (who would share the 1983 Nobel Prize with Fowler). Over the following decade both Fowler and Chandrasekhar made major contributions to my chosen areas of research and influenced me substantially (Fowler on relativistic stars; Chandrasekhar on black holes and gravitational waves), and both became dear friends of mine. Early years as a Caltech professor When I arrived back at Caltech in 1966, there was a paucity of theoretical physics faculty working outside elementary particle theory. Particle theory was in the doldrums and I was bubbling over with research problems involving black holes, neutron stars, and gravitational waves, so a number of outstanding physics graduate students gravitated toward me, looking for interesting research problems. By late winter, although just a postdoc, I had built a research group of five graduate students and was having a wonderful time working with them. Then in the spring, to my great surprise, the University of Chicago – under Chandrasekhar’s influence – offered me a tenured associate professorship. To my great joy, Caltech matched the offer, and almost overnight I was a tenured member of the Caltech faculty. One of the great things about Caltech is the support that the administration and one’s colleagues provide to young faculty members, to help them reach their potential. Maintaining a research group of five or six graduate students and several postdocs, as I was doing almost from the outset, is not cheap. Initially most of the expenses were covered by Fowler’s research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and from the Office of Naval Research. In 1968, when Fowler became a member of the National Science Board, which oversees NSF, he arranged for me to take over from him as the Principal Investigator on his large NSF grant. Under my leadership, that grant was renewed time and time again over the next forty years and remained my largest source of research funding until my formal retirement in 2009, whereupon my successor, Yanbei Chen, became the grant’s Principal Investigator, and remains so today, after several renewals. My group’s initial research topics – black holes, neutron stars and gravitational waves – were all subtopics in a brand-new field called relativistic astrophysics. This new field grew out of the discoveries of quasars (1963; Maarten Schmidt at Caltech), pulsars (1967; Tony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell at the University of Cambridge), cosmic X-ray sources (1962; Riccardo Giacconi and colleagues at American Science and Engineering), and the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB 1964; Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Labs, and then Robert Dicke and his group at Princeton). Thanks to these observational discoveries, relativity was suddenly relevant to a whole lot more in the universe than just its expansion. The merger of these discoveries with the theoretical ideas of Wheeler (Princeton), Yakov Borisovich Zel’dovich (Moscow), Dennis Sciama (Cambridge), Fowler, Chandrasekhar, and others, gave rise to relativistic astrophysics. Very early in the development of this new field (summer 1965; before moving to Caltech), I attended the Fifth International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation, in London. There I met and initiated close friendships with a few physicists who would profoundly influence my life and career. Most important, perhaps, were Stephen Hawking (a student of Sciama) and Igor Novikov (a young colleague of Zel’dovich). Hawking had contracted Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis only two years earlier. In London, walking with a cane and talking with modestly mutilated enunciation, he lectured about his recent insights into the big bang. I was mesmerized by his science and also his personality. We talked in the conference corridors and found ourselves kindred spirits. Although, in the subsequent half century, Hawking’s research on black holes and the big bang has greatly impacted my gravitational wave work, we have never collaborated on research, and when together we have spent more time discussing life and death and love, than physics; so I shall describe the details of our friendship elsewhere, not here. In London, Igor Novikov lectured about new insights in relativistic astrophysics that he and Zel’dovich had been developing. I had studied the Russian language as a Caltech undergraduate, and in London I found that my Russian was about as good (or bad!) as Novikov’s English, so we stumbled along in a semi-coherent mixture of the two languages, exchanging astrophysics ideas and initiating a friendship that would soon grow strong and deep. In 1968, with my new Caltech research group beginning to make an impact, I was well prepared to take advantage of the next international conference on general relativity, this time in Tbilisi (Soviet Georgia). There I met Zel’dovich in person for the first time, and Zel’dovich introduced me to Vladimir Braginsky, who was building a research program in gravitational wave experiment at Moscow University in parallel with Joseph Weber’s in America. This was the beginning of my career-long research collaboration with the groups of Braginsky (on gravitational waves and experimental tests of relativity) and of Zel’dovich and Novikov (on black holes and neutron stars, and later on wormholes and time travel). To facilitate our collaborations, Braginsky, Novikov and I began traveling back and forth between Moscow and Pasadena with typically one trip per year in one direction or the other – despite the raging cold war. For a few details, see my book Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. During my first dozen years on the Caltech faculty, 1966–1978, gravitational waves were only a modest portion of my group’s research portfolio. Our larger foci were black holes, and other astrophysical phenomena where gravity is so strong that it must be described by Einstein’s relativity laws rather than Newton’s laws – primarily neutron stars and dense, relativistic clusters of stars. My students and postdocs (sometimes with a little help from me) used general relativity to analyze the structures and astrophysical roles of these objects, and also how they would behave when disturbed – their pulsations and their emission of gravitational waves. This fed into the main thrust of our gravitational wave research: our evolving vision for the information that can be extracted from gravitational waves, when they are ultimately detected; and more broadly, our vision for the future of gravitational wave astronomy; see my Nobel Lecture. In the next to last section of this biography, I describe the style in which we carried out this research. That style included extensive interactions with colleagues from other institutions, including Zel’dovich, Novikov, Braginsky, and also Leonid Grishchuk in Russia; Hawking and Brandon Carter in the UK; Wheeler, Chandrasekhar, Fowler, James Bardeen and James Hartle in the US; and many more. Caltech’s early research in gravitational-wave experiment In his Part I of our joint Nobel Lecture, Rai Weiss describes the early history of experimental research on gravitational waves, including (very briefly) at Caltech. Here I shall add some details about the genesis and early years of the Caltech experimental effort. My early ideas about gravitational-wave experiment were influenced profoundly by Vladimir Braginsky. After Weber’s 1969 announcement that he might be seeing gravitational waves, Braginsky (1969–1972) was the first other experimenter to build and operate gravitational wave detectors using the “bar” technology that Weber had initiated, and was the first to fail to find the waves that Weber appeared to be detecting (1972), and among the first to move on toward second generation detectors (1974). In 1972, after Rai Weiss wrote his seminal paper proposing the gravitational wave detectors – “gravitational interferometers” – that would ultimately be used in LIGO (see my Nobel Lecture), I turned to Braginsky for insights and advice about future gravitational wave experiments. It was my many discussions with Braginsky in 1972–1976, as well as those with Weiss, that convinced me gravitational wave detection was truly feasible and led me in 1976 to propose to Caltech that we create a research group working on gravitational wave experiment. My first choice to lead our Caltech group was Braginsky. After many months of struggling with the idea of moving from Moscow to Caltech, he told me No. Even if he managed to get himself and his family through the iron curtain to California, the consequences for his professional colleagues and friends left back in Moscow could be dire, he thought. When I asked Braginsky whom we should go after to lead the Caltech effort, at the top of his list was the same person as Weiss suggested to me: Ronald Drever of the University of Glasgow. Why? Because of Drever’s high creativity and his experimental insights. (For example, Drever had already proposed operating the arms of gravitational interferometers as Fabry-Perot cavities, which has turned out to be a major improvement on Weiss’s original design.) So, I suggested Drever to the Caltech physics and astronomy faculty, and after many months of learning about him and other candidates, they chose him to initiate our new experimental effort. The Caltech administration made him an offer which after many many more months, in 1979, he ultimately accepted. The next year we recruited Stan Whitcomb from the University of Chicago to assist Drever in leading our experimental effort. (Today Whitcomb is the LIGO Laboratory’s Chief Scientist.) As a precursor to Drever’s acceptance, the Caltech administration pledged roughly two million dollars of Caltech’s own private funds for the construction of laboratories and equipment for the new experimental group, including, most importantly, funds toward a prototype gravitational interferometer with 40-meter arms. This was the first substantial investment in gravitational interferometer research by any institution in the US: Neither MIT (Weiss’s home institution) nor the National Science Foundation had yet been willing to commit significant funds for such research. With Caltech on board, Weiss, Drever, and I, working with NSF’s Richard Isaacson, were able to trigger significant NSF funding from 1979 onward. [I take great pride in Caltech’s early and enthusiastic commitment to this field and unwavering support from the 1970s through today. Caltech’s atmosphere of collegiality, intellectual ferment, and easy communication across fields of science, and our administration’s enthusiastic efforts to help us find the funding needed for realizing our dreams, have anchored me to Caltech throughout my career, as they also anchored Richard Feynman and many others of my colleagues.] For me, the late 1970s and early 1980s were a particularly exciting period: Drever, commuting back and forth between Caltech and Glasgow, made several inventions that would significantly improve gravitational interferometers: power recycling (recycling unused light back into the interferometer – which was also invented independently by Roland Schilling in Garching, Germany). resonant recycling (tuning the response of the interferometer to waves of different frequencies by recycling some of the signal back into the interferometer before extracting it. A few years later, Brian Meers improved on Drever’s version of this and it got renamed signal recycling). the PDH technique for stabilizing the frequency of lasers (adapted by Drever from an earlier microwave idea by Robert Pound, and then first demonstrated by John Hall and Drever in Hall’s lab in Colorado). This is now widely used in other areas of science and technology. While Drever was inventing and commuting, Whitcomb and the students and postdocs that he and Drever hired were focused on building and perfecting the 40-meter prototype interferometer on the Caltech campus, and with it exploring technical issues that had to be surmounted in any ultimately successful gravitational interferometer. In parallel, Carlton Caves and my other theory students and I – with very helpful input from Drever and Whitcomb – embarked on Quantum Nondemolition research: an effort to devise ways to circumvent the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in gravitational interferometers and other gravitational wave detectors. This effort was triggered by insights from Braginsky, much of it was in collaboration with Braginsky and his group, and it continues to this day; see my Nobel Lecture for details. LIGO In 1984 – building on successes with the interferometer prototypes at MIT, Caltech, Glasgow and Garching, and building on a feasibility study for kilometer-sized interferometers that Weiss and his MIT group and Whitcomb had carried out – Drever, Weiss and I founded LIGO as a Caltech/MIT collaboration. MIT was unwilling to make any substantial institutional commitment to LIGO until a few years later, so Caltech became our collaboration’s lead institution. Weiss and Barish sketch the subsequent history of LIGO in their parts of our joint Nobel Lecture. From 1984 to 1987, I served as the “glue” that held our Caltech/MIT collaboration together, mediating between Weiss (who understood clearly that collaboration was essential for success) and Drever (who needed to be in complete control of all he did in order to remain creative and productive, and so had difficulty truly collaborating). It was with great relief that I relinquished my mediation role in 1987, when the three of us turned over the leadership of LIGO to our first director, Robbie Vogt, who quickly molded us into a truly functional, joint Caltech/MIT team. In the meantime, Braginsky – despite having endorsed Weiss’s gravitational-interferometer ideas in the 1970s – focused the energy of his research group unwaveringly on a variant of Weber’s “bar” gravitational-wave technology. Braginsky was concerned that, to succeed, gravitational interferometers would have to become extremely complex (which they indeed are today, with 100,000 data channels that monitor their subsystems and the environment); and he worried that this complexity might ultimately doom the interferometers to failure. Throughout the late 1970s and the 1980s, Braginsky and I both commuted back and forth between Moscow and California, maintaining a tight collaboration (particularly on quantum nondemolition techniques and technology; see my Nobel Lecture). And throughout this period, Braginsky advised Drever, Weiss, and their colleagues about interferometer R&D and planning. In the late 1980s, when Braginsky saw the progress that was being made with the prototype interferometers and saw the Caltech/MIT plans for a proposal to the NSF to construct LIGO, he became convinced that the probability of success was reasonably high; so he went home to Moscow, shut down his bar-detector research, and initiated in its place a whole new research program in support of LIGO. This had a profound effect on me, bolstering my confidence at just the moment my Caltech/MIT colleagues and I were developing our proposal and plans for LIGO construction. In the early 1990s, under Vogt’s leadership, we secured approval from NSF for LIGO’s construction and we took major steps toward construction. Then in 1994–2001, our second director, Barry Barish, transformed LIGO from a small Caltech/MIT project into a large international collaboration, and led us through the construction of LIGO’s facilities, the installation of LIGO’s first interferometers, and the writing of a proposal for the advanced interferometers that have now succeeded in discovering gravitational waves; see Barish’s part II of our joint Nobel Lecture. In 1992, with LIGO starting to move forward, I wound down other efforts (including the theory of time travel) that my theory research group was doing and I refocused our research almost completely onto theoretical support for LIGO. This included analyzing sources of noise in LIGO’s interferometers and ways of controlling the noise (see my Nobel Lecture), a beefed-up effort on quantum nondemolition, and a renewed effort to understand sources of gravitational waves, and the shapes of their waves – their waveforms. It was only then that I began to realize how difficult would be the analysis of LIGO’s data – finding weak gravitational-wave signals amidst LIGO’s noise, and extracting the information carried by the signals. Fortunately, my former student Bernard Schutz, at the University of Cardiff, UK, had recognized this as early as 1986 and had begun then to lay foundations for the data analysis (see my Nobel Lecture). To bring Caltech up to speed on the data analysis, we imported Bruce Allen from the University of Wisconsin; and he, together with a number of my students and postdocs, dove into the problem while I cheered them on. Soon thereafter, Barish, as LIGO’s second director, created the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), which facilitated expanding the data analysis effort to scientists at many other institutions; see Barish’s Part II of our joint Nobel Lecture. To help educate the many hundreds of scientists who joined the LIGO effort in the late 1990s and the 2000s, I created in 2002 an online course in gravitational-wave physics that included videos of lectures about all aspects of the field, by the best experts. By 2002, it seemed to me that I was no longer much needed within the LIGO Project. The students and postdocs I had trained, and other LSC theorists, could play the roles that I had been playing, and could do it at least as well I, if not better. So, with a sigh of relief (because by personality I did not really like working in a large project), I left day to day involvement with LIGO, and focused my attention largely on building at Caltech a research effort on computer simulations of colliding black holes and other sources of gravitational waves; see my Nobel Lecture for details. One consequence of my departure from day-to-day LIGO work was my non-involvement in Advanced LIGO and its triumphant discovery of gravitational waves. The credit for that ultimate success, and for all the rich insights about the universe that have begun to flow from it, belongs largely to the younger generation of LIGO/Virgo scientists and engineers, and also to my Nobel Prize co-laureates Rai Weiss and Barry Barish, who have continued to make major contributions in the Advanced-LIGO era. I continue to help the LIGO Project whenever called on for help, but that is less and less often as time passes (and almost entirely on political issues and not technical issues). My students and postdocs Over the near-half-century of my career, my graduate students and postdocs have done much more important and impactful research, while in my group, than I myself. I take great pride in their accomplishments, some of which I describe in my Nobel Lecture. In many cases they took research problems that I suggested, and with very little help from me, brought the problems into soluble form, solved them, and made major discoveries; an example is the work by Alessandra Buonanno and Yanbei Chen on quantum noise in Advanced LIGO interferometers (see my Nobel Lecture). In other cases, they identified important research problems themselves and, with little concrete input from me, brought the problems to fruition, with impactful results; examples are Carlton Caves’ work on the origin of quantum noise and using squeezed vacuum to modify it, and Yuri Levin’s work on thermal noise in interferometers (see my Nobel Lecture). I patterned my style of working with students and postdocs after the styles of Wheeler, Dicke, and Zel’dovich (which I had observed up close) and of Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer’s Berkeley/Caltech years (the 1930s). I gave the students a lot of room and time and freedom to explore things on their own, flounder, and ultimately find themselves, with an occasional nudge from me. But I also gave them an intellectual environment in which to learn from each other, and from students and colleagues elsewhere – an environment that included weekly group meetings typically two hours long and sometimes far longer than that, with frequent participation by experimenters from the Drever/Whitcomb group and later the LIGO Laboratory, and by outside experts. It also included frequent trips to Santa Barbara to interact with the superb relativity group that James Hartle had created there, and frequent visits to Caltech by research leaders from around the world – for example, members of Zel’dovich’s and Braginsky’s groups, and Stephen Hawking and members of his Cambridge research group. We had an Interaction Room, with a huge blackboard, a refrigerator filled with drinks, and comfortable couches and chairs, in which we would gather for spontaneous discussions as well as organized discussions. Over my 43 years of mentoring students and postdocs, roughly 2/3 of our time and effort went into gravitational-wave-related research, largely connected to LIGO or what would become LIGO, but also connected to LISA, Weber-type bar detectors, and sources of gravitational waves in all frequency bands. I describe some of this research in my Nobel Lecture. The other 1/3 of our time has gone into a wide range of other issues in relativistic astrophysics, or relativity, including a highly enjoyable period of several years in which we asked ourselves whether the laws of physics permit an infinitely advanced civilization to build wormholes for rapid interstellar travel and machines for traveling backward in time. (Although such questions may seem weird or flaky, they are useful tools for probing the laws of physics in domains where experiment is not yet possible. For example, our research, and that of Hawking and his students, have convinced both Hawking and me that the poorly understood laws of quantum gravity control whether or not backward time travel is possible.) A new career at the interface of science and the arts Since 2009 I have turned much of my effort in a very different direction: collaborations about science with artists, musicians and film makers. Christopher Nolan’s movie Interstellar was one fruit of this, and with Stephen Hawking and my long-time Hollywood partner, Lynda Obst, I have a second science-inspired movie in the works. With the painter Lia Halloran, I am working on a book about the Warped Side of the Universe (objects and phenomena made largely or wholly from warped spacetime, most of them sources of gravitational waves). And I have been doing an occasional multimedia concert about the Warped Side of the Universe with composer Hans Zimmer and visual effects gurus Paul Franklin and Oliver James, using beautiful videos generated by numerical relativity physicists. I take great pleasure in these collaborations with brilliant and creative artists, who bring to our joint work talents and insights quite different from my own. These collaborations are my attempt to inspire nonscientists and especially young people about the beauty and power of science, in the same way as George Gamow’s book One, Two Three, … Infinity inspired me, 65 years ago. My family This is a scientific biography, so I have chosen not to discuss my two marriages (to Linda Thorne, 1960–1975; and then to Carolee Winstein, 1984–…), nor Linda’s and my children Kares Anne Thorne and Bret Carter Thorne (and his wife Regine Thorne), and granddaughter Larisa Anne Thorne. Suffice it to say that they all have been tremendously important in my life and have provided a balance to my scientific work that has helped make me more productive. They all went to Stockholm with me to share in the Nobel Week festivities. From The Nobel Prizes 2017. Published on behalf of The Nobel Foundation by Science History Publications/USA, division Watson Publishing International LLC, Sagamore Beach, 2018 This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/ Nobel Lectures/The Nobel Prizes. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 2017
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With tracks from Nick Lowe, The Specials, Minnie Ripperton and Blondie. Show more On a biting December night, Jim Lloyd enthrals Ambridge residents with the story of a family who dare to direct their future when they wish upon a bewitched monkey’s paw. Show more Alistair McGowan stars as a host of famous people in this new comedy about a man who spends his life on the road, daydreaming about the brilliant life that he's never had. Show more Wiley challenges you to do the alphabet over a different beat! Shaun talks to Sarfraz Manzoor about his new live show inspired by Bruce Springsteen, and how his memoir was turned into last year's comedy film 'Blinded By the Light'. Show more
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1098	dbpedia	1	80	https://www.nameslook.com/dennis-w.-sciama	en	Dennis W. Sciama Meaning & Pronunciation	https://www.nameslook.co…ty-nameslook.png	https://www.nameslook.co…ty-nameslook.png	[ "https://www.nameslook.com/assets/img/horizontal-logo.png", "https://cdn.lotslook.com/img/sivaguru-ayyadurai.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Dennis W. Sciama means 'Strong, Love'. Learn how to pronounce Dennis W. Sciama with our 15 audio pronunciations and discover its popularity in United States of America and 98 more countries.	en	https://www.nameslook.co…e-touch-icon.png	NamesLook	https://www.nameslook.com/dennis-w.-sciama	Dennis Name Popularity At NamesLook, the name Dennis is recorded 115,492 times globally, ranking it as the 492th most common name worldwide. Dennis is most prevalent in United States of America, with 24,505 occurrences, making it the 224th most popular name in the country.
1098	dbpedia	1	38	https://www.sissa.it/news/story-pulsars-then-and-now-jocelyn-bell-burnell-sciama-sissa-colloquium	en	The story of pulsars: then and now - With Jocelyn Bell Burnell - Sciama SISSA Colloquium	https://www.sissa.it/the…mages/social.jpg	https://www.sissa.it/the…mages/social.jpg	[ "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/logo-sissa-mobile.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/logo-type.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/logo-icona.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/logo-sissa-mobile.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-fb.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-tw.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-li.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-fl.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-yt.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-footer-w.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-fb.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-tw.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-li.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-fl.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-yt.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2023-10-10T18:30:00	The traditional Sciama SISSA Colloquium returns October 18, at 5 p.m. in room 128-129, with a seminar by Jocelyn Bell Burnell, titled "The story of pulsars: then and now". Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars as a graduate student in radio astronomy in Cambridge, opening up a new branch of astrophysics - work recognised by the award of a Nobel Prize to her supervisor. She has subsequently worked in many roles in many branches of astronomy, working part-time while raising a family. She is now a Visiting Academic in Oxford, and the Chancellor of the University of Dundee, Scotland. She has been President of the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society, in 2008 became the first female President of the Institute of Physics for the UK and Ireland, and in 2014 the first female President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was one of the small group of women scientists that set up the Athena SWAN scheme. She has received many honours, including a $3M Breakthrough Prize in 2018. The public appreciation and understanding of science have always been important to her, and she is much in demand as a speaker and broadcaster. She has co-edited an anthology of poetry with an astronomical theme – ‘Dark Matter; Poems of Space’. The Sciama SISSA Colloquium is named in memory of Dennis Sciama, one of the most important cosmologists of the 20th century, and for many years a pillar of the astrophysics field at SISSA. An aperitif in the canteen will follow the event.	en	/themes/custom/sissa/favicon.ico	Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati	https://www.sissa.it/news/story-pulsars-then-and-now-jocelyn-bell-burnell-sciama-sissa-colloquium	The traditional Sciama SISSA Colloquium returns October 18, at 5 p.m. in room 128-129, with a seminar by Jocelyn Bell Burnell, titled "The story of pulsars: then and now". Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars as a graduate student in radio astronomy in Cambridge, opening up a new branch of astrophysics - work recognised by the award of a Nobel Prize to her supervisor. She has subsequently worked in many roles in many branches of astronomy, working part-time while raising a family. She is now a Visiting Academic in Oxford, and the Chancellor of the University of Dundee, Scotland. She has been President of the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society, in 2008 became the first female President of the Institute of Physics for the UK and Ireland, and in 2014 the first female President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was one of the small group of women scientists that set up the Athena SWAN scheme. She has received many honours, including a $3M Breakthrough Prize in 2018. The public appreciation and understanding of science have always been important to her, and she is much in demand as a speaker and broadcaster. She has co-edited an anthology of poetry with an astronomical theme – ‘Dark Matter; Poems of Space’. The Sciama SISSA Colloquium is named in memory of Dennis Sciama, one of the most important cosmologists of the 20th century, and for many years a pillar of the astrophysics field at SISSA. An aperitif in the canteen will follow the event.
1098	dbpedia	0	8	https://www.newsweek.com/brief-history-friend-stephen-hawking-man-who-changed-our-times-844300	en	A Brief History of My Friend Stephen Hawking, the Man Who Changed Our Times	https://d.newsweek.com/e…phen-hawking.jpg	https://d.newsweek.com/e…phen-hawking.jpg	[ "https://g.newsweek.com/www/images/newsweek-desktop-tablet.svg", "https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/832328/03-06-stephen-hawking-exploration.jpg?w=1200&f=7617c9082f5c94b498bb64cd77beb20c", "https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/288603/stephen-hawking.jpg?w=1200&f=2704fe9eeab87c9e0484044982e70e1b", "https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/292413/eddie-redmayne-theory-everything.jpg?w=1200&f=543168d7b36f407c56900e57e48daa3a", "https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/435393/20-06-2007-stephen-hawking.jpg?w=1200&f=da2fad3dace9ede3c874f87cb1376250", "https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/2447124/heidi-heitkamp.png?w=80&h=80&f=4ba40b39b7a512e7d05b668bcee0cba8", "https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/2355314/paul-du-quenoy.png?w=80&h=80&f=d6b690874d17425d8a345913992a041d", "https://g.newsweek.com/www/images/newsletter-white.svg", "https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/2280621/subscription-newsweek-premium.png", "https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/2222596/subscription-digital.png", "https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/2447316/israeli-airstrike.jpg", "https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/2447308/trump-vs-harris.jpg", "https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/2447335/jesse-ventura.jpg", "https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/1752217/jeremiah-johnson.png", "https://g.newsweek.com/img/footer/NW-LOGO-001.svg", "https://g.newsweek.com/img/footer/linkedin.svg", "https://g.newsweek.com/img/footer/instagram.svg", "https://g.newsweek.com/www/images/twitter-icon-white.svg", "https://g.newsweek.com/img/footer/facebook.svg", "https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/2443047/cover-august-16-23-2024.jpg?w=400&f=58a090a65411b186a00e386fe33eab38" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Martin Rees" ]	2018-03-14T09:18:29-04:00	Millions have had their cosmic horizons widened by his best-selling books; and even more, around the world, have been inspired by a unique example of achievement against all the odds.	en	https://g.newsweek.com/t…e-touch-icon.png	Newsweek	https://www.newsweek.com/brief-history-friend-stephen-hawking-man-who-changed-our-times-844300	Soon after I enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge in 1964, I encountered a fellow student who was two years ahead of me in his studies. He was unsteady on his feet and spoke with great difficulty. This was Stephen Hawking. He had recently been diagnosed with a progressive neurodegenerative disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and it was thought that he might not survive long enough to even finish his PhD. But, amazingly, he lived on to the age of 76. Even mere survival would have been a medical marvel, but of course he didn't just survive. He became one of the most famous scientists in the world—acclaimed as a world-leading researcher in mathematical physics, for his best-selling books about space, time and the cosmos, and for his astonishing triumph over adversity. Astronomers are used to large numbers. But few numbers could be a large as the odds I'd have given, back in 1964 when Stephen received his 'death sentence', against witnessing this uniquely inspiring crescendo of achievement sustained for more than 50 years. Few, if any, of Einstein's successors have done more to deepen our insights into gravity, space and time. Stephen went to school in St Albans, near London, and then to Oxford University. He was, by all accounts, a 'laid back' undergraduate, but his brilliance nonetheless earned him a first class degree in physics, and an 'entry ticket' to a research career in Cambridge. Within a few years of the onset of his disease he was wheelchair-bound, and his speech was an indistinct croak that could only be interpreted by those who knew him. But in other respects fortune, had favored him. He married a family friend, Jane Wilde, who provided a supportive home life for him and their three children, Robert, Lucy and Tim. The 1960s were an exciting period in astronomy and cosmology; this was the decade when evidence began to emerge for black holes and the big bang. In Cambridge, Stephen joined a lively research group. It was headed by Dennis Sciama, an enthusiastic and effective mentor who urged him to focus on the new mathematical concepts being developed by Roger Penrose, which were initiating a renaissance in the study of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Stephen mastered Penrose's techniques and quickly came up with a succession of insights into the nature of black holes (then a very new idea), along with new arguments that our universe had expanded from a 'big bang'. The latter work was done jointly with George Ellis, another of Sciama's students, with whom Stephen wrote a monograph entitled The Large-Scale Structure of Space-Time. Especially important was the realization that the area of a black hole's horizon (the 'one-way membranes' that shroud the interior of black holes, and from within which nothing can escape) could never decrease. The analogy with entropy (a measure of disorder, that likewise can never decrease) was developed further by the late Israeli theorist Jacob Bekenstein. In the subsequent decades, the observational support for these ideas has strengthened—most spectacularly with the 2016 announcement of the detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes. Stephen was elected to the Royal Society, Britain's main scientific academy, at the exceptionally early age of 32. He was by then so frail that most of us suspected that he could scale no further heights. But, for Stephen, this was still just the beginning. He worked in the same building as I did. I would often push his wheelchair into his office, and he would ask me to open an abstruse book on quantum theory—the science of atoms, not a subject that had hitherto much interested him. He would sit hunched motionless for hours—he couldn't even to turn the pages without help. I wondered what was going through his mind, and if his powers were failing. But within a year he came up with his best-ever idea—encapsulated in an equation that he said he wanted on his memorial stone. The great advances in science generally involve discovering a link between phenomena that seemed hitherto conceptually unconnected. For instance, Isaac Newton famously realized that the force making an apple fall was the same as the force that held the moon and planets in their orbits. Stephen's 'eureka moment' revealed a profound and unexpected link between gravity and quantum theory; he predicted that black holes would not be completely black, but would radiate in a characteristic way. Bekenstein's concept that black holes had 'entropy' was more than just an analogy. This radiation is only significant for black holes much less massive than stars—and none of these have been found. However 'Hawking radiation' had very deep implications for mathematical physics—indeed one of the main achievements of string theory has been to corroborate his idea. It is still the focus of theoretical interest—a topic of debate and controversy more than 40 years after his discovery. Indeed, the Harvard theorist Andrew Strominger (with whom Stephen recently collaborated) said that this paper had caused "more sleepless nights among theoretical physicists than any paper in history." The key issue is whether information that is seemingly lost when objects fall into a black hole is in principle recoverable from the radiation when it evaporates. If it is not, this violates a deeply believed general physical principle. In 2013 he was one of the early winners of the Breakthrough Prize, worth three million dollars, which was intended to recognize theoretical work. Cambridge was Stephen's base throughout his career, and he became a familiar figure navigating his wheelchair around the city's streets. By the end of the 1970s, he had advanced to one of the most distinguished posts in the University—the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics, once held by Newton himself. He held this chair with distinction for 30 years; but reached the retiring age in 2009 and thereafter held a special research professorship. He travelled widely. He was an especially frequent visitor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena; and at the Texas A&M University. He continued to seek new links between the very large (the cosmos) and the very small (atoms and quantum theory) and to gain deeper insights into the very beginning of our universe—addressing questions like 'was our big bang the only one?' He had a remarkable ability to figure things out in his head. But latterly he worked with students and colleagues who would write a formula on a blackboard; he would stare at it, and say whether he agreed with it, and perhaps what should come next. In 1987, Stephen contracted pneumonia. He had to undergo a tracheotomy, which removed even the limited powers of speech he then possessed. It had been more than 10 years since he could write, or even use a keyboard. Without speech, the only way he could communicate was by directing his eye towards one of the letters of the alphabet on a big board in front of him. But he was saved by technology. He still had the use of one hand; and a computer, controlled by a single lever, allowed him to spell out sentences. These were then declaimed by a speech synthesizer, with the androidal American accent that has thereafter become his trademark. His lectures were, of course, pre-prepared, but conversation remained a struggle. Each word involved several presses of the lever, so even a sentence took several minutes. He learnt to economize with words. His comments were aphoristic or oracular, but often infused with wit. In his later years, he became too weak to control this machine effectively, even via facial muscles or eye movements, and his communication—to his immense frustration—became even slower. At the time of his tracheotomy operation, he had a rough draft of a book, which he'd hoped would describe his ideas to a wide readership and earn something for his two eldest children, who were then of college age. On his recovery from pneumonia, he resumed work with the help of an editor. When the US edition of A Brief History of Time appeared, the printers made some errors (a picture was upside down), and the publishers tried to recall the stock. To their amazement, all copies had already been sold. This was the first inkling that the book was destined for runaway success . The feature film The Theory of Everything (where he was superbly impersonated by Eddie Redmayne, in an Oscar-winning performance) portrayed the human story behind his struggle. It surpassed most biopics in representing the main characters so well that they themselves were happy with the portrayal (even though it understandably omitted and conflated key episodes in his scientific life). Even before this film, his life and work had featured in movies. In an excellent TV docudrama made in 2004, he was played by Benedict Cumberbatch. The Theory of Everything conveyed with sensitivity how the need for support (first from a succession of students, later from a team of nurses), strained his marriage to breaking point, especially when augmented by the pressure of his growing celebrity. Jane's book, on which the film is based, chronicles the 25 years during which, with amazing dedication, she underpinned his family life and his career. This is where the film ends. But it left us only halfway through Stephen's adult life. After the split with Jane, Stephen married, in 1995, Elaine Mason, who had been one of his nurses, and whose former husband had designed Stephen's speech synthesizer. But this partnership broke up within a decade. He was sustained, then and thereafter, by a team of helpers and personal assistants, as well as his family. His daughter Lucy has written books for children with her father as coauthor. His later theories were described, and beautifully illustrated, in other books such as Our Universe in a Nutshell and The Grand Design. These weren't bought by quite as many people as his first book—but more readers probably got to the end of them. The success of A Brief History of Time catapulted Stephen to international stardom. He featured in numerous TV programs; his lectures filled the Albert Hall, and similar venues in the US and Japan. He featured in Star Trek and The Simpsons, and in numerous TV documentaries, as well as advertisements. He lectured at Clinton's White House and was back there more recently when President Obama presented him with the US Medal of Freedom, a very rare honor for any foreigner—and of course just one of the many awards he accumulated over his career. In the summer of 2012, he reached perhaps his largest-ever audience when he had a star role at the opening ceremony of the London Paralympics. Why did he become such a cult figure? The concept of an imprisoned mind roaming the cosmos plainly grabbed people's imagination. If he had achieved equal distinction in, say, genetics rather than cosmology, his triumph of intellect against adversity probably wouldn't have achieved the same resonance with a worldwide public. His 60th birthday celebrations, in January 2002, were a memorable occasion for all of us. Hundreds of leading scientists came from all over the world to honor and celebrate Stephen's discoveries, and to spend a week discussing the latest theories on space, time and the cosmos. But the celebrations weren't just scientific—that wouldn't have been Stephen's style. Stephen was surrounded by his children and grandchildren; there was music and singing; there were 'celebrities' in attendance. And when the week's events were all over, he celebrated with a trip in a hot air balloon. His 70th birthday was again marked by an international gathering of scientists in Cambridge, and also with some razzmatazz. So was his 75th birthday, though now shared by several million people via a live-stream on the internet. In these last years he was plainly weakening. But he was still able to 'deliver' entertaining (and sometimes rather moving) lectures via his speech synthesizer and with the aid of skillfully prepared visuals. Stephen continued, right until his last decade, to co-author technical papers, and speak at premier international conferences—doubly remarkable in a subject where even healthy researchers tend to peak at an early age. Especially influential were his contributions to cosmic inflation—a theory that many believe describes the ultra-early phases of our expanding universe. A key issue is to understand the primordial seeds which eventually develop into galaxies. He proposed (as, independently, did the Russian theorist Viatcheslav Mukhanov) that these were quantum fluctuation—somewhat analogous to those involved in 'Hawking radiation' from black holes. He hosted an important meeting in 1982 where such ideas were thoroughly discussed. Subsequently, particularly with James Hartle and Thomas Hertog, he made further steps towards linking the two great theories of 20th century physics; the quantum theory of the microworld and Einstein's theory of gravity and space-time. He continued to be an inveterate traveler—despite attempts to curb this as his respiration weakened. This wasn't just to lecture. For instance, on a visit to Canada he was undeterred by having to go two miles down a mine-shaft to visit an underground laboratory where famous and delicate experiments had been carried out. And on a later trip, only a last-minute health setback prevented him from going to the Galapagos. All these travels—and indeed his everyday working life—involved an entourage of assistants and nurses. His fame, and the allure of his public appearances, gave him the resources for nursing care, and protected him against the 'does he take sugar?' type of indignity that disabled people often suffer. Stephen was far from being the archetype unworldy or nerdish scientist—his personality remained amazingly unwarped by his frustrations and handicaps. As well as his extensive travels, he enjoyed trips to theatre or opera. He had robust common sense, and was ready to express forceful political opinions. However, a downside of his iconic status was that that his comments attracted exaggerated attention even on topics where he had no special expertise—for instance philosophy, or the dangers from aliens or from intelligent machines. And he was sometimes involved in media events where his 'script' was written by the promoters of causes about which he may have been ambivalent. But there was absolutely no gainsaying his lifelong commitment to campaigns for the disabled, and (just in the last few months) in support of the NHS—to which he acknowledged he owed so much. He was always, at the personal level, sensitive to the misfortunes of others. He recorded that, when in hospital soon after his illness was first diagnosed, his depression was lifted when he compared his lot with a boy in the next bed who was dying of leukemia. And he was firmly aligned with other political campaigns and causes. When he visited Israel, he insisted on going also to the West Bank. Newspapers in 2006 showed remarkable pictures of him, in his wheelchair, surrounded by fascinated and curious crowds in Ramallah. Even more astonishing are the pictures of him 'floating' in the NASA aircraft (the 'vomit comet' that allows passengers to experience weightlessness)—he was manifestly overjoyed at escaping, albeit briefly, the clutches of the gravitational force he'd studied for decades and which had so cruelly imprisoned his body. Tragedy struck Stephen Hawking when he was only 22. He was diagnosed with a deadly disease, and his expectations dropped to zero. He himself said that everything that happened since then was a bonus. And what a triumph his life has been. His name will live in the annals of science; millions have had their cosmic horizons widened by his best-selling books; and even more, around the world, have been inspired by a unique example of achievement against all the odds—a manifestation of amazing will-power and determination. Martin Rees is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist who was appointed to the House of Lords in 2005.
1098	dbpedia	1	43	https://www.oliobymarilyn.com/2015/07/the-theory-of-everything.html	en	The Life Journey of Stephen Hawking	https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vsKaJZWarTc40KgreClOKMCsnrXtgZNKo2Y2PA7MaCrhTW1ouJx8hUUqMeWdPdecHyhfJvrRaMhS8TWSTgm-3rMT2315pT0pL2Ralfshi4OLj6eOm9GivwofDrAycWTikmoJL1StkiW4oTOD6umOW0_z-xCdzntp06aJqTPDJ-KR77eYVEgPs=w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu	https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vsKaJZWarTc40KgreClOKMCsnrXtgZNKo2Y2PA7MaCrhTW1ouJx8hUUqMeWdPdecHyhfJvrRaMhS8TWSTgm-3rMT2315pT0pL2Ralfshi4OLj6eOm9GivwofDrAycWTikmoJL1StkiW4oTOD6umOW0_z-xCdzntp06aJqTPDJ-KR77eYVEgPs=w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu	[ "https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-m0izREGixy0/XGH1V1srVTI/AAAAAAAAYyw/4lZXxWcnjw4sLi997sFhrOSia8cyQmpcgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Blog%2Bheader.jpg", "https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vsKaJZWarTc40KgreClOKMCsnrXtgZNKo2Y2PA7MaCrhTW1ouJx8hUUqMeWdPdecHyhfJvrRaMhS8TWSTgm-3rMT2315pT0pL2Ralfshi4OLj6eOm9GivwofDrAycWTikmoJL1StkiW4oTOD6umOW0_z-xCdzntp06aJqTPDJ-KR77eYVEgPs=s0-d", "https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPMgKBZ1eAsGAXAGuWxjRdwlEPInY7RNxAemBLHbibEPJqZBjqaBhql6QffQDobF2sfDzYWYg1DOj1kGoB_UtsWKHT1gZU13W-Q9PSe83A11ZwQKdQvbVO_FdMcVRJKyj5qewTV4b-c6w/s640/3.png", "https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCSsFQ6Xv3gYEZzK-3awxQ5E-UiAgMEKHfd-gXHq-eqbt931oO7aE-UKeZQGdGDP-Y77-E5Z6kXals5NzG8P4xl_OK1A-OczTCan9KWSzd48xIWfIISsG3f_uSZfsAAlwvoQj0Z7rcal4/s400/4.png", "https://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png" ]	[ "https://www.youtube.com/embed/8RHU0X5CYpU?feature=player_embedded" ]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Marilyn R. Wilson" ]	2015-07-08T07:35:00-07:00	o·li·o – a hodgepodge, a medley. Articles featuring a wide variety of topics including fashion, recipes, travel, reviews and more.	en	https://www.oliobymarilyn.com/favicon.ico		https://www.oliobymarilyn.com/2015/07/the-theory-of-everything.html	The Theory of Everything - The Life Journey of Stephen Hawking I finally had a chance to watch Universal Pictures' The Theory of Everything this week. An upcoming trip to Ontario had me downloading onto my iPad to distract me in flight, but I ended up coming back with it unwatched. Once home, Glen and I used Airplay so we could enjoy it together. Fortunately I knew little about the movie other than it was about Stephen Hawking and had received good reviews. That is enough for any movie. Coming in with little expectations allows you to enjoy your simple reactions and mine were oh so positive. It was amazing! Where to start. I felt the casting was strong on this one. Everyone rose to the occasion - their characters believable. I want to say a personal kudos to actor Eddie Redmayne for his wonderful portrayal of Hawking. What a demanding role that had to be. He subtly showed the first signs of ALS - also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease - through the tilt of his head and problems with using his hands/feet/ankles. There was a charming early awkwardness that built over time into symptoms of ALS. From first diagnosis offering no hope and a life expectancy of only two years, to accepting the love of Jane who would become his wife, the arrival of three children and his rise to fame, we follow the wonderful highs of accomplishment to the terrible lows as his progression into loss of personal control steadily continues. I searched high and low to find a few photos of Redmayne later in the film and a similar one of Hawkins to show how uncanny his performance was. The ones I found are just a shadow of what he brought - classic movement problems, garbled speech and difficulty eating all which became more difficult as time passed. Felicity Jones' portrayal of Jane Hawkins was also touching. You felt her determination, strength and the sacrifice this path forced on her. Great performances were also seen from Harry Lloyd (fellow Phd student) and David Thewlis (professor - Dennis Sciama), to name just a few. Helping them offer us believable characters was a strong, tight script, great filming and wonderful pacing. What was most astonishing was to see a comment at the end that Hawking was 72 at the time of release and still working. He is now 73 as of this date. As he was diagnosed at the early age of 21 and was given 2 years to live, that means he has beat the odds by 52 years so far. Although he is the exception to the rule, what a beacon of hope he is for those receiving this diagnosis. If you haven't had a chance to watch this yet, I'd made time soon. This is a truly wonderful film that I will mostly likely enjoy a second time.
1098	dbpedia	1	14	https://www.howtopronounce.com/dennis-sciama	en	How to pronounce Dennis Sciama	https://media.howtoprono…f5cdafe03532.png	https://media.howtoprono…f5cdafe03532.png	[ "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/logo-dark.png?id=d5f581577f07831b3eb1", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronouncelayer.png?id=01cc6eec43af674dda58", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronounce.png?id=46e127f00494bb0fe649", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronounce.png?id=46e127f00494bb0fe649", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/play-animation.gif?id=3f048eaa7bed72c8cd6a", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronounce.png?id=46e127f00494bb0fe649", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/play-animation.gif?id=3f048eaa7bed72c8cd6a", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronounce.png?id=46e127f00494bb0fe649", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/play-animation.gif?id=3f048eaa7bed72c8cd6a", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronounce.png?id=46e127f00494bb0fe649", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/play-animation.gif?id=3f048eaa7bed72c8cd6a", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronounce.png?id=46e127f00494bb0fe649", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/{{quiz.quiz_image}}", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/{{quiz.quiz_image}}", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/{{comment[0].p_image}}", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/private_user.png?id=7f824f4a0a0d617584b2", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/{{reply.c_image }}", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/private_user.png?id=7f824f4a0a0d617584b2", "https://media.howtopronounce.com/question-assets/757f1d454d59f703592427d66caec5bb.png?ops=wt213,ht112", "https://media.howtopronounce.com/question-assets/c9fc2e0299d7137c0ba9207f9a647c07.png?ops=wt213,ht112", "https://media.howtopronounce.com/question-assets/ac4b332bc254baabdb70d903b5e75456.png?ops=wt213,ht112", "https://media.howtopronounce.com/question-assets/e7ce5a149bf97897fd069c073ae03068.jpg?ops=wt168,ht112", "https://media.howtopronounce.com/question-assets/aa1ed1776c874cdec5c8bf348becfd2a.png?ops=wt213,ht112", "https://media.howtopronounce.com/question-assets/eafeb630545202f9af094dec595d77bf.png?ops=wt213,ht112", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/loader.gif", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/loader.gif", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/loader.gif", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/loader.gif", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/loader.gif", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/{{app.userTrophy[app.userTrophyNo].picture_url}}", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/logo-white.png?id=a258499d635ad04a9b3b", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/loader.gif" ]	[ "https://streaming.humix.com/contents/NeFPWrpPpedCZWgh/1680837581/index.m3u8" ]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Casey Ondricka" ]	2020-01-21T03:35:08	How to say Dennis Sciama in English? Pronunciation of Dennis Sciama with 1 audio pronunciation, 1 meaning and more for Dennis Sciama.	en	/apple-icon-57x57.png		https://www.howtopronounce.com/dennis-sciama	You are not logged in.. Please Log in or Register or post as a guest You are not logged in.. Please Log in or Register or post as a guest You are not logged in.. Please Log in or Register or post as a guest You are not logged in.. Please Log in or Register or post as a guest You are not logged in.. Please Log in or Register or post as a guest
1098	dbpedia	0	58	https://www3.nd.edu/~histast/workshops/2001ndv/abstracts.shtml	en	Biennial History of Astronomy Workshop			[ "https://www3.nd.edu/~histast/images/nd_shield.png", "https://www3.nd.edu/~histast/images/marquee_images.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null	Abstracts (listed alphabetically) Peter Abrahams “H. Dennis Taylor and the design and testing of astronomical instruments” (poster paper) Harold Dennis Taylor was chief optical designer for Thomas Cooke & Sons of York, England, working from the 1880s to the 1920s. His long career resulted in many developments in optical instrumentation, and astronomical instruments were an early and favored specialty. Taylor wrote the first published guide to the 'star test' of lenses and mirrors. The first triplet apochromatic telescope objective was the 'Cooke Photo-Visual Objective', a Taylor design. His 'Cooke Triplet' photographic lens, the most creative and influential of his designs, was extensively used by astrophotographers, and was modified by Taylor for the specific projects of various noted astronomers. Taylor introduced the first method of antireflection coatings for lenses. His eyepiece designs from the 1920s used the negative field lens that is the basis for 'modern style' telescope eyepieces. The primary documents to illustrate the work of Taylor are the relevant United Kingdom patents. Contemporary astronomers were customers and correspondents of Cooke, and their work is also part of the record. Wilbur Applebaum, Illinois Institute of Technology “Galileo and Kepler on the sun as Planetary Mover” It's commonly held that Galileo gave little or no attention to the problem of the cause of planetary motion. Some have taken the position that his principle of so-called “circular inertia” eliminated a need for a planetary mover. Galileo was certainly aware of Kepler's hypothesis of a quasi-magnetic force from a rotating sun as the means by which the planets were moved in their orbits, but he never directly commented on the astronomer's ideas on the causes of celestial motions. After the publication of Galileo's Sidereus nuncius, Kepler several times urged upon Galileo the notion of a rotating Sun as planetary mover. With his discovery and close observations of sunspots, however, Galileo concluded that the Sun indeed rotates, and went on to propose that the planets are moved by the rotation of the Sun. In this belief he was echoing positions taken earlier, not only by Kepler, but also by Giordano Bruno. All three were modifying and elaborating a position, now in a Copernican context, and after the dissolution of the celestial spheres, frequently enunciated during the Renaissance and going back to Plato's Timaeus. Jorge Bartolucci, UNAM-Mexico “Awakening Mexican Astronomy (1938-1945). The Harvard College Observatory and Mexican-American Relationships during the Second World War” The creation of the National Astrophysical Observatory of Tonantzintla, Puebla, in 1942, marked the beginning of the later establishment of modern astrophysics in Mexico. Such a change was made possible through the support given by the Harvard College Observatory to a group of young Mexican scientists who worked very hard to integrate their country into the international scientific community. Despite the efforts made by Mexican politicians and astronomers before 1940 to build scientific institutions to promote the progress of science in the country, public and private support was sporadic, fragmented, weak and directionless. What happened in the forties that made it possible to overcome the earlier situation? According to the analysis done here, it can be explained as a consequence of the close interaction between Harlow Shapley and Luis E. Erro under very singular historical circumstances. Since the story took place within the context of the Second World War, the presence of geopolitical affairs must be underlined. As a case study, the paper exposes the presence of social and historical factors that particularizes the process of transference of modern science outside Western Europe and the United States throughout the wider world. Julian Baum, Independent Computer Graphics Artist and Animator, and Richard Baum, Independent Scholar “The Great Cordilleras of Venus” From the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, and in some quarters until very much later, there existed in the astronomical mind a tradition of a Great Enlightened Mountain situated near the south pole of Venus. It was a reality to the people of that time, signifying to them the highest point of an immense cordillera whose profile was “relieved against planetary night in startling luminosity, its inner side ... fringed with a necklace of beads, representing to our fancy a bristling range of isolated peaks” high enough to tower “into the upper air to an altitude of over forty miles above the cloud canopy of the planet.” Trudy E. Bell “The 'American Method': The 19th-Century Telegraphic Revolution in Astronomy” The invention of the telegraph revolutionized practical and positional astronomy. Its biggest contribution was simplifying and exacting the determination of longitude on the earth. Less than five years after the United States' first telegraph line was completed between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, the telegraphic 'American method' of determining longitude had become so accepted worldwide that, in the words of U.S. Coast Survey chief Alexander Dallas Bache, it 'may be considered to have passed into one of the regular methods of geodesy.' Indeed, virtually the first use of the first transatlantic telegraph cable laid in 1866 was to send star-transit timings between astronomers in Newfoundland and Great Britain, to nail down the exact longitude differences between points in Europe and North America. Telegraphic longitude determination was supplanted only in 1922 by radio navigation techniques. Less well known, by mid-century, the chronograph had been invented, which simultaneously recorded both time signals and star signals using a pen-chart recorder. The chronograph was essential not only to longitude determinations, but also for providing an indelible and precise record of any astronomical observations that relied on timings--notably star transits and meridian-circle observations--thereby quadrupling an astronomer's productivity at the eyepiece (timings per hour). The telegraph and chronograph also sparked astronomers' first comprehensive discussions on measuring personal equation. In the second half of the 19th century, the telegraph provided steady income to astronomical observatories from railroads. Each noon, the observatory sent time signals to railroad masters for setting local station clocks; in the most sophisticated setups, the observatory's telegraph signals adjusted a railroad station's clock automatically. The telegraph was even used on solar eclipse expeditions seeking the hypothetical inner planet Vulcan: if observers in a western part of the path of totality thought they spotted Vulcan, they were to telegraph its position to colleagues waiting farther east. This paper will outline some of the key inventions and telegraphic techniques used by 19th-century American astronomers. Dennis Danielson, University of British Columbia “Copernicus and the Enthronement of the Sun” When Copernicus “removed” earth from the center of the universe, he was not, contrary to later popular opinion, “dethroning” the earth but rather freeing it from what the Middle Ages had seen as a state of cosmic exile in “the worst, most senseless, and drooping part of the world ... and farthest from heaven's cope” (Montaigne). However, if earth was thus promoted to “the dance of the stars” (Galileo), then how shall we interpret what Copernicus did to the sun? Must its “relocation” to the middle be seen as a demotion? Of course not. Yet, to avoid making its new dwelling place appear a diminution of the sun's traditionally royal status--“in noble eminence enthroned” (Shakespeare)--required that Copernicus and his followers employ their poetic as well as scientific resources to “renovate” what had previously been thought a place of cosmic disrepute. By developing familial, social, biological, and architectural metaphors for the sun, both Copernicus and Kepler manage to support the appropriateness of the sun's central location in a manner consistent with the sun's royalty and nobility. Indeed, their very success in re-imagining the center of the world as a place worthy of the sun's enthronement may have provided anachronistic support for those who later saw Copernicus's achievement as entailing a dethronement of the earth. Sven Dupré, Ghent University, Belgium “Galileo, the Telescope, and the Light of the Planets and the Stars” (poster paper) While Galileo's telescopic discoveries are mostly dealt with as evidence in the ongoing cosmological debate between the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic and the Copernican system, they also may be considered in the context of optico-astronomical questions regarding the light of the planets and the stars, going back to at least Alhazen. Taking up a suggestion of Roger Ariew, it will be shown that Galileo was concerned with the problem whether the planets and/or the stars shine with their own light or reflect solar light (or any combination thereof) as early as the appearance of the nova in 1604, criticizing Kepler's 'De stella nova', and again, in 1607, when studying moon light and mirror reflections, based on his acquaintance with 15th and 16th century optical literature. Eventually, it was to the telescope to decide that stars shine with their own light and planets only reflect light. However, taking into account that telescopic observation of planets and stars was problematic, Galileo's analysis shows that the light of the stars and the planets also decided about the working of the telescope, in particular its aperture stop. In turn, this influenced Kepler's dealing with the Galilean telescope in terms of light instead of vision. Bernard R. Goldstein, University of Pittsburgh “The Astronomical Tables of Judah Ben Verga of Lisbon” Little is known about the life of Judah Ben Verga, other than that he was an astronomer in Lisbon, writing in Hebrew, who flourished from about 1455 to 1480. While there were many sets of astronomical tables in Hebrew produced in medieval Spain, Ben Verga's set is the earliest in Portugal. In several places he reports astronomical observations he made in Lisbon in 1456 and 1457 and, in the introduction (or canons) to his astronomical tables, he computes the circumstances of a lunar eclipse to take place in the future on March 22, 1475, as well as a solar eclipse to take place on July 29, 1478. As far as I have been able to determine, the only contemporary (or near contemporary) astronomer to cite Ben Verga was Abraham Zacut of Salamanca (d. 1515). In this presentation I will focus on Ben Verga's astronomical tables, based on manuscript sources. While most of his tables are similar in structure to those found in comparable works in Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew, some are unusual and worthy of special attention. Robert Havlik, University of Notre Dame “Arthur Joseph Stace (1838-1890), Philosopher, Astronomer, Scientist and Linguist and His Contribution to Early Astronomy Education” Arthur Joseph Stace was a late 19th century Catholic educator and faculty member at the University of Notre Dame. With the exception of 2 or 3 interruptions he spent his entire academic life at Notre Dame. In 1867 he became the first faculty member to teach astronomy at the University. In 1886 he was appointed the first Dean of the Engineering College at the University. It was at this time he was instrumental in completing the planning for the Notre Dame Badin Observatory, to house our six inch Napoleon refractor. His eclectic career culminated his appointment, by President Grover Cleveland, as a United States Commissioner to the Universal Exposition of 1889 at Paris. Arthur J. Stace did much to enhance the University's early programs in astronomy, science, mathematics and civil engineering. His eccentric and eclectic attitude made him one of the more colorful figures in the early history of the university. Elizabeth E. Hayes, University of Notre Dame “David Rittenhouse and the Politics of Astronomy” David Rittenhouse was the most famous astronomer of the Early American Republic. A noted mathematician, clockmaker and astronomer, Rittenhouse was a member of the American Philosophical Society, and brought that society international attention with his careful observation of the Transit of Venus in 1769. Interestingly, Rittenhouse was not only the colonies' most famous scientist (after Ben Franklin); he was also a revolutionary. As part of a small group of politicians (including Thomas Paine and Benjamin Rush) who led the radical revolution against the established anti-independence party in Philadelphia, Rittenhouse sat on the committee that created the most democratic of all of the state constitutions of the Revolutionary era. In 1775, a year before this internal revolution took place, David Rittenhouse gave an oration on the history of astronomy in front of the American Philosophical Society. The purpose of my paper will be to explore the arguments for American Independence that are the subcontext of an otherwise straightforward discourse on the history of astronomy. J. Christopher Hunt, Prince George's Community College and Virginia Tech “Dennis W. Sciama and the Steady State Cosmology” In his 1932 Guthrie Lecture to the Physical Society of London, Max Planck made the following remarkable statement regarding the nature of scientific change: “An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning....” If “Planck's Principle” (as it has come to be known) is true, it has profound implications for science, essentially denying traditional, rationalist views of theory change. In this paper, I examine the abandonment of the steady state model of the universe by the cosmologist Dennis W. Sciama. The reasons for Sciama's initial passion for the steady state are examined (including aesthetic factors), as are the reasons for his conversion. I show that Sciama's case presents a clear counterexample to Planck's Principle. Nick Kollerstrom, University College, London “The Elusive British Claim for Neptune's Co-Prediction” After being 'lost' for three decades, the Royal Greenwich Observatory's 'Neptune file' finally resurfaced in Chile in 1999 and has now been recovered. Some of the historic manuscripts are the worse for wear, and I have a Royal Society grant for collating these manuscripts, over 1845-6. Earlier accounts were somewhat coloured by the intense national passions kindled by this debate, in which Britain's Astronomer Royal Airy had a key role. I have the assistance of celestial mechanist David Harper to try and sort out what Adams really did achieve and to what extent he can be said to have co-predicted Neptune's position as was averred by Challis and Airy. Or, were these two merely trying to save their own skins after the ruinous failure of their six-week sky-search at Cambridge for the new planet, conducted rather secretly, following its discovery at Berlin in half an hour? What status has a retrospective claim to a prediction as having been made a year earlier? I take the view that the dated sections of Adams manuscripts offer us the best option of answering these questions; of which there are seven in the year preceding Neptune's discovery. I have located a section of Adams' diary for the years 1846 and 1845 unmentioned by any previous scholars (it turned up due to improved computer indexing at the John's college library) which throws important light on how close Challis and Adams were in this key period. Circumstantial evidence indicates that the undated, unaddressed note which Airy produced in November 1846 before the Royal Astronomical Society, with details of Adams' prediction, is unlikely to be that which Adams gave to him in October of the previous year. Keith Lafortune, University of Notre Dame “Almanac Science and the Geography of American Astronomical Knowledge” Historian Stephen J. Harris defines the “geography of knowledge” as “the logically and chronologically prior stages of scientific practice that involve the collecting, transporting, and collating of all the things that go into the making of scientific knowledge.” Put simply, the geography of knowledge answers the questions “who knew what, when, and for what reason?” Harris' aim is to study travel and the corporations that stood to profit from the transportation of knowledge during the Age of Discovery. The geography of knowledge can also be used to study the spread of scientific knowledge among the general public through printed media. That is the focus of this paper. The almanac was one of the most important forms of American media during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not only did almanacs predict the weather and advise the farmer about when to plant his crops, but they were also a source of entertainment and current events. Entertainment and current events mixed in the popular science essays included in many early American almanacs. These essays give the historian an opportunity to ask “who knew what, when, and for what reason” about advances in astronomy? A quick glance at the almanacs shows that the astronomical content of the essays was diverse, providing the prominent ideas of Ptolemy, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton alongside the more obscure arguments of William Gilbert and Olaus Roemer. To understand how the American almanac reader received these astronomical essays, I explore a number of questions: Who read these almanacs? How important was the almanac to its reader? How did the reader use the almanac? How current were the astronomical theories described in the almanacs' essays? How might religious beliefs have influenced the reception of the almanacs' essays? How might almanac humor have influenced this reception? This paper is a suggestion for further research on the subject of almanac science and its reception among the American public. Rudi Paul Lindner, University of Michigan “From Podium to Print: Curtis and Shapley Prepare the 'Great Debate' for Publication” After their talks in Washington, Heber D. Curtis and Harlow Shapley revised their presentations for a wider audience, and within a year extended versions of their papers appeared together. During the months after their meeting, they exchanged letters and drafts, continuing their discussion, modifying their emphases, and establishing what each would and would not yield. Further, they discussed the work with others, and in Shapley's corner we can follow the suggestions of his mentor, Henry Norris Russell. This talk is about the development of their final essays as a measure of the rhetorical strategies once popular in scientific prose. Kurt Locher (Switzerland) “Ancient Egyptian Astronomy: A Century of Text Studies, with Emphasis on the Last Two Decades” The largest corpus of preserved texts from writing cultures prior to classical Greece is that from Ancient Egypt. This applies not only to the total amounts of these texts but also to the roughly 3% out of them with astronomical content. As in almost any autochthonous astronomical culture, the observation and understanding of the apparent yearly rhythms of the fixed stars was achieved in Egypt long before concepts of the lunar and planetary motions were developed. The details of the annually repeated phenomena were recognized by the Egyptians before the Babylonians, Greek, Chinese, and Protoarabians by 4 to 24 centuries respectively, and less closely connected to divination and weather phases than in these other cultures, but rather to religion. Almost all relevant ancient Egyptian astronomical texts known by 1960 were at that time re-discussed in Neugebauer and Parker's huge monograph, so that a comprehensive knowledge of these texts can be acquired by simply using this and the scattered studies published since. The later publications go beyond that monograph because of 3 reasons, namely (1) the newly discovered sources, (2) the progress of hieroglyphic philology, and (3) the abandon of Neugebauer's reserve against identification of constellations beyond the 3 already uncontested in classical Antiquity (the counterparts of UMa, Ori, and CMa). Howard Margolis, University of Chicago “How Copernicus discovered that in a heliocentric world the retrogressions of the planets are not actual loops in the paths of the planets” It is usually taken as obvious that in a heliocentric world, the planet do not actually travel on what Kepler invidiously called “pretzel-shaped” paths. But the heliocentric possibility had been known to astronomers for 1800 years (since Aristarchus) with no hint that anyone before Copernicus noticed this. It really could hardly be done without Ptolemaic astronomy to work from. But that still leaves 1400 years of no one noticing. I give an account of how Copernicus seems to have done it, which has large consequences for the wave of discoveries produced by Copernicans at the turn of the next century. This issue plays a large role in my forthcoming book, The Discovery of Discovery. James A. Marshall, Independent Scholar “What the Archaeoastronomers Have Missed” (poster paper) This researcher has instrumentally surveyed and mapped more than 230 sites of prehistoric constructions in eastern North America since 1965. From these he has selected 6 very large geometric earthworks. He will compare each in size to the Notre Dame campus. These works and mid-19th century drawings of such have been bases of many archaeoastronomical claims. What they have missed is the use, in the design and layout of these works, of true north by the stars, the interesting patterns created by placing the plan of one of these works over the plan of another, and the historical implications of such. The pattern is that key points and lines on these works coincide, two works, high Banil and Newark Golf course consist each of an octagon and a circle on an axis. If placed over the other works, their respective axes point toward hilltops or other works a few miles away. One implication is that native American Indians as early as 300 BC had to have had permanent records of the plans of these works. Durruty Jesus de Alba MartÌnez, Universidad de Guadalajara “First Astrophysics Textbook in Mexico” In the 19th century, astronomy was included in curricula of educational institutions in Jalisco state, Mèxico along with arithmetic, geometry and other similar topics of a situation which reflected the educational priorities of the medieval world, the level that we know as quadrivium. Lay centers of education were classified according to who was in power: they were called “university” if conservative governments nor “science institute” by liberal-leaning politicians. In this context we are also far from clear which spaces were to be included investigation and how this research would be reflected in teaching activities. In 1853 however, there appeared a book titled “Lecciones de astronomÌa” (astronomy lessons), by AgustÌn de la Rosa y Serrano (1824-1907), secular priest who had earned his doctoral degree in theology at the old Universidad de Guadalajara in 1850 and who eventually became rector of Guadalajara's seminary in 1867. In 1882, furthermore he also published the “Adiciones a las lecciones de astronomÌa” (astronomy lessons additions) which may be considered first astrophysics textbook in Mèxico. This book and its content is described giving some indication of how modern astronomy started in Mèxico. Mary Quinlan-McGrath (Northern Illinois University) “Picturing Science, Rectifying Art: Case studies from the Italian Renaissance” Artworks of the Italian Renaissance often represent astronomical or astrological understandings that were prevalent in Italy between 1400-1600. This workshop presentation will consider problems in research methodology that arise when painters and architects used mathematical and scientific information as part of their art. How did artists balance the requirements of beauty against the requirements for mathematical accuracy? What can these art examples tell us about scientific practices as these were understood at a more popular level? What scientific standards are necessary for art historians in this field? Sepp Rothwangl, Graz, Austria “Consideration about the origin of the common yearly counting in the Julian and Gregorian calendar with special attention to the ancient astronomy and world view” The official tradition of the Catholic church describes the following: Dionysius Exiguus in his Liber de paschate indicates he made a new calculation of the Easter data. The old calculation made by the Alexandrinian Cyrill had concluded and needed to be renewed and resumed for the future. According to Dionysius Exiguus, the cycle created by Cyrill ended in the Diokletian Year 247 (531 CE) Dionysius Exiguus synchronized the subsequent year with of his new 532 year lasting lunisolar Easter cycle and so created a new yearly counting. “D.E.” calls this new cycle 'anni ab incarnatione Domini nostri Jesu Christi' (A.D.), since he does not want to count the years any more after the “Christian pursuer.” As a consequence, this yearly counting became until today the usual in the Gregorian and Julian calendar. The actual cause of the definition of the yearly counting might be the combined result of three other factors: 1. The conjunction of all naked eye planets as a “Greatest Year”: In the antique astronomy the conjunction of all planets had great importance. On the one hand it was a mythical astrological event which was symbolically linked with the Symposium (Gathering) of the Olympic Gods and with the creation of humans by Prometheus. On the other hand, the conjunction was a temporal astrological orientation, an orientation which one assumes was used to derive terrestrial rule from the celestial run. An example is quoted from Aristotle: “... there is a yearly unit, which Aristotle rather calls the Greatest Year than a large year. It concerns the period, in which the circular paths of Sun, Moon and the five planets will pass through in such a way that all these heavenly bodies are located in the same constellation” (Censorinus, De die natale, ch. 18) 2. In the year 531 CE, the previous year of the new Dionysian cycle, such a close conjunction of all planets took place and was used by the Indian astronomer Aryabhata and others as a base for the back calculation of such a conjunction and the dating of the Kali Yuga or the Deluge on 17th February 3102 BCE. See: B. L. van der Waerden (Das groþe Jahr und seine ewige Wiederkehr) and E.S. Kennedy. Until May 2000 there was only in 1524 one more such close alignment of all naked eye planets. 3. The Platonic month (precession) as cause of religious ages: The precession of the equinoxes brings about the change of the spring constellations, whose progression is expressed by the constant of precession (modern value: 71.66 years per 1°). It's falsely assumed antique value was 100 years as reported by Hipparchos and Ptolemaios, which would result 30° in 3000 years . Secretly and by later Arab constants delivered, its progressing in the ending antiquity however might have been assumed to be “faster” with a value of 66.6 years per 1° of the zodiac (Number of the animal- “beast”). This results in the number of 2000 years each 30°, which led to the late antique acceptance that due precession every 2000 years ends and begins an age (spring constellation) Conclusion: It is maintained that Dionysius Exiguus, by incorporating these three factors, pre-calculated the planet conjunction of May 2000 with the help of planet boards and determined the year 1 A.D. exactly 1999 years before it and thus linked “Platonic Year” with “Greatest Year.” He did this in order to fulfill the Christian faith conceptions of the return of the Lord during a planetary position which is adequate to the former Betlehem Star (triple alignment of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces in 7 BCE). D. E. determined the yearly counting in such a way that in the year 2000 (2nd millennium) of his counting, because of the precalculated sky positions, should mark in his late antique religious and astronomical conception of the world the end of the age of Pisces (ICHTHYS) and the religiously prophesied Christian end time. Steven W. Ruskin, University of Notre Dame “The Great Garden of the Universe: Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos and William Herschel's Cosmogony” In 1845 Alexander von Humboldt published the first of his five-volume Cosmos. The Cosmos was an attempt to demonstrate the “chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent on each other.” Sections of the five volumes of Cosmos that deal with cosmology reveal striking similarities to the theories of William Herschel. As it turns out, to write the Cosmos Humboldt borrowed heavily from the work of others, often without acknowledging their contributions. John Herschel, long an advocate of his father William's cosmological theories, was one of Humboldt's biggest British “contributors.” Thus the appearance of William Herschel's cosmology in the Cosmos is partially explained. More generally, however, in the Cosmos Humboldt was advocating a view of nature which had long been his trademark: a romantic conception of the Universe that aimed to replace the clockwork cosmos of the Enlightenment. John Herschel was quite sympathetic to Humboldt's world view. This paper explains why, for Humboldt's romantic Cosmos, the cosmology of the Herschels played a necessary role. Voula Saridakis, Virginia Tech “Who was Elisabetha Hevelius? A Study of a Seventeenth-Century Woman Astronomer” Who was Elisabetha Hevelius? In a number of current scholarly works, an image of her appears in which she is using a sextant and compiling measurements together with her husband, the famous European astronomer, Johannes Hevelius of Danzig. But how extensive was her astronomical knowledge? And what role did she play as a woman astronomer in the seventeenth century? In this paper, I briefly discuss her life and involvement with her husband's work. I then draw some general conclusions concerning the involvement of women in seventeenth-century astronomy. I argue that the opportunities for women like Elisabetha had diminished after the formation of scientific societies in the late seventeenth century, even though these societies were supposed to promote the 'democratization' of science. David L. Seim, Iowa State University “Measuring the Stars: John Herschel, Norman Pogson, and the Selection of a Standardized Scale for Expressing a Relation between Magnitude and Relative Apparent Brightness of Stars” I introduce and explore the route by which Norman Pogson proposed and gained acceptance for a standardized logarithm scale for classifying the increasing brightness of stars. The standardized scale, first published in 1856, is known today as “Pogson's rule.” John Herschel had been the leading proponent of a need by astronomers for an objective scale to foster progress in observational astronomy. Herschel not only had repeatedly published professional callings for a standardized scale, but also was (in the 1840s) the person who was first to offer a candidate for a compact measurement rule that could be imposed on the apparent brightness of stars to enable a standard star classification scheme according to a scale of magnitudes. Herschel's rule and Pogson's rule may be compared and contrasted. First, where the quantity “x” represents the variable of apparent brightness of a star, the most reduced form of Herschel's rule is that magnitude equals x raised to the negative two, where x may go from one to infinity. In this inverse-square rule the power is held constant while the base is the input variable. Even though Herschel seems never to have directly said as much, I am interested in arguing that he may have been influenced toward his rule by a naturalist impulse that he felt could help him rationalize an imposition upon material nature of an artificial categorization scheme analogous to Isaac Newton's inverse-square law of universal gravitation. Second, where the quantity “x” again represents the apparent brightness of a star, the most reduced form of Pogson's rule is that magnitude equals 2.512 raised to the x, where x may go from zero to infinity. In this logarithm rule the base is held constant while the power is the input variable. Even though Pogson seems never to have directly said as much, I am interested in arguing that he may have been influenced toward his rule by a kind of naturalist impulse to help rationalize an imposition upon material nature of an artificial categorization scheme analogous to Gustav Fechner's 1850 threshold principle in sensory psychology called “the just noticeable difference.” John Sisko, College of William and Mary “Worlds within Worlds within the One: Anaxagoras' Parmenidean Cosmology” It is said that the Greek atomists (Leucippus and Democritus) were the first cosmologists to posit the existence of a plurality of worlds. This is correct, but only in a qualified way. For the atomists were the first to posit the existence of a plurality of spatially distinct worlds. Before the atomists, however, Anaxagoras posited the existence of a plurality of concentric, or nested, worlds. Anaxagoras' cosmology was developed in response to Parmenides' theory of the 'One'. Parmenides had posited the existence of a single static material plenum. Against Parmenides, Anaxagoras argued that cyclical (or vortex) motion is possible in a voidless plenum and he argued that such motion is responsible for the emergence of our (geocentric) world within the plenum. However, Parmenides held that change requires a 'first event' and such an event is impossible, since there is no sufficient reason for its occurring at one particular time as opposed to its occurring at some earlier time. Anaxagoras, circumvented the problem of a 'first event' by positing the existence of an eternal and ever-expanding vortex. This vortex expands through infinitely divisible and infinitely extended space, repeatedly bringing structure to the plenum. Thus, the vortex is not only responsible for the emergence of our word within the 'One', it is also responsible for the emergence of worlds within worlds within the 'One'. Christopher S. Turner “Prehistoric Native American Calendrical-Monumental Architecture in Ohio: Chronology, Form, and Motive” Building convincing arguments in archaeoastronomy is not about whimsical map work or developing arcane numeracies. Contextual cultural syntheses are paramount. Careful mathematical modeling, cultural archaeology, paleobotany, comparative ethnology, concepts involving monumental architecture, and calendar histories are examples of the topics woven into any perspicacious overview. This poster demonstrates both winter and summer solstice rise events at a Hopewell geometric enclosure, development of these monuments from earlier Adena forms, as well as similar sightlines at other Hopewell sites. The intensification of agriculture (c.200BC) in the Eastern Woodlands was synchronous with the creation of the Hopewell earthwork calendars. Petra van der Heijden, Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands “Frederik Kaiser (1808-1872) and the modernisation of Dutch astronomy” Frederik Kaiser was the director of Leiden Observatory from 1837 until his death in 1872. His contributions to astronomical practice include the foundation of a new, completely up-to-date observatory building in Leiden, and the introduction of statistics and precision measurements in daily practice at the observatory. Moreover he was the author of several bestselling books on popular astronomy. Preliminary research indicates that Frederik Kaiser played a crucial role in the revival of Dutch astronomy in the second half of the 19th century. I will give a short introduction into my project, which aims at analysing and explaining Kaiser's activities in the context of national and international developments in 19th-century astronomy and scientific culture. Craig B. Waff, Encyclopedia Americana, Grolier Educational “From What Meridian Shall We Count Our Longitudes?: The Debate over Charles Henry Davis's 1849 Proposal to Establish an American Prime Meridian” U.S. Navy Lt. Charles Henry Davis's 1849 proposal to have the United States adopt a prime meridian located within the borders of the country is important in several respects. It prompted the newly formed American Association for the Advancement of Science to appoint what may have been the first broadly national committee of American scientists to be asked to debate the pros and cons of a scientific issue--an issue that in this case involved astronomy, geography, cartography, and navigation. The issue involved more than just science, however, and the debate and resolution of this issue was not contained within the developing American scientific community. A large part of the maritime community involved in oceangoing commerce vocally opposed the proposal, and the U.S. Congress as a consequence imposed a compromise that continued to affect the form of the newly authorized American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac (whose publication Davis had just been appointed to superintend) until the early 20th century. This paper will discuss the arguments presented in support of and against Davis's proposal, and also survey the prime meridians that were actually employed by American mapmakers in the early 19th century. Barbara Welther (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA) “The Development of Harvard's Astronomy Department: A Matter of Serendipity and Philanthropy” This paper will draw on documents in the Harvard Archives to examine briefly the funding and research of some of the HCO PhD candidates in the Shapley Era (1921-1955) and will highlight their subsequent contributions to 20th-century American Astronomy. Although Harvard offered a course or two in astronomy from its inception in the 17th century, it was slow to develop an observatory or a curriculum in the field. It was not until the 20th century, when Harlow Shapley assumed the Directorship of Harvard College Observatory in 1921, that Harvard finally took an interest in training the next generation of astronomers. In 1923, using the Pickering Fund for women assistants, Shapley serendipitously hired a young English woman, Cecilia Payne, to work on stellar spectra. Just two short years later, Payne completed her research and wrote a celebrated thesis on stellar atmospheres. Because the physics department at Harvard was not prepared to confer a PhD degree on a woman at that time, Payne had to present her thesis to Radcliffe College. Thus, in 1925 she became the first person to receive a PhD in astronomy for a research project at HCO. Nevertheless, it took three more years for Harvard to see the light and establish an Astronomy Department. The turn of events came about because a young man from Toronto, named Frank Scott Hogg, needed some financial help to finish his PhD and Shapley found a great philanthropist in George Russell Agassiz. Hogg became the second person to present a thesis on research at HCO. In his case, the University decided it could, indeed, confer a PhD in astronomy on a man. Barbara Welther (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA) “The First PhDs in Astronomy at Harvard: A Gallery of Pictures” (poster paper) This poster paper will draw on early photographs, primarily from the Harvard Archives, to show the images of PhD candidates in the Shapley Era (1921-1955). Short biographical sketches will accompany each picture. Patricia S. Whitesell “Nineteenth-Century Longitude Determinations in the Great Lakes Region: Government-University Collaborations” The longitude problem--determining geographic position with precision on land or at sea--was one of the greatest scientific problems of all time. Yet, this fascinating history was virtually forgotten until 1993 when William J H Andrewes at Harvard University organized an international symposium and Dava Sobel wrote her best-selling book Longitude (1995). But, this recent attention stopped short of chronicling the important contributions made by nineteenth-century astronomical observatories in determining the longitude across America. University observatories collaborated on longitude determinations with government agencies such as the United States Lake Survey to enable them to perform accurate surveys of land and coastal areas. My paper, which was published in the Journal of Astronomical History & Heritage in December 2000, provides the historical context of nineteenth-century longitude determinations in America. Specific examples and details are drawn from Great Lakes longitude determinations performed through collaborations between the United States Lake Survey and academic astronomers at the Hudson Observatory at Western Reserve College, Harvard College Observatory, Hamilton College Observatory, and the University of Michigan Detroit Observatory. Yaakov Zik , University of Haifa, Israel “Mathematical Instruments, Optics and Telescopes” Optical instrument design is a complex, non-linear game of strategy as well as a science and engineering. An image forming system is complex not only because of elements such as tubes, lenses and diaphragms, but also because each element placed there for a certain need. The Galilean telescope, in which the converging eyepiece is replaced with a diverging one, gives a virtual erect image and narrow field of view. The diameters of the entrance and exit pupils are proportional to the focal lengths of the objective and eyepiece respectively, so the angular magnification can be expressed by the ratio of the entrance pupil to the exit pupil. Those relationships determine the practical limits of magnification and aperture. Therefore, magnification by its own, would not be the primary factor by which the performance of the instrument should be evaluated. Variables such as field of view, lens quality, light gathering, corrections for the various aberrations, and losses in light transmission through the optical system are also involved in the construction of the telescope. By the end of the 16th century, as reflected in the treatises of Alhazen, Witelo and Porta and in the voluminous treatises and commentaries relating to practical geometry, instrument manuals and astronomy, optics developed to a level in which new and perplexing questions as well as solutions could have been proposed. It grew into a fair platform from which modern optics could be launched. Retrospectively, its theoretical features bore most of the knowledge needed for the refinement of the telescope. From that point of view I would like to make some comments with regard to mathematical instruments, Kepler, Galileo, the science called optics and the refinement of the telescope. Huib J. Zuidervaart, Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, The Netherlands “Dutch Astronomy in the 18th Century: A Neglected and Undervalued History” The history of Dutch astronomy in the eighteenth century is an episode in the history of science which has hitherto remained underexposed. Until recent times it has been suggested that after Huygens there was 'no continuous tradition in the Netherlands as far as astronomy is concerned'. Only in the 19the century--so was told--astronomy in the Netherlands acquired 'enough status' to be able to 'present valuable contributions at an international level'. My study has proved that this picture is incorrect. In the 18th century a lot of interesting work was done in the field of astronomy; research was carried out in a scholarly way and the results were exchanged with fellow astronomers both in the Netherlands and abroad. However, astronomical research was not carried out by scientists at universities (as in later years), but mainly by a group of amateurs outside the universities, who used to call themselves “konstgenoten.” Because they published little, or only in the Dutch language, their impact on astronomy as a international science was rather modest. Extended summary: Two important astronomical topics of the time gave the opportunity to study the work of these Dutch astronomers. First, there was the research on the orbits of comets. Dutch astronomers produced the first critical cometography and the first supplement to Halley's well-known work Synopsis of the astronomy of comets. They also were skillful observers. Of the total of 34 comets observed in the period 1715-1770 eighteen were observed independently by Dutch astronomers, eleven of them being the first registered observer. These “amateurs” were also skilled in calculating the orbital elements of cometary orbits. A number of their findings are still mentioned in the modern Catalogue of Cometary Orbits. Also the Dutch search-table to trace Comet Halley (published in 1755) was among the first of this kind. Even the use of the name Comet Halley in the Netherlands preludes the official international name-giving of the comet. In 1756 a Dutch wine-merchant even produced a study on the problem of planetary perturbations on the comets orbit, which at the time was sent to the French astronomer Clairaut. The famous transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769 were the second topic of astronomical investigation. As astronomers all over Europe were preparing expeditions for astronomical observations all over the world, the Dutch government was not willing to support similar efforts. Only after the encouragement of French astronomers, it became possible to carry out some small scale observations in Batavia in the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch province of Friesland forms the exception. The Frisian Stadholder inspired the Provincial Government to provide both financial and material support to a local mathematician. So in 1761 Friesland was the only place in the Netherlands where preparations were made and as a result a value for the solar parallax (10.23”) was established independently. Initially, things had looked more favourable. On the occasion of the Mercury transit of 1743, a Dutch booklet was published that dealt extensively with the problem of the solar parallax. Observations were also made, both in 1743 and in 1753. In 1751 support was also given to the French expedition of De la Caille to Dutch territory in South Africa. The newly appointed stadtholder, William IV supported the expedition personally. The prince himself had created in 1748 the honorary position of Stadhouderlijk Astronomus. Efforts were made to establish a network of local Dutch astronomers to cooperate with the French expedition on taking coordinated observations. Nevertheless, their attempts failed. As the 1761 transit was observed in the Dutch Republic from several places, the 1769 transit of Venus could not be observed at all, due to severe weather conditions. Yet one successful observation was made from Batavia in the Dutch East Indies. A local vicar especially built a large and well equipped astronomical observatory. His observations were eventually published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. So the Dutch “konstgenoten” tried to make real contributions to astronomy. That their efforts were hardly noticed is to be credited to the institutional weakness of Dutch society, with a lack of a strong central government. Nevertheless these amateurs contributed to a climate in which people realized the importance of scientific knowledge. Further a number of important Dutch astronomers of the nineteenth century, who took part in shaping the Dutch scientific landscape, had their roots in these circles of “konstgenoten.” In this way the “konstgenoten” contributed in a sense for giving astronomy in the Netherlands a modern, professional basis.
1098	dbpedia	1	1	https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/38160	en	Dennis W. Sciama	https://encyclopedia.pub…/header_logo.png	https://encyclopedia.pub…/header_logo.png	[ "https://encyclopedia.pub/build/images/header_logo.png", "https://encyclopedia.pub/build/images/logo.png", "https://encyclopedia.pub/build/images/point-3.png", "https://encyclopedia.pub/media/biography/202212/638fe52213955200px-Sciama2.jpg", "https://encyclopedia.pub/media/banner/202408/huodongbanner85-66b2e82a63c33.jpg", "https://encyclopedia.pub/build/images/feedback_success.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2022-12-07T04:41:33+01:00	Encyclopedia is a user-generated content hub aiming to provide a comprehensive record for scientific developments. All content free to post, read, share and reuse.	en	/favicon.ico		https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/38160	1. Introduction Dennis William Siahou Sciama, ( ; 18 November 1926 – 18/19 December 1999)[1][2] was a British physicist who, through his own work and that of his students, played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War.[3][4] He was the Ph.D supervisor to many famous cosmologists, including Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees and David Deutsch; he is considered one of the fathers of modern cosmology.[5][6][7][8] 2. Education and Early Life Sciama was born in Manchester, England , the son of Nelly Ades and Abraham Sciama.[9] He was of Syrian-Jewish ancestry—his father born in Manchester and his mother born in Egypt both traced their roots back to Aleppo, Syria.[10] Sciama earned his PhD in 1953 at the University of Cambridge supervised by Paul Dirac, with a dissertation on Mach's principle and inertia. His work later influenced the formulation of scalar-tensor theories of gravity. 3. Career and Research Sciama taught at Cornell University, King's College London, Harvard University and the University of Texas at Austin, but spent most of his career at the University of Cambridge (1950s and 1960s) and the University of Oxford as a Senior Research Fellow in All Souls College, Oxford (1970s and early 1980s). In 1983, he moved from Oxford to Trieste, becoming Professor of Astrophysics at the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA), and a consultant with the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. He also taught at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. From 1972 to 1973 he was the Donegall Lecturer in Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin.[11] During the 1990s, he divided his time between Trieste (with a residence in nearby Venice) and his main residence at Oxford, where he was a visiting professor until the end of his life. Sciama made connections among some topics in astronomy and astrophysics. He wrote on radio astronomy, X-ray astronomy, quasars, the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave radiation, the interstellar and intergalactic medium, astroparticle physics and the nature of dark matter. Most significant was his work in general relativity, with and without quantum theory, and black holes. He helped revitalize the classical relativistic alternative to general relativity known as Einstein-Cartan gravity. Early in his career, he supported Fred Hoyle's steady state cosmology, and interacted with Hoyle, Hermann Bondi, and Thomas Gold. When evidence against the steady state theory, e.g., the cosmic microwave radiation, mounted in the 1960s, Sciama abandoned it and worked on the Big Bang cosmology; he was perhaps the only prominent Steady-State supporter to switch sides (Hoyle continued to work on modifications of steady-state for the rest of his life, while Bondi and Gold moved away from cosmology during the 1960s). During his last years, Sciama became interested in the issue of dark matter in galaxies. Among other aspects he pursued a theory of dark matter that consists of a heavy neutrino, certainly disfavored in his realization, but still possible in a more complicated scenario. 3.1. Doctoral Students Several leading astrophysicists and cosmologists of the modern era completed their doctorates under Sciama's supervision, notably: George Ellis (1964) Stephen Hawking (1966) Brandon Carter (1967) Martin Rees (1967) Gary Gibbons (1973) James Binney (1975) John D. Barrow (1977) Philip Candelas (1977)[12] David Deutsch (1978) Adrian Melott (1981) Antony Valentini (1992) Sciama also strongly influenced Roger Penrose, who dedicated his The Road to Reality to Sciama's memory. The 1960s group he led in Cambridge (which included Ellis, Hawking,[13] Rees, and Carter), has proved of lasting influence. 3.2. Publications Sciama, Dennis (1959). The Unity of the Universe. London: Faber & Faber. Sciama, Dennis (1969). "The Physical Foundations of General Relativity". Science Study Series (New York: Doubleday) 58. Short (104 pages) and clearly written non-mathematical book on the physical and conceptual foundations of General Relativity. Could be read with profit by physics students before immersing themselves in more technical studies of General Relativity. Sciama, Dennis (1971). Modern Cosmology. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521080699. https://archive.org/details/moderncosmology0000scia. Sciama, Dennis (1993). Modern Cosmology and the Dark Matter Problem. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521438483. https://books.google.com/books/about/Modern_Cosmology_and_the_Dark_Matter_Pro.html?id=7dTOlXBLiFQC. 3.3. Awards and Honours Sciama was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1983.[1] He was also an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Academia Lincei of Rome. He served as president of the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation, 1980–84. His work at SISSA and the University of Oxford led to the creation of a lecture series in his honour, the Dennis Sciama Memorial Lectures.[14] In 2009, the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth elected to name their new building, and their supercomputer in 2011, in his honour.[15] Sciama has been portrayed in a number of biographical projects about his most famous student, Stephen Hawking. In the 2004 BBC TV movie Hawking, Sciama was played by John Sessions. In the 2014 film The Theory of Everything, Sciama was played by David Thewlis; physicist Adrian Melott strongly criticized the portrayal of Sciama in the film.[16] 4. Personal Life
1098	dbpedia	2	77	https://nameberry.com/b/boy-baby-name-dennis	en	Dennis - Baby Name Meaning, Origin, and Popularity	https://nb-public-img.im….net/sharing.jpg	https://nb-public-img.im….net/sharing.jpg	[ "https://nb-public-img.imgix.net/banner-dna-logo.svg", "https://nb-public-img.imgix.net/nameberry-logo.png", "https://nameberry.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnb-contentful-imgix.imgix.net%2F%2F1nzw6mpfcddc%2F7hKD0aheMkZsqTxmWOYpTa%2Fd7a959b6491514e141debcc85696718f%2FHeadshot.jpg&w=640&q=75 640w, /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnb-contentful-imgix.imgix.net%2F%2F1nzw6mpfcddc%2F7hKD0aheMkZsqTxmWOYpTa%2Fd7a959b6491514e141debcc85696718f%2FHeadshot.jpg&w=750&q=75 750w, /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnb-contentful-imgix.imgix.net%2F%2F1nzw6mpfcddc%2F7hKD0aheMkZsqTxmWOYpTa%2Fd7a959b6491514e141debcc85696718f%2FHeadshot.jpg&w=828&q=75 828w, /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnb-contentful-imgix.imgix.net%2F%2F1nzw6mpfcddc%2F7hKD0aheMkZsqTxmWOYpTa%2Fd7a959b6491514e141debcc85696718f%2FHeadshot.jpg&w=1080&q=75 1080w, /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnb-contentful-imgix.imgix.net%2F%2F1nzw6mpfcddc%2F7hKD0aheMkZsqTxmWOYpTa%2Fd7a959b6491514e141debcc85696718f%2FHeadshot.jpg&w=1200&q=75 1200w, /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnb-contentful-imgix.imgix.net%2F%2F1nzw6mpfcddc%2F7hKD0aheMkZsqTxmWOYpTa%2Fd7a959b6491514e141debcc85696718f%2FHeadshot.jpg&w=1920&q=75 1920w, /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnb-contentful-imgix.imgix.net%2F%2F1nzw6mpfcddc%2F7hKD0aheMkZsqTxmWOYpTa%2Fd7a959b6491514e141debcc85696718f%2FHeadshot.jpg&w=2048&q=75 2048w, /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnb-contentful-imgix.imgix.net%2F%2F1nzw6mpfcddc%2F7hKD0aheMkZsqTxmWOYpTa%2Fd7a959b6491514e141debcc85696718f%2FHeadshot.jpg&w=3840&q=75 3840w" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Dennis is a boy's name of French origin meaning "god of Nysa". Dennis is the 643 ranked male name by popularity.	en	/favicon.ico	Nameberry	https://nameberry.com/b/boy-baby-name-dennis	Dennis Origin and Meaning The name Dennis is a boy's name of French origin meaning "god of Nysa". Although it has come to sound Irish, Dennis is one of the most widely-used French names (St. Denis is the patron saint of France) and harks back even further to Dionysius, the Greek god of wine and debauchery. It was introduced to England by the Normans. Dennis was considered cool when it was near the top of the charts in the 1940s and 1950s, but has been slipping ever since, thanks in part to the devilish Dennis the Menace. Dennis Barlow is the main character in Evelyn Waugh's satirical 1948 novel The Loved One. Some prominent namesakes also include Dennis Hopper, Dennis Rodman, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Leary and Dennis Wilson. Denis is a secondary spelling. # 643 in the US Dennis Rank in US Top 1000 # 563 on Nameberry Dennis Rank in Nameberry Top 1000 Dennis Popularity 643US2023 563Nameberry2024 866Future2028 356England2021 191Germany2016 Famous People Named Dennis (John) Dennis Hastert51st U.S. Speaker of the House Dennis William QuaidAmerican actor Dennis ChristopherAmerican actor Dennis Lee HopperAmerican actor Dennis FranzAmerican actor Dennis Carl WilsonAmerican musician of The Beach Boys Dennis John KucinichU.S. Congressman from Ohio Dennis MillerAmerican comedian Dennis Dexter HaysbertAmerican actor Dennis Keith RodmanAmerican basketball player Dennis Leroy SpringerAmerican baseball player Dennis Gregory PittaAmerican football player Dennis Marvin SeidenbergGerman NHL Hockey player Dennis William SciamaBritish physicist Dennis GaborHungarian,British engineer; winner of the Nobel Prize Dennis O'NeilAmerican comic book writer and editor
1098	dbpedia	1	22	https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/close-to-greatness	en	What it’s like to work with the academic greats	https://www.timeshighere…tatue-leshan.jpg	https://www.timeshighere…tatue-leshan.jpg	[ "https://www.timeshighereducation.com/sites/default/files/styles/the_breaking_news_image_style/public/person-standing-on-big-toe-of-sitting-buddha-statue-leshan.jpg?itok=W1YKecHV", "https://www.timeshighereducation.com/sites/default/files/dennis-sciama-1926-1999.jpg", "https://www.timeshighereducation.com/sites/default/files/elizabeth-anscombe-cambridge-1990.jpg", "https://www.timeshighereducation.com/sites/default/files/malcolm-bradbury-1985.jpg", "https://www.timeshighereducation.com/sites/default/files/dorothy-hodgkin-london-1973.jpg", "https://www.timeshighereducation.com/sites/default/files/philip-larkin-011015.jpg", "https://www.timeshighereducation.com/sites/default/files/styles/teaser_standard/public/jellyfish_getty.jpg?itok=AxuwXObr", "https://www.timeshighereducation.com/sites/default/files/styles/teaser_standard/public/web-the_290824_p10_wet-pride_getty.jpg?itok=J5kvFkIC", "https://www.timeshighereducation.com/sites/default/files/styles/teaser_standard/public/statue-being-covered-with-dustsheet.jpg?itok=OOjpRgFL", "https://www.timeshighereducation.com/sites/default/files/styles/teaser_standard/public/money_tree_0.jpg?itok=ivV1gIvr", "https://dmp.adform.net/dmp/profile/?pid=10648&sg=DeUr-8da6f5e5", "https://track.adform.net/Serving/TrackPoint/?pm=711826" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Contributors" ]	2015-10-01T12:00:00	Five contributors recall friendships and encounters with preeminent scientists, writers and philosophers	en	https://www.timeshighereducation.com/sites/default/themes/custom/the_responsive/favicon.ico	Times Higher Education (THE)	https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/close-to-greatness	The physicist Dennis Sciama (1926-1999) is considered one of the fathers of modern cosmology. Martin Rees was one of his PhD students at the University of Cambridge in the 1960s. The film The Theory of Everything portrays Stephen and Jane Hawking superbly. But the scientific backdrop fares less well. In particular, the film distorts the personality and style of Dennis Sciama – a crucial supporter of Stephen’s early career, and a mentor to many others. Dennis inspired his research group with his infectious enthusiasm; he followed developments in theory and observation along a broad front and was a fine judge of where the scientific opportunities lay. This year, we are celebrating the centenary of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. But this theory was somewhat sidelined from the mainstream of physics, until the situation changed dramatically in the 1960s. This was partly because astronomers discovered neutron stars, quasars, black holes and the Big Bang – contexts in which Einstein’s theory is crucial, rather than just a tiny correction to Newtonian gravity. But it stemmed also from advances in the theory. Here, the pioneering figure was the mathematician Roger Penrose, and Dennis – his friend and near-contemporary – persuaded him to transfer his interests to relativity. Penrose’s insights led to a deeper appreciation of what Einstein’s theory actually implied. Dennis encouraged his students (several of whom became major figures in the subject) to attend a lecture series that Penrose was giving in London. When I enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge (two years after Stephen Hawking), it was my good luck to be allocated to Dennis. I was initially unsure whether doing astrophysics was a sensible choice – in fact, I’d seriously thought of shifting to economics. But Dennis created a “buzz” that swept me along. My own research was guided into a less mathematical topic: trying to interpret new observations of quasars. Dennis was “plugged in” to these developments too. He encouraged his students and postdocs to interact and to learn from each other. He eagerly shared new preprints, correspondence, news of conferences, and so forth – and of course, in those pre-internet days, being on networks and mailing lists gave one a crucial head start. In the late 1940s, Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi proposed the steady state cosmology, according to which the universe, although expanding, had existed in the same state from everlasting to everlasting. This theory never acquired much traction in the US (and still less in the Soviet Union). But its three advocates were vocal and articulate: and in the UK, the theory was widely publicised and discussed. Dennis extolled its aesthetic qualities in his book The Unity of the Universe (1959) – and described himself as its most fervent advocate apart from its three inventors. The steady state theory made definite predictions that everything was the same, everywhere and at all times. But in the 1960s astronomers were, for the first time, able to probe deep enough into space (and therefore, because of light’s finite speed, far enough back into the past) to test it – and it hit the buffers. Dennis’ disappointment was deep, but short-lived. He was quickly reconciled to the Big Bang – indeed he espoused it with the enthusiasm of the newly converted. The 1960s worldwide renaissance in relativity and “high energy astrophysics” was centred on three “schools”: those inspired by John Wheeler (Princeton University), Yakov Zeldovich (Institute for Physical Problems) – and Dennis in the UK. The interactions among them (even though those between East and West were sadly restricted) were cooperative and friendly, to an extent that isn’t always the case in fast-moving scientific fields. Although a superb teacher, Dennis had never enjoyed his routine lecturing or supervision in Cambridge. He left in 1971 to become a senior research fellow of All Souls College, Oxford (being one of the first scientists to breach the walls of that institution). In Oxford, he again mentored an outstanding generation of young scientists. He then moved to the recently established International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, where he did it all again for a third time. He was a distinguished and original researcher, but he achieved even more as a “coach” than as a “player”. Martin Rees is emeritus professor of cosmology and astrophysics, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and astronomer royal. Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) was a British analytic philosopher who has been described as “the undoubted giant among women philosophers”. Roger Teichmann knew her since childhood and is author of The Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe (2008). Elizabeth Anscombe was one of the most important philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. Renowned for her English translations of the writings of Wittgenstein, whose friend and pupil she was, she was also a bold and original thinker in her own right. I got to know Anscombe as a child: my mother had been taught by Anscombe in the 1950s at the University of Oxford, and they kept up the friendship after they had both come to the University of Cambridge. It was by sitting in on philosophical conversations between the adults that I first caught the philosophy bug. I’ve remained infected ever since. As I grew older, and as a friend of the family, I increasingly took part in those domestic conversations, so that when as an undergraduate I came to attend Anscombe’s lectures, the experience was familiar and at the same time strangely novel. Like Wittgenstein, she lectured more or less without notes. Again like Wittgenstein, she had both intellectual honesty and philosophical stamina, both necessary when it comes to resisting the charms of system-building. If your name is associated with some “-ism”, it can be tempting to spend the rest of your career just defending and elaborating. Anscombe was immune to this common temptation. It was only after I had graduated that I came slowly to appreciate the depth and fecundity of Anscombe’s thought. When I was offered the editorship of a collection of essays in her honour that had got “stuck”, I gladly accepted. At my request, she sent me a photocopy of one of her unpublished essays for inclusion, written in an elegant hand on what appeared to be foolscap paper. There are many anecdotes told about Anscombe, and many are apocryphal. But the non-apocryphal anecdotes are quite good enough. Her independence of spirit coupled with a mischievous and sometimes slightly surreal sense of humour account for many of these. Taken to a restaurant in the US during one of her visits there, she was told by the doorman that ladies in trousers were not admitted (she always wore slacks). Her host was mortified, but she insisted that he shouldn’t worry. She then removed her trousers, beneath which she wore a slip, and they gained entry to the fastidious establishment. I myself remember her at a stand-up drinks reception, when everyone was applauding some worthy speech, putting her glass on her head so as to clap since there were no tables nearby. The experiment failed. In her lifetime, Anscombe trod on many toes, being forthright in her views and in how she expressed them. But she could be as encouraging to her students as she was infuriating to some of her colleagues. She was one of the least hierarchical people I have known. Her complete seriousness and lack of interest in anything glib or merely fashionable was obvious to anyone who knew her, and went back to her childhood and youth. An early manifestation of her independent-mindedness was her teenage announcement to her horrified parents of her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Later in Oxford, she protested against the proposal to award President Truman an honorary degree, a man she described on the occasion as having “a couple of massacres to his name” (at Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The vote went against her, unsurprisingly. Anscombe’s philosophical range was wide. Especially influential has been what she wrote about intention, action and ethics. My own work has been hugely influenced by Anscombe; she together with Wittgenstein taught me how to tackle a philosophical problem. Her star is very much in the ascendant these days, and that can only be for the good. System-builders beware. Roger Teichmann is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Oxford. The author Malcolm Bradbury (1932-2000), best known for his comic novels about academic life, worked at the universities of Hull, Birmingham and East Anglia. Christopher Bigsby met him in 1966 when he was a lecturer at the University of Wales, Aberwystwyth. What to say of Malcolm Bradbury, academic, comic novelist, television scriptwriter, knighted for services to literature, and my reason for teaching at the University of East Anglia, a university that he helped to shape? As soon as he moved to Norwich I decided to follow. After all, his interests were mine – creative writing and American studies. We had both studied and taught in the US. Thereafter, he would become my model, mentor and best of friends. In 1958, Malcolm underwent major heart surgery, without which he would not have survived to the age of 50. Typically, while in hospital he wrote a comic novel, Eating People is Wrong. Having sidestepped an early death, he threw himself into life and was always writing. If invited to lecture, be a literary judge, write a piece for The New York Times, his answer would always be “yes”, unless his wife answered the phone, in which case it would always be “no”. Over the years we would travel together for the British Council or to conferences. In Moscow, a dash across the airport ended in Malcolm, always a better writer than runner, being treated with oxygen. In Tenerife, the professor who had invited us to a conference was in hiding from terrorists, so we had to introduce and then thank ourselves profusely. He had an eye for a pretty face but also a terror of heights so that I once watched as on a mountain drive he chatted up the young female driver but then grew whiter and more silent as the altitude rose. In the mid-1970s, he was asked to write a Play for Today set in a new university for BBC television, but having just published The History Man felt that he needed a new angle and asked me to co-write. I was very much the junior partner but had a track record of sorts. As an undergraduate I had written satirical scripts for Granada TV, admittedly for a puppet and admittedly appalling. I had also gone the usual student route of writing and performing in a revue at the Edinburgh fringe. The play turned on a manipulative vice-chancellor (our own, we subsequently discovered, anaesthetising himself with a bottle of wine as he watched in trepidation) and a young professor of organisational studies. At the time, there was no such academic discipline. Now there is. He was in contention with that familiar Malcolm figure, the well-meaning but disordered liberal. The line of which I was most proud was, “If God had been a liberal we wouldn’t have had the Ten Commandments, we would have had the Ten Suggestions.” We then wrote a science fiction play for BBC Two, but finding ourselves in contention with the producer, adopted the pseudonym Malcolm Christopher. The Daily Mail review began, “A new play by Malcolm Christopher is always an event.” Malcolm had the ability to write brilliantly funny novels that caught the zeitgeist. In that respect he was the twin of his friend David Lodge and, like David, was an astute and deeply intellectual critic who wrote with a clarity that I admired and aspired to. Politically conservative, he was morally and in every other way liberal, a master of so much but prone to phone his wife from the station asking her where he was supposed to be going. Pipe Smoker of the Year in 1997, he lived in fear that they would take the award away when he was finally forced to stop smoking. When he was dying (although not aware of such) we were writing a speculative new television series set in a failing post-92 university. One of my last memories of him was his laughing at his own jokes behind the oxygen mask he was required to wear. There are worse ways to go. I miss him greatly. Christopher Bigsby is director of the Arthur Miller Centre and professor of American studies at the University of East Anglia. Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for her work on the structures of vitamin B12 and penicillin and remains the only British woman to have won a Nobel prize in science. I was a very young postgraduate when I went to see Dorothy Hodgkin at the University of Oxford one summer to discuss the possibility of my doing a DPhil. I had just completed a BSc in chemistry at the University of Bristol and she was incredibly kind to accept me with a plan to work on the neutron study of insulin. Dorothy was in the process of finishing novel research on the neutron diffraction of vitamin B12 with my co-supervisor, Terry Willis of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell. It was very unusual at that time to study such large structures by neutron diffraction, and the doctorate offered a huge but exciting challenge. I joined Somerville College two years after she had been awarded the Nobel prize and was in complete awe, but I had no preconceptions about how it would be in Oxford working with such a famous person – I just knew that I was very lucky to be there. Dorothy never made us feel inadequate about our lack of knowledge or inexperience in the subject and always seemed to have time for her students and members of the research group. Although I spent most of my time working on experiments at Harwell, it seemed that I had plenty of opportunity to be with Dorothy in her rooms in the chemistry department to discuss our results. She sometimes seemed to go into her own world in the middle of some discussion we were having and I wondered if I should slip away quietly and leave her to more serious scientific matters, but then she would return from her reverie and continue our conversation quite cheerfully. I don’t think I realised at the time just how many famous names in crystallography came through Oxford in those years. It was a truly enriching period of my early career and the influence of Dorothy and the Oxford labs stayed with me for ever and directed my future career. Dorothy was a very gentle person in many ways, but she was not without enormous presence. When she felt strongly about something, she was direct in giving an opinion on matters within and beyond science. Less than two years after I had left Oxford to take up a postdoctoral position at Bristol, Dorothy became the chancellor of the University of Bristol in 1971. This was wonderful for me as I could continue to see her regularly and we could talk about science rather than university politics. When Dorothy retired formally from Oxford, she spent more time at her home in the Cotswolds. I lived nearby and became a frequent visitor to her home at Crab Mill. Later, when I moved to Durham, my route back to the South West took me past her house and I would call in regularly to see her and her family. She was by then increasingly frail but always enjoyed hearing about science and discussing the latest results. Dorothy was extremely bright and had the ability to concentrate completely when working on a difficult problem, refusing to give up even when the task was long and complicated. Her seminal work on the structure of insulin spanned almost 35 years. It was a tour de force and ran alongside other major projects for which she was awarded the Nobel prize in 1964. She very cleverly chose to study the most important biological systems of the time, as well as tackling extremely interesting scientific challenges using the then-new technique of X-ray crystallography. One of her many skills was an incredible ability to interpret correctly complicated electron density maps that she calculated herself from the X-ray diffraction photographs, and with tremendous insight and tenacity she solved extremely important and complex molecular structures. These are facts, but her “greatness” was so much more a part of her character and her gentle ability to inspire and encourage others. Her empathy with scientists in parts of the world where life was more complicated and difficult scientifically was amazing, and Dorothy gave a great deal of her time to help aspiring young people. Her example lives on through those who worked with her and whom she taught and inspired. Judith Howard is professor of chemistry at Durham University. The poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) worked as university librarian at the University of Hull for 30 years. James Booth worked in Hull’s English department from 1968 to 2011, so was for 17 years a distant colleague. “Of course it will all be up if any of the committee has read Toads,” Larkin wrote on being invited for interview at the University of Hull in 1954: “Why should I let the toad work/Squat on my life? […]/Six days of the week it soils/With its sickening poison-/Just for paying a few bills!/That’s out of proportion.” His luck held, and he was offered the post of librarian at the age of 32. A quarter-century after his death, in 2010, 25 brightly decorated toads adorned the streets of Hull. Today Larkin’s toad is part of Hull’s cultural “brand”. This, then, is no conventional account of academic influence. My contacts with Larkin were slight. He was a poet who never gave readings; I was an academic specialising in postcolonial literature. Larkin saw his work in the university as the nine-to-five “day job” that gave him the time to write poems. Nevertheless, his librarianship alone would preserve his memory. He presided over two rebuildings (completed in 1961 and 1970), creating, with vice-chancellor Sir Brynmor Jones, one of the finest post-war university libraries in Britain. After his death the Library Association published a volume of essays in his honour. Larkin’s Library remained unaltered until the magnificent £28 million renewal under his successor, Richard Heseltine, which was officially opened by the Poet Laureate last month. The new Reading Room preserves the original design of lighting, and with it, for all the computer terminals, much of the atmosphere of Larkin’s time. I arrived in Hull five years after the Robbins report, in 1968, a record year for staff appointments. With his background in the austere 1950s, the arrogance and sense of entitlement of the younger generation sharpened Larkin’s reactionary persona: “the place is full of replicas of Che Guevara & John Lennon, muttering away and plotting treason”. On the other hand, lunching in the staff refectory with my poet colleague Angela Leighton, he would envy the life of Riley we male academics must be enjoying among the female students. In 1973, The Guardian revealed that Reckitt and Colman, in which the university held a large investment, were paying black workers in their South African subsidiary below the official United Nations poverty wage. Knocking on doors, I signed up half the university staff to a petition to the university council requesting disinvestment. Asked about this in the bar over lunch, Larkin replied: “He’s performing a valuable function. It will be handy to have a complete list of all the pricks in the university.” But beyond all this are the poems. In the 1970s, I would spend Sunday afternoons in Loten Hall of Residence, watching the sky darken over the rugby pitch and listening to the familiar music of Larkin’s voice on the vinyl records of The Less Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings: “And past the poppies bluish neutral distance/Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach/Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:/Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.” In those days, Larkin was a guilty passion; he was too parochial, not modernist enough. But new enthusiastic generations of readers have followed to prove this a mistake. His work does not “date”. By the 1990s, I was teaching a Larkin option and supervising PhDs on his work. I recall my last glimpse. A few months before he died, in 1985, I saw him standing outside Grandways supermarket holding a plastic carrier bag. He acknowledged me with a wan grimace, round-shouldered, defeated, bound for “the total emptiness forever,/The sure extinction that we travel to/And shall be lost in always”.
1098	dbpedia	3	83	https://theshiftnetwork.com/blog/2019-07-24/dr-jude-currivan-answers-question	en	Dr. Jude Currivan answers the question:			[ "https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=1444956822439800&ev=PageView&noscript=1", "https://theshiftnetwork.com/sites/all/themes/shift/images/loader.gif", "https://theshiftnetwork.com/sites/all/themes/shift/images/top_logo_white.jpg", "https://theshiftnetwork.com/sites/all/themes/shift/images/small_logo_dark.png", "https://tsn-newsletter.s3.amazonaws.com/201914-article-currivan-1.png", "https://tsn-newsletter.s3.amazonaws.com/201914-article-currivan-2.jpg", "https://tsn-newsletter.s3.amazonaws.com/201914-article-currivan-3.png", "https://theshiftnetwork.com/sites/all/themes/shift/images/footer_logo_white.jpg" ]	[ "https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y8X7fSsVhJA?rel=0&showinfo=0&autohide=1&modestbranding=1&controls=1" ]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2019-07-24T00:00:00	Access the Best Transformational Education, Media, and Events on the Planet	en	/apple-touch-icon.png?v=47rb0e2erB		https://theshiftnetwork.com/blog/2019-07-24/dr-jude-currivan-answers-question	What is the nicest thing a non-family member has ever done for you? Oh, my goodness. Well, it's really tough to choose one story because I'm very fortunate. Many, many people over many years have been incredibly kind to me. But the one that really feels when I tune into it seemed quite small, but has actually shown to be incredibly powerful through my life. It goes back to when I was 19 years old, and I was a student at Oxford University. I was a coal miner's daughter. I grew up in the north of England. My dad was a coal miner, my granddad was a coal miner. My dad died when I was 10 years old, and so my mom brought myself and my younger brother up, and I got a place at Oxford, very prestigious. And in fact I was the first member of my family to go to university at all. So it was a big deal for many reasons, including the fact that I'd been a science nerd since I was five years old. Going to Oxford to read physics was a big deal. And in addition to being a northern lass with virtually everybody else being from posh schools from down south in England, but also being one of six women out of a course of 200 folks, all the rest men, it was quite a lonely time. And the kindness was offered me by a wonderful man called Professor Dennis Sciama. Dennis was the mentor and teacher of Stephen Hawking, who I guess many people know. And when I was 19, Dennis invited Stephen to give a talk, a seminar to postgraduate folks at Oxford, and he invited me. I was the youngest person in the room, I think I was the only undergraduate, and it was phenomenal to see this great mind that is Stephen Hawking begin at that point, because this is back in 1972, to talk about black holes. Professor Dennis Sciama This was the new big thing, and it was Dennis' kindness that invited me into that room, and I [entered] that room in one way and came out another, as it were. At the time, it was fine, but it didn't seem such a big deal. But then Dennis said, “Look, you know, there's a university prize, an essay prize for physics, and I think you should enter it.“ I was a bit nervous and reticent, you know, and not very confident at all. But I did, and I wrote an essay on, of course, dark holes. And I won the essay! I won the prize! But not only that, there was a prize money of 25 pounds, which believe me, back then was a lot of beer money. So it was great, but this is actually that essay, and I've kept it ever since. I was 19 then, I'm 67 now, so this is coming up to its half-century, this essay. But what he did, and what Dennis's kindness did, was not necessarily make me into academia. In fact, that didn't happen, but it gave me a continuing and lifelong interest in my curiosity about the nature of reality, and not just its appearance in the physical world, but other parts of my life have explored, you know, beyond that physical appearance to the deeper true nature of reality. So all my life threads have come to the point where now I'm an author, I can write The Cosmic Hologram, which is behind me, and share that after all this time there is a convergence, and even more than that, an integration between science and spirituality, that [creates the] potential to transcend both. A cosmology of consciousness, a cosmology where our universe is being now more and more seen as a great thought rather than a great thing. And more and more, the evidence is showing that mind and consciousness aren't something we have, but literally what we and the whole world are... a revelation that is according with so much of what so many pioneers are now sharing with the world. I think without Dennis' kindness and that introduction to black holes, which we’re finding actually is a very key phenomenon in understanding this new perception of reality, I wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be having this conversation, and I wouldn't be probably able to share all that I am able to share. Again, with the kindness of a professor who saw this young student, probably saw that I was a bit lost, probably saw that I needed some encouragement, and stepped forward and gave me that encouragement. And I just wonder how so many people have what may at the time seem a small kindness, actually is a huge gift that ultimately transforms our path through life. So thank you to Dennis, and thank you to you for this invitation, and thanks for everyone listening. I hope in everyone's life we can remember some times and many times of small and huge kindnesses that are ultimately all great gifts of spirit. Jude Currivan, PhD, is a cosmologist, planetary healer, futurist, and author. She was previously one of the most senior business women in the UK, as Group Finance Director and Executive Board Member of two major international companies. She has a Master’s degree in Physics from Oxford University specializing in quantum physics and cosmology, and a Doctorate in Archaeology from the University of Reading, specializing in the research of ancient cosmologies. She has travelled to nearly 80 countries, worked with wisdom keepers from many traditions, and been a lifelong researcher into the scientific and experiential understanding of the nature of reality. The author of six books, with the most recent the Nautilus award-winning, The Cosmic Hologram, she is a member of the Evolutionary Leaders circle, and in 2017 co-founded WholeWorld-View, a growing community of global change-makers serving the understanding, experiencing, and embodying of unity awareness to empower conscious evolution. She lives in Wiltshire, England.
1098	dbpedia	1	63	https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/jan/07/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-hawking-eddie-redmayne	en	The Theory of Everything skips over the black holes of marriage and science	https://i.guim.co.uk/img…e8b50e36f7dce489	https://i.guim.co.uk/img…e8b50e36f7dce489	[ "https://sb.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6035250&cv=2.0&cj=1&cs_ucfr=0&comscorekw=The+Theory+of+Everything%2CFilm%2CCulture%2CFilm+adaptations%2CStephen+Hawking%2CEddie+Redmayne%2CBiopics%2CBooks%2CScience%2CWorking+Title", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/1/6/1420559258997/5cda520a-dd89-4bb6-898b-8cf852f94258-2060x1236.jpeg?width=465&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/1/6/1420559777819/7146998e-c498-4e2c-bcca-0d1f0f2524b8-2060x1236.jpeg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/1/6/1420559619151/3f583f52-787b-4854-a150-a73ba975d0d4-2060x1236.jpeg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2015/1/12/1421069711332/Jane-Hawking-Stephen-Hawk-012.jpg?width=220&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/audio/video/2015/1/12/1421052100495/crop_KP-66904_1200.jpeg?width=220&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/1/6/1420559530591/dba48039-b1a4-426f-8561-d61ed653ed11-2060x1236.jpeg?width=220&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/audio/video/2015/1/5/1420453400007/crop_KP-62823_1200.jpeg?width=220&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2014/12/30/1419948596939/theory-of-everything-010.jpg?width=220&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/1/15/1421348725423/Eddie-Redmayne-as-Stephen-012.jpg?width=220&dpr=1&s=none", "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/1/13/1421151148845/Eddie-Redmayne-as-Stephen-012.jpg?width=220&dpr=1&s=none" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Alex von Tunzelmann", "www.theguardian.com" ]	2015-01-07T00:00:00	James Marsh’s biopic of Stephen Hawking oversimplifies the physics and dodges the darker side of his marriage breakdown, but the precise performance from Eddie Redmayne is out of this world, writes <strong>Alex von Tunzelmann</strong>	en	https://assets.guim.co.u…e-touch-icon.svg	the Guardian	https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/jan/07/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-hawking-eddie-redmayne	The Theory of Everything (2014) Director: James Marsh Entertainment grade: B+ History grade: B– Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes has sold more than 10 million copies. Romance Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones) meets Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) at a student party. She is captivated by the clever, awkward and occasionally spiky cosmologist. “His tales made very appealing listening,” the real Jane wrote in her memoir Travelling to Infinity, “particularly because of his way of hiccoughing with laughter, almost suffocating himself, at the jokes he told, many of them against himself.” The film recreates this perfectly. Meanwhile, Hawking’s PhD supervisor, Dennis Sciama (David Thewlis), warns that his course will separate “the quarks from the quacks”. Very timely: physicist Murray Gell-Mann identified and named the quark particle in 1963, though he pronounced it to rhyme with “fork” – not, as Sciama says it in the film, to rhyme with “park”. Illness Jane and Stephen soon start to date, and attend a May ball together. Their relationship goes well – except that if you watch Redmayne’s exceptionally precise and quite brilliant performance closely, you will notice he gradually becomes more clumsy and less able to control his movements. Eventually, Stephen stumbles and falls in a quad – and is diagnosed with a form of motor neurone disease. The doctor tells him he has two years to live. This is a well-constructed piece of storytelling, but it isn’t quite how it happened. The real Hawking was diagnosed before he started dating Jane. Rather than pushing her away, he brushed his diagnosis off: “I mentioned how sorry I had been to hear of his stay in hospital, whereupon he wrinkled his nose and said nothing,” Jane wrote. “He behaved so convincingly as if everything were fine, and I felt it would have been cruel to have pursued the subject further.” Physics Some science writers have complained that Hawking’s physics has been oversimplified in the movie. It has, of course – feature films often struggle with the exposition of complex science. There are minor bloopers, such as when Hawking and his fellow PhD students attend a lecture by Sir Roger Penrose (Christian McKay) in 1963 discussing “black holes”. Astronomers first suggested that black holes might exist in the 18th century, but they were not called “black holes” until the physicist John Wheeler so named them in 1967. But the film does at least try to explain Hawking radiation, and does better than many historical films in showing that its central character was not an isolated, lone genius struggling towards discovery unaided, but actually had colleagues. Several notable physicists appear briefly as characters. It is true that Hawking and Kip Thorne (Enzo Cilenti) had a bet over whether Cygnus X-1 was a black hole. The film suggests the winner would get a year’s subscription to Penthouse. According to Jane’s memoir, Thorne wanted Penthouse – but Hawking preferred Private Eye. Astrophysics enthusiasts might note that Thorne also had a big movie out this year: he was the scientific mind behind Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. Relationships Jane sticks with Stephen despite the increasing difficulties of living with him. As their relationship becomes more complex, the film becomes more interesting. Her determination that he must and will live on has an edge of zealotry, but she is gradually worn down by the toll of caring for him single-handed; he refuses to allow carers in to help. She begins a platonic romance with a hunky choirmaster, Jonathan Hellyer Jones (Charlie Cox), who effectively joins the family. Jane’s memoir Travelling to Infinity, published in 2007, was originally released as Music to Move the Stars in 1999. The earlier version was longer and painted a less forgiving picture of her former husband. Even the new edition makes him out to be a more egotistical and less saintly personality than he appears in the film, especially after he began his connection with his then-nurse, Elaine Mason (Maxine Peake). Disharmony In the film, the Hawkings’ marriage breakdown is civilised. In real life, Jane believed that Elaine was manipulating Stephen: “He was being persuaded that I was no longer of any use to him, that I was good for nothing … Flames of vituperation, hatred, desire for revenge leapt at me from all sides, scorching me to the quick with accusations – the unfaithful wife, the uncaring partner, the selfish career woman, work-shy and frivolous, more intent on singing than on looking after her frail, defenceless husband.” The film does not show Jane and Stephen’s decade-long estrangement, preferring to skip to their more recent reconciliation. It can be forgiven for dodging his second marriage to Elaine, from 1995-2006. Allegations that Hawking was abused during the marriage were reported, but were strongly denied by Hawking himself – making that relationship difficult territory for the film-makers to approach in any more detail than they have. Verdict The Theory of Everything is an accomplished and moving film, with exceptional performances. Its portrait of Stephen and Jane Hawking’s relationship is fair-minded – almost to a fault.
1098	dbpedia	2	61	https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/media-resources/tim-palmer-festschrift/preface	en	Preface	https://www.ecmwf.int/sites/default/files/favicon.ico.production.ico	https://www.ecmwf.int/sites/default/files/favicon.ico.production.ico	[ "https://www.ecmwf.int/themes/ecmwf/src/images/svg/ECMWF_logo.svg", "https://www.ecmwf.int/sites/default/files/styles/150x200/public/2023-02/AntjeWeisheimer.jpeg?itok=sEh7UV9A", "https://www.ecmwf.int/sites/default/files/styles/150x200/public/2023-02/FlorianPappenberger.jpg?itok=lB_RRDyy", "https://www.ecmwf.int/sites/default/files/styles/150x200/public/2023-02/IanShipsey.jpg?itok=dPc9kYxB", "https://www.ecmwf.int/themes/ecmwf/src/images/svg/twitter.svg", "https://www.ecmwf.int/themes/ecmwf/src/images/svg/facebook.svg", "https://www.ecmwf.int/themes/ecmwf/src/images/svg/linkedin.svg", "https://www.ecmwf.int/themes/ecmwf/src/images/svg/flickr.svg", "https://www.ecmwf.int/themes/ecmwf/src/images/svg/youtube.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts" ]	2023-02-02T09:54:00+00:00	← prev	en	/sites/default/files/favicon.ico.production.ico	ECMWF	https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/media-resources/tim-palmer-festschrift/preface	← prev Contents next → Tim Palmer: Mathematical physicist, climate dynamicist, poet, band leader Antje Weisheimer1,2 Florian Pappenberger1 and Ian Shipsey2 1 ECMWF 2 University of Oxford In 1963, Ed Lorenz showed that due to the chaotic nature of the atmosphere, even small initial errors would eventually prevent the weather being predicted in detail. However, the timescale for such unpredictable effects to occur would vary from one initial state to another, and sometimes small initial errors could affect the forecasts. Such flow-dependent error growth and predictability can be estimated from the spread of forecasts made from slightly different initial conditions. This led to the development of the operational ensemble prediction systems at ECMWF, starting in the second half of the 1980s, and ensembles are now at the heart of ECMWF’s global forecasts at all time ranges from the ensemble of data analysis to the medium-, extended and longest seasonal forecast ranges. Ensemble-based probabilistic forecasts have become immensely successful for both the scientific developments of weather, climate, and environmental predictions as well as for a wide spectrum of sectorial applications. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of this significant milestone for numerical weather predictions, and to pay tribute to Tim Palmer’s manifold contributions to science, ECMWF and Oxford University hosted a symposium on the 5th and 6th of December 2022. The days of talks and reflections also celebrated Tim's career as one of ECMWF’s most influential protagonists. He was instrumental in the development of ensemble techniques and their widespread adoption by meteorologists around the world. Tim Palmer’s professional life has been profoundly linked to ECMWF’s ensemble prediction system leading the probabilistic forecasting and diagnostics activities at the centre. He was at the forefront of the development of the scientific basis for probabilistic forecasting and the implementation of the first operational ensemble predictions in the early 1990s. In 2011, Tim left ECMWF to take up a Royal Society Research Professorship at the University of Oxford’s Physics Department. He continues to work very closely with ECMWF, in the development of the use of low numerical precision and the use of AI in weather forecast models (amongst many other activities). He also authored many highly cited scientific articles on the subject, co-edited the books Predictability of Weather and Climate and Stochastic Physics and Climate Modelling, as well as his own recently published book The Primacy of Doubt: From climate change to quantum physics, how the science of uncertainty can help predict and understand our chaotic world, in which he links climate change to quantum physics as well as economic modelling and conflict prediction with the aim to bring uncertainty in a thought-provoking way to scientists and the wider public. In addition to his work on ensemble forecasting for weather prediction, Tim has also made significant contributions to the field of climate science contributing to the IPCC as a lead author. He has written extensively on the subject and has been a major influence in the development of climate models. The presentations of the first day of the symposium reviewed the history that led to the development of operational ensemble forecasts, the initial perturbation and model uncertainty strategies as key characteristics of an ensemble configuration, the use of ensembles across time scales from weather to climate, and their value for humanitarian disaster risk management and commercial applications in the world of energy markets. While we celebrate Tim Palmer’s career, ECMWF’s upgrade of the operational modelling cycle to a unified high-resolution 9-km global ensemble as the centre piece of our medium-range prediction is actively being tested to be implemented in 2023, a truly marvellous prospect for the future of ensemble forecasting. We are proud to present this Festschrift in honour of Tim Palmer and his remarkable career. His contributions to meteorology and climate science have been immense and have had a profound impact on the way that scientists understand and predict the weather and climate. A second day of talks marking Tim’s wider career was held the following day at the Physics Department of the University of Oxford. We are a very wide-ranging department, studying the universe from the smallest scales to the largest scales, and everything in between. From the birth of time to the present, we make predictions about the future, from how our universe will evolve, to how our climate is changing. We are helping to usher in quantum revolution 2.0, developing some of the world’s most efficient solar cells and bringing them to market next year, and advancing the national programme in nuclear fusion. Whether we are astrophysicists, or biophysicists, or study quantum materials or quantum computing, or climate, we are united by being physicists. I was impressed when I joined Oxford eight years ago, that the department of physics had a sub-department of atmospheric, oceanographic and planetary physics, because it is something of a rarity. But it should not be so. It is right and fitting because climate and climate change are physics. The award of the 2021 Nobel prize in physics, for the physical warming of earth’s climate, quantifying variability, and reliably predicting global warming, highlights that climate is physics. That it is so is profound because it renders the question “do you believe in global warming?” meaningless. Whether the globe warms in response to greenhouse gases is determined by the physics of energy balance; it is not subject to a belief system. Tim is a great advocate that new ideas do not somehow emerge out of the aether. But rather they arise when someone takes an idea from one field and applies it to another. And so people should be encouraged to move between different areas of physics and bring ideas with them - Tim has written eloquently and with energy and passion on this subject. I think he can write that way because that’s how he’s lived. He was awarded a prize at the Royal Society for work parameterizing the effect of breaking gravity waves which are produced by flow over mountains in weather forecast models. The parametrisation improved the accuracy of jet stream forecasts and saved the airlines a great deal of money because they didn’t need to carry so much spare fuel; that prize (ESSO Energy Award in 1986) was for improvements in energy efficiency. During the presentation given by Tim on the prize, someone in the audience asked Tim about his PhD work. Tim’s thesis at Oxford was entitled “Covariant conservation equations and their relation to the energy momentum concept in general relativity” and his doctoral advisors included the eminent cosmologist Dennis Sciama. This person observed that and said that Tim had made a truly big switch in fields. But Tim replied “Not really. I used to work on gravitational waves, and now I work on gravity waves”. I remember having dinner with Tim a day or two after LIGO announced the observation of gravitational waves at Jesus College, and we discussed the immense significance of that amazing technological feat. We then had a really interesting and wide-ranging discussion on general relativity and quantum mechanics. Discussing physics with Tim is a delight, but it is also an education. I am very proud indeed that our department is home to Tim, and all my other colleagues in Atmospheric, Oceanographic and Planetary Physics. Tim is a scientific titan, who has made truly immense and sustained contributions to climate physics. Thank you very much Tim!
1098	dbpedia	3	56	https://indico.cern.ch/event/892213/page/19899-venue-dennis-sciama-lecture-theatre	en	Accelerator & Particle Physics Education at A-Level APPEAL-11	https://indico.cern.ch/i…ndico_square.png	https://indico.cern.ch/i…ndico_square.png	[ "https://indico.cern.ch/static/custom/files/cern_small.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	APPEAL 11 – Particle Accelerators and Plasma Technology The Wave of the Future	en	/images/indico.ico	Indico	null	University of Oxford Sub-department of Particle Physics Contact and Location Information Mailing address: Denys Wilkinson Building Keble Road Oxford OX1 3RH UK How to find us: We are in the Denys Wilkinson Building (formerly called Nuclear and Astrophysics Laboratory), which is the modern concrete building on the corner of Banbury and Keble Roads. To get to the entrance, go up the stairs on the Keble Road side, then to the left into the corner. For maps and information on travel to Oxford, see http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/contact/findus.htm. Please note the information there that parking is extremely limited.
1098	dbpedia	0	54	https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tomkerss_launch-day-my-first-foray-into-science-fiction-activity-7071602963122638848-4FwL	en	Tom Kerss on LinkedIn: Launch day! My first foray into science fiction is out now! It’s been…	https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D4E22AQE-zgkJWanS8w/feedshare-shrink_800/0/1686001529102?e=2147483647&v=beta&t=TKjTeUp56IQxPAZatCqEKjJvrMdjUdv2tT0iJNPms54	https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D4E22AQE-zgkJWanS8w/feedshare-shrink_800/0/1686001529102?e=2147483647&v=beta&t=TKjTeUp56IQxPAZatCqEKjJvrMdjUdv2tT0iJNPms54	[ "https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D4E16AQFcTbuzfiUpXw/profile-displaybackgroundimage-shrink_200_800/0/1704238503431?e=2147483647&v=beta&t=f2yFG8YubUI8HEgAAvRE_nlY10Bo8oOZ0oC8uqKWtkg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Tom Kerss" ]	2023-06-05T21:45:30.419000+00:00	Launch day! My first foray into science fiction is out now! It’s been awesome developing this graphic novel for Collins Big Cat, and quite a departure from my…	en	https://static.licdn.com/aero-v1/sc/h/al2o9zrvru7aqj8e1x2rzsrca		https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tomkerss_launch-day-my-first-foray-into-science-fiction-activity-7071602963122638848-4FwL	Autumn is around the corner, and the Northern Lights season is about to begin. I shared my thoughts with Forbes about why this autumn will be a fantastic time for aurora-chasing, just one of five excellent reasons to join Hurtigruten for a voyage along Norway's astonishing coastline. Celebrating its tenth year, the Northern Lights Promise has been extended to mid-September! Thoroughly looking forward to joining the National Space Centre for this year's UK in Space Festival, alongside some fantastic speakers and organisations. I'll be launching my upcoming Children's Guide to the Night Sky, and introducing young stargazers to the Universe. You can find out more and get tickets here: https://lnkd.in/ekEe7RiS Ever since the historic geomagnetic storm of May 2024, we've been wondering when the next one will occur. This week, a moderate G2 storm raised hopes of more auroral activity but failed to emerge as can often happen. Nevertheless, the next big storm is a matter of when, not if, and I shared some evergreen advice for US aurora-chasers with Parade Magazine. https://lnkd.in/e83Zfcht Thank you to Bradford Literature Festival for inviting me to take part in 2024’s education programme! I spoke to hundreds of primary school students at BLF about the stories and science we draw from the night sky. It was wonderful to meet so many bright and brilliant students - tomorrow’s space professionals and storytellers. I'm looking forward to joining the 10th annual Bradford Literature Festival to take part in the Primary Education Programme and inspire young readers to discover the cosmos! I'll be sharing the storied history of the sky from the Children's Picture Atlas of the Stars, and exploring the practical ways that budding astronomers can hone their skills as revealed in the Children's Guide to the Night Sky (publishing 12 September.) Teachers can book the session on 28 June as part of the 'You are Stardust' programme. https://lnkd.in/eStPvFt9 Almost a month has passed since the incredible geomagnetic storms that brought visible auroras to the tropics, and I'm still regularly answering questions about it. I'm delighted to be featured in Smithsonian Magazine this week to share my insights alongside other experts! It's going to be a great season to join Hurtigruten in Norway and come aurora-chasing with me. https://lnkd.in/e47RswEV It was nice to make my NPR debut, with an interview on affiliate station WOSU (Ohio) about why the approaching solar maximum will bring us more sightings of the Northern Lights. After last weekend's historic global aurora storm, triggered by intense solar activity, and with perhaps more activity on the way, I joined Sky News to explore the prospects for UK aurora-hunters. I also had a chance to share some insight into my role as Chief Aurora Chaser at Hurtigruten Chances are you’ve never seen these images from the James Webb Space Telescope before. That’s because I processed these myself using data from the NIRCam instrument, and none have appeared in press releases before. These and more from my own processing projects will be included, alongside many stunning official images, in my upcoming book Unknown Universe. It’s due to be published by HarperCollins in October, ahead of Webb’s third anniversary in space this Christmas! It’s official: A Hurtigruten Astronomy Voyage is 𝘵𝘩𝘦 way to experience the Northern Lights during the upcoming solar maximum, not least because there is so much more to Norway than its unique nightlife. It was such a pleasure to be joined by Cosmopolitan’s Sophie Leen for the trip of a lifetime, from the cute shops in Tromsø to the adorable huskies in Kirkenes.
1098	dbpedia	1	18	https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/our-facilities/lab-and-testing-facilities/sciama-supercomputer	en	SCIAMA Supercomputer	https://www.port.ac.uk/themes/custom/portsmouth/favicon.ico	https://www.port.ac.uk/themes/custom/portsmouth/favicon.ico	[ "https://www.port.ac.uk/themes/custom/portsmouth/logo.svg", "https://www.port.ac.uk/themes/custom/portsmouth//images/logo-mobile.png", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/hero_mobile/public/media/images/webimage-9C180481-270D-4FDA-89C5F6629D824485.jpg?itok=DMxsnpds", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/embedded_image_part_width_mobile/public/media/images/footer_map_0.png?itok=Y8EmpEti" ]	[]	[]	[ "SCIAMA", "supercomputer", "computer", "cosmology", "gravitation" ]	null	[]	null	Explore the Sciama Supercomputer at the University of Portsmouth, driving cutting-edge research and computational simulations in diverse scientific disciplines.	en	/themes/custom/portsmouth/favicon.ico	University of Portsmouth	https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/our-facilities/lab-and-testing-facilities/sciama-supercomputer	The SCIAMA supercomputer is at the heart of the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) – a research institute devoted to cosmology, galaxy evolution and gravitation. SCIAMA is a High Performance Compute Cluster (HPCC) which is supported by ICG, SEPnet and the University of Portsmouth. It was built in 2011 to provide computational resources for scientific research carried out at the ICG. The supercomputer was named after Dennis Sciama, a leading figure in the development of astrophysics and cosmology, but it's also an acronym that stands for SEPnet Computing Infrastructure for Astrophysical Modelling and Analysis. The facility is used by postgraduate and undergraduate students, researchers and external partners. The supercomputer is able to complete a billion calculations per second, simulate vast regions of the Universe, investigate the properties of hundreds of millions of galaxies, and has been used to run complex cosmological experiments and simulations, such as:
1098	dbpedia	0	15	https://www.newscientist.com/article/2053929-a-brief-history-of-stephen-hawking-a-legacy-of-paradox/	en	A brief history of Stephen Hawking: A legacy of paradox	https://images.newscient…/08/73149807.jpg	https://images.newscient…/08/73149807.jpg	[ "https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/73149807.jpg", "https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/h_02681055.jpg?width=300 300w, https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/h_02681055.jpg?width=400 400w, https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/h_02681055.jpg?width=500 500w, https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/h_02681055.jpg?width=600 600w, https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/h_02681055.jpg?width=700 700w, https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/h_02681055.jpg?width=800 800w, https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/h_02681055.jpg?width=837 837w, 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https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/17122440/SEI_148399225.jpg?width=738 738w, https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/17122440/SEI_148399225.jpg?width=788 788w", "https://www.newscientist.com/build/images/footer/apple.691391b5.svg", "https://www.newscientist.com/build/images/footer/google.f217b9d7.svg", "https://www.newscientist.com/build/images/footer/instagram.49e1fa34.svg", "https://www.newscientist.com/build/images/footer/meta.f61ba35f.svg", "https://www.newscientist.com/build/images/footer/twitter.86154302.svg", "https://www.newscientist.com/build/images/footer/tiktok.020a2952.svg", "https://www.newscientist.com/build/images/footer/linkedin.aff7042c.svg", "https://www.newscientist.com/build/images/footer/whatsapp.a05d81f2.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "Stephen Hawking", "physics", "obituary", "stephen hawking" ]	null	[ "Stuart Clark", "#author.fullName}" ]	2018-03-14T05:57:52+00:00	He was an icon for many reasons, but as we remember Stephen Hawking, his remarkable contribution to science is undoubtedly his greatest legacy	en	/build/images/layup/new-sci-favicon.d65b52af.ico	New Scientist	https://www.newscientist.com/article/2053929-a-brief-history-of-stephen-hawking-a-legacy-of-paradox/	Stephen Hawking, the world-famous theoretical physicist, has died at the age of 76. Hawking’s children, Lucy, Robert and Tim said in a statement: “We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today. “He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across the world. “He once said: ‘It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.’ We will miss him for ever.” The most recognisable scientist of our age, Hawking holds an iconic status. His genre-defining book, A Brief History of Time, has sold more than 10 million copies since its publication in 1988, and has been translated into more than 35 languages. He appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory. His early life was the subject of an Oscar-winning performance by Eddie Redmayne in the 2014 film The Theory of Everything. He was routinely consulted for oracular pronouncements on everything from time travel and alien life to Middle Eastern politics and nefarious robots. He had an endearing sense of humour and a daredevil attitude – relatable human traits that, combined with his seemingly superhuman mind, made Hawking eminently marketable. But his cultural status – amplified by his disability and the media storm it invoked – often overshadowed his scientific legacy. That’s a shame for the man who discovered what might prove to be the key clue to the theory of everything, advanced our understanding of space and time, helped shape the course of physics for the last four decades and whose insight continues to drive progress in fundamental physics today. Beginning with the big bang Hawking’s research career began with disappointment. Arriving at the University of Cambridge in 1962 to begin his PhD, he was told that Fred Hoyle, his chosen supervisor, already had a full complement of students. The most famous British astrophysicist at the time, Hoyle was a magnet for the more ambitious students. Hawking didn’t make the cut. Instead, he was to work with Dennis Sciama, a physicist Hawking knew nothing about. In the same year, Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative motor neurone disease that quickly robs people of the ability to voluntarily move their muscles. He was told he had two years to live. Although Hawking’s body may have weakened, his intellect stayed sharp. Two years into his PhD, he was having trouble walking and talking, but it was clear that the disease was progressing more slowly than the doctors had initially feared. Meanwhile, his engagement to Jane Wilde – with whom he later had three children, Robert, Lucy and Tim – renewed his drive to make real progress in physics. Working with Sciama had its advantages. Hoyle’s fame meant that he was seldom in the department, whereas Sciama was around and eager to talk. Those discussions stimulated the young Hawking to pursue his own scientific vision. Hoyle was vehemently opposed to the big bang theory (in fact, he had coined the name “big bang” in mockery). Sciama, on the other hand, was happy for Hawking to investigate the beginning of time. Time’s arrow Hawking was studying the work of Roger Penrose, which proved that if Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct, at the heart of every black hole must be a point where space and time themselves break down – a singularity. Hawking realised that if time’s arrow were reversed, the same reasoning would hold true for the universe as a whole. Under Sciama’s encouragement, he worked out the maths and was able to prove it: the universe according to general relativity began in a singularity. Hawking was well aware, however, that Einstein didn’t have the last word. General relativity, which describes space and time on a large scale, doesn’t take into account quantum mechanics, which describes matter’s strange behaviour at much smaller scales. Some unknown “theory of everything” was needed to unite the two. For Hawking, the singularity at the universe’s origin did not signal the breakdown of space and time; it signalled the need for quantum gravity. Luckily, the link that he forged between Penrose’s singularity and the singularity at the big bang provided a key clue for finding such a theory. If physicists wanted to understand the origin of the universe, Hawking had just shown them exactly where to look: a black hole. Black holes were a subject ripe for investigation in the early 1970s. Although Karl Schwarzschild had found such objects lurking in the equations of general relativity back in 1915, theoreticians viewed them as mere mathematical anomalies and were reluctant to believe they could actually exist. Albeit frightening, their action is reasonably straightforward: black holes have such strong gravitational fields that nothing, not even light, can escape their grip. Any matter that falls into one is forever lost to the outside world. This, however, is a dagger in the heart of thermodynamics. Thermodynamic threat The second law of thermodynamics is one of the most well-established laws of nature. It states that the entropy, or level of disorder in a system, always increases. The second law gives form to the observation that ice cubes will melt into a puddle, but a puddle of water will never spontaneously turn into a block of ice. All matter contains entropy, so what happens when it is dropped into a black hole? Is entropy lost along with it? If so, the total entropy of the universe goes down and black holes would violate the second law of thermodynamics. Hawking thought that this was fine. He was happy to discard any concept that stood in the way to a deeper truth. And if that meant the second law, then so be it. Bekenstein and breakthrough But Hawking met his match at a 1972 physics summer school in the French ski resort of Les Houches, France. Princeton University graduate student Jacob Bekenstein thought that the second law of thermodynamics should apply to black holes too. Bekenstein had been studying the entropy problem and had reached a possible solution thanks to an earlier insight of Hawking’s. A black hole hides its singularity with a boundary known as the event horizon. Nothing that crosses the event horizon can ever return to the outside. Hawking’s work had shown that the area of a black hole’s event horizon never decreases over time. What’s more, when matter falls into a black hole, the area of its event horizon grows. Bekenstein realised this was key to the entropy problem. Every time a black hole swallows matter, its entropy appears to be lost, and at the same time, its event horizon grows. So, Bekenstein suggested, what if – to preserve the second law – the area of the horizon is itself a measure of entropy? Hawking immediately disliked the idea and was angry that his own work had been used in support of a concept so flawed. With entropy comes heat, but the black hole couldn’t be radiating heat – nothing can escape its pull of gravity. During a break from the lectures, Hawking got together with colleagues Brandon Carter, who also studied under Sciama, and James Bardeen, of the University of Washington, and confronted Bekenstein. The disagreement bothered Bekenstein. “These three were senior people. I was just out of my PhD. You worry whether you are just stupid and these guys know the truth,” he recalls. Back in Cambridge, Hawking set out to prove Bekenstein wrong. Instead, he discovered the precise form of the mathematical relationship between entropy and the black hole’s horizon. Rather than destroying the idea, he had confirmed it. It was Hawking’s greatest breakthrough. Hawking radiation Hawking now embraced the idea that thermodynamics played a part in black holes. Anything that has entropy, he reasoned, also has a temperature – and anything that has a temperature can radiate. His original mistake, Hawking realised, was in only considering general relativity, which says that nothing – no particles, no heat – can escape the grip of a black hole. That changes when quantum mechanics comes into play. According to quantum mechanics, fleeting pairs of particles and antiparticles are constantly appearing out of empty space, only to annihilate and disappear in the blink of an eye. When this happens in the vicinity of an event horizon, a particle-antiparticle pair can be separated – one falls behind the horizon while one escapes, leaving them forever unable to meet and annihilate. The orphaned particles stream away from the black hole’s edge as radiation. The randomness of quantum creation becomes the randomness of heat. “I think most physicists would agree that Hawking’s greatest contribution is the prediction that black holes emit radiation,” says Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. “While we still don’t have experimental confirmation that Hawking’s prediction is true, nearly every expert believes he was right.” Experiments to test Hawking’s prediction are so difficult because the more massive a black hole is, the lower its temperature. For a large black hole – the kind astronomers can study with a telescope – the temperature of the radiation is too insignificant to measure. As Hawking himself often noted, it was for this reason that he was never awarded a Nobel Prize. Still, the prediction was enough to secure him a prime place in the annals of science, and the quantum particles that stream from the black hole’s edge would forever be known as Hawking radiation. Some have suggested that they should more appropriately be called Bekenstein-Hawking radiation, but Bekenstein himself rejects this. “The entropy of a black hole is called Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, which I think is fine. I wrote it down first, Hawking found the numerical value of the constant, so together we found the formula as it is today. The radiation was really Hawking’s work. I had no idea how a black hole could radiate. Hawking brought that out very clearly. So that should be called Hawking radiation.” Theory of everything The Bekenstein-Hawking entropy equation is the one Hawking asked to have engraved on his tombstone. It represents the ultimate mash-up of physical disciplines because it contains Newton’s constant, which clearly relates to gravity; Planck’s constant, which betrays quantum mechanics at play; the speed of light, the talisman of Einstein’s relativity; and the Boltzmann constant, the herald of thermodynamics. The presence of these diverse constants hinted at a theory of everything, in which all physics is unified. Furthermore, it strongly corroborated Hawking’s original hunch that understanding black holes would be key in unlocking that deeper theory. Hawking’s breakthrough may have solved the entropy problem, but it raised an even more difficult problem in its wake. If black holes can radiate, they will eventually evaporate and disappear. So what happens to all the information that fell in? Does it vanish too? If so, it will violate a central tenet of quantum mechanics. On the other hand, if it escapes from the black hole, it will violate Einstein’s theory of relativity. With the discovery of black hole radiation, Hawking had pit the ultimate laws of physics against one another. The black hole information loss paradox had been born. Hawking staked his position in another ground-breaking and even more contentious paper entitled Breakdown of predictability in gravitational collapse, published in Physical Review D in 1976. He argued that when a black hole radiates away its mass, it does take all of its information with it – despite the fact that quantum mechanics expressly forbids information loss. Soon other physicists would pick sides, for or against this idea, in a debate that continues to this day. Indeed, many feel that information loss is the most pressing obstacle in understanding quantum gravity. “Hawking’s 1976 argument that black holes lose information is a towering achievement, perhaps one of the most consequential discoveries on the theoretical side of physics since the subject was invented,” says Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley. Concession By the late 1990s, results emerging from string theory had most theoretical physicists convinced that Hawking was wrong about information loss, but Hawking, known for his stubbornness, dug in his heels. It wasn’t until 2004 that he would change his mind. And he did it with flair – dramatically showing up at a conference in Dublin and announcing his updated view: black holes cannot lose information. Today, however, a new paradox known as the firewall has thrown everything into doubt (see “Hawking’s paradox”, below). It is clear that the question Hawking raised is at the core of the quest for quantum gravity. “Black hole radiation raises serious puzzles we are still working very hard to understand,” says Carroll. “It’s fair to say that Hawking radiation is the single biggest clue we have to the ultimate reconciliation of quantum mechanics and gravity, arguably the greatest challenge facing theoretical physics today.” Hawking’s legacy, says Bousso, will be “having put his finger on the key difficulty in the search for a theory of everything”. Hawking continued pushing the boundaries of theoretical physics at a seemingly impossible pace for the rest of his life. He made important inroads towards understanding how quantum mechanics applies to the universe as a whole, leading the way in the field known as quantum cosmology. His progressive disease pushed him to tackle problems in novel ways, which contributed to his remarkable intuition for his subject. As he lost the ability to write out long, complicated equations, Hawking found new and inventive methods to solve problems in his head, usually by reimagining them in geometric form. But, like Einstein before him, Hawking never produced anything quite as revolutionary as his early work. “Hawking’s most influential work was done in the 1970s, when he was younger,” says Carroll, “but that’s completely standard even for physicists who aren’t burdened with a debilitating neurone disease.” Hawking the superstar In the meantime, the publication of A Brief History of Time catapulted Hawking to cultural stardom and gave a fresh face to theoretical physics. He never seemed to mind. “In front of the camera, Hawking played the character of Hawking. He seemed to play with his cultural status,” says Hélène Mialet, an anthropologist from the University of California, Berkeley, who courted controversy in 2012 with the publication of her book Hawking Incorporated. In it, she investigated the way the people around Hawking helped him build and maintain his public image. That public image undoubtedly made his life easier than it might otherwise have been. As Hawking’s disease progressed, technologists gladly provided increasingly complicated machines to allow him to communicate. This, in turn, let him continue doing the thing for which he should ultimately be remembered: his science. “Stephen Hawking has done more to advance our understanding of gravitation than anyone since Einstein,” Carroll says. “He was a world-leading theoretical physicist, clearly the best in the world for his time among those working at the intersection of gravity and quantum mechanics, and he did it all in the face of a terrible disease. He is an inspirational figure, and history will certainly remember him that way.”
1098	dbpedia	2	6	https://www.themoviedb.org/person/3227585-dennis-sciama	en	Dennis Sciama	https://www.themoviedb.o…197a37b367b5.png	https://www.themoviedb.o…197a37b367b5.png	[ "https://www.themoviedb.org/assets/2/v4/logos/v2/blue_short-8e7b30f73a4020692ccca9c88bafe5dcb6f8a62a4c6bc55cd9ba82bb2cd95f6c.svg", "https://www.themoviedb.org/assets/2/v4/logos/v2/blue_square_2-d537fb228cf3ded904ef09b136fe3fec72548ebc1fea3fbbd1ad9e36364db38b.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "Movies", "TV Shows", "Streaming", "Reviews", "API", "Actors", "Actresses", "Photos", "User Ratings", "Synopsis", "Trailers", "Teasers", "Credits", "Cast" ]	null	[]	null	Dennis William Siahou Sciama, FRS, was a British physicist who, through his own work and that of his students, played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War.	de	/assets/2/apple-touch-icon-57ed4b3b0450fd5e9a0c20f34e814b82adaa1085c79bdde2f00ca8787b63d2c4.png	The Movie Database	https://www.themoviedb.org/person/3227585-dennis-sciama	Looks like we're missing the following data in de-DE or en-US... A movie or TV credit Profile image Dennis William Siahou Sciama, FRS, was a British physicist who, through his own work and that of his students, played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War.
1098	dbpedia	0	49	https://infinite.mit.edu/video/susan-sontag-e-o-wilson-roger-penrose-mit-images-meaning-conference-2001	en	Susan Sontag, E. O. Wilson & Roger Penrose at MIT - Images & Meaning Conference 2001	https://media.graphassets.com/9h46IQTPKRYYVJJuc5Kw	https://media.graphassets.com/9h46IQTPKRYYVJJuc5Kw	[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	The InfiniteMIT site is a collection of videos that create a vivid portrait of an institution that is continually changing the way we live and work. Interviews with legendary change-makers, historic footage from the MIT Museum collection, unforgettable lectures, commencement speeches, and symposia.	en	/favicon-32x32.png?v=aefb52b158a71bcc56ad63f983d7a720		null	[MUSIC PLAYING] [BACKGROUND CHATTER] ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Roger Penrose, Susan Sontag, Edward O. Wilson, and Alan Lightman. [APPLAUSE] LIGHTMAN: I'll sit here. Welcome to our evening discussion of image and meaning. I'm Alan Lightman of MIT, and it is my pleasure and privilege to be the host of tonight's session. In the history of modern science, a central measure of progress has been the degree to which knowledge can be expressed in numbers and equations and concepts. A ball takes 1.3 seconds to fall a distance of 30 feet. The electrical force between two electrons varies as the square of the distance between them. The energy of a closed system is always the same. To represent a concept or a result in this form has usually been considered the most precise form of understanding nature. But knowledge can also be presented and misrepresented in pictures and images. Our minds and imaginations react to these representations in a different way than to numbers and equations. And here, we must remember that we can objectify and distill all that we want, but meaning and understanding must ultimately be assigned by the human mind. Image and meaning is really a matter of human perception. We're sitting here tonight in one of the world's temples of science and technology, dedicated to the study of physical phenomena, atoms and molecules, DNA, computers, galaxies. But of all the wonderful mysteries of nature, nothing is more mysterious or profound than the human mind. Somehow, we are aware of ourselves and our relationship to the outside world. Somehow, we think. Somehow, we assign meaning to the billions of sensory inputs constantly flooding our brains. Somehow, we create new ideas. More specifically, in the context of our gathering tonight and our conference topic of image and meaning, I want to raise the following four questions. What role do images and visualization play in the creative process? How do images change the way that we think of ourselves? How do images help scientists in their research beyond the help provided by numerical data? And finally, in what ways do scientists communicate their work? In what ways do images help scientists communicate their work to non-scientists? To stimulate our thought tonight about these and related questions, we have with us three of the most interesting minds of our time-- Roger Penrose, Susan Sontag, and Edward O. Wilson. Roger Penrose is a mathematician and physicist at Oxford. In the 1960s, Penrose proved very general conditions under which the universe had to have originated in a big bang. Penrose often uses pictures and diagrams in his work. He is renowned for his discovery of Penrose tiles, which are two geometric shapes that can completely cover an infinite plane without ever repeating a pattern. In his book The Emperor's New Mind, Penrose broadened his interests to consider the nature of thinking and human consciousness. Among his many awards, Penrose has won the Wolf Prize, which he shared with Stephen Hawking in 1988. And I learned tonight that a collection of Roger's drawings will be shown in the Ruskin School of Fine Arts at Oxford. Susan Sontag is one of the great literary and cultural voices of America. In both fiction and nonfiction, she explores topics ranging from the American consciousness and identity, to the cultural and literary meaning of illness, to the different complexions of the narrative voice in the modern novel. Her nonfiction includes such books as Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Illness as Metaphor, and Under the Sign of Saturn. And her novels include The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and, most recently, In America. Sontag is a winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and just recently, she has won the prestigious Jerusalem International Book Award. Edward O. Wilson is an evolutionary biologist and zoologist at Harvard. Wilson is equally famous for his decades-long, detailed study of the tiny ant and his broad analyses and theories about the biological principles that govern social behavior and organization in all kinds of animals, including us. Some of Wilson's many books include The Ants, On Human Nature, and Sociobiology. One of his most recent books, Consilience, concerns commonalities between all forms of human knowledge. Wilson, among his other awards, has twice won the Pulitzer Prize. And I learned from him tonight that he is at work on another book on what of all subjects but ants. 800 pages, including over 5,000 of his own drawings of ants. I want to begin by giving a brief summary of the format for the evening. We will start with a series of six images, which you will all see here on the screen, and I hope that our panelists can see here pr by straining your neck and looking backwards. These are images which have not been shown before to our guests. Each of our guests will then speak for 10 minutes, during which he or she-- [LAUGHTER] Is something happening? OK. All right, let me know when something happens. Each of our guests will then speak for about 10 minutes, in which he or she can either give a spontaneous reaction to the images, or address the four questions that I brought up earlier, or speak on any topic that is relevant-- [LAUGHTER] --to our conference. Then, we'll have about 20 minutes of dialogue between the three of them, in which they can talk to each other. I may insert a question or two. And after that, I'll open the floor for questions and comments for another half hour. So, are you ready to have some fun? Good. Well, let's begin with the images. Roger, can we start with you? PENROSE: OK. Well, let me comment first on your images here. I mean, the first one, presumably, is an atomic bomb explosion, which I take to represent the issue of science and the responsibility that one has in developing, in this case, nuclear energy. I'm certainly one of those people who believes that you can't really-- I mean, some people think that science, OK, that's a pure activity. You can do it. You don't have to worry about the social consequences. I mean, there's something in me which believes that, too, that science is something that should be done for its own sake. But on the other hand, it does seem to me that the scientists, after all, are the people who have the best knowledge of what their discoveries are likely to do. And so, therefore, they do have a responsibility to at least pay attention to these issues. So I'm certainly one of these people who believes that you can't really separate the pure science from what potential applications it might have and whether they'll be useful for benefits or otherwise. Of course, scientists are not always very accurate in their predictions in this way. And I think there's some famous quote from Rutherford, who thought that nuclear energy would never be useful for anything. So you can't always believe what they say. But on the other hand, they are in a better position than other people. So the responsibility is there. I take the second image to be representative-- well, it certainly is the Earth rising from the moon. And it does represent a fantastic achievement, a technological achievement. Not so much as scientific achievement, although there is, of course, that. It goes back to Newton. One appreciates that space travel was potentially possible. But it's really a technological achievement, which required a great deal of money and so on. And I feel a great thrill in this. I was one of these people who stayed up all night when the first moon landings came out and so on. I think it's a great thing that people can do this. Of course, they're not doing it now, but maybe they'll go to Mars one day. And so I like that kind of thing. I think it's great. But it is expensive, of course, and one has to worry about how these things affect other research which might be going on. Here we have Crick and Watson, and of course, this was a fantastic thing they did to discover the structure of DNA, and it did set off a tremendous revolution in biology. It probably represents a number of other things, because in a sense, I seem to remember from reading Watson's book, or somewhere, that they argued how ignorant they were of some of these things at the time they were doing it. And maybe it's a case for not knowing too much. Because if you don't know too much about what other people are doing, you can bring a new perspective on a subject. And maybe that's an illustration of that. It certainly was a wonderful scientific achievement. There's no question about that. And we're going to see further developments from that in the Genome Project and so on. And then, again, one has these issues of social consequences, which maybe will come up again in one of the later images. The development from-- well, that's supposed to be a great-- showing how human beings are somehow the pinnacle of evolution. Of course, there are cartoons which show these things going opposite directions and so on, and they start coming back down again. It's a wonderful image. It may not be-- well, it also reflects, somehow, that human beings are part of animal life as a whole and that there isn't a dividing line between the humans and other animals, which I believe very strongly. So that when one talks about things like the human mind, one is really talking about mind, and mind is not just human mind. One has to think about animals. It's something that I worried about with all this great business with foot-and-mouth in the UK and with all this tremendous slaughter of cattle and so on. And nobody ever mentioned that, somehow, there were any rights for the animals. I mean, it was all to do with what was economically the best thing and so on and so forth. And I didn't hear a single person, certainly not a politician, mention that should we think whether an infinite number of animals is equivalent to one human or something. Is that a fair equation? It seemed to me that it goes against the grain very much with me. Here, it looks like a fetus, or maybe a call it a baby at this stage, in the womb, which does raise certain issues of the relation of science to moral issues. More or less, when does life begin, and so on? Well, I think it's a difficult question. I certainly don't believe that one should regard a few-week-old fetus as having-- I mean, think, there are issues we don't know yet. And this probably relates to, perhaps, the next image, too, which is the question of a brain and what's going on in the brain. And here we have imaging of there is presumably somebody thinking about various things, and where is it to be pinpointed in the brain? Of course, that doesn't tell us a great deal about what it is to have an awareness of something. So although it's a tremendous achievement in science to find out what goes on where in different parts of the brain, does it really tell us what it is that's going on when somebody is aware of something, of consciousness? So I think there's a great deal that science is going to have to do before we answer this question. I'm certainly one of these people-- I've written about these things and get into lots of trouble with people sometimes. But my general view is that we simply don't know yet what's really going on, even in a serious way. We're going to have to know more physics than we do at the moment before we can know what could be going on, even, to evoke consciousness. So the issue of consciousness, then, relates to the central, the red one in the middle there. And it's a question of when does the fetus actually become a person in the sense of being conscious. My guess is it's fairly early. But I don't think it's a matter of a few weeks. I think you have to have a significant looking thing, but that's a guess. The question is, we really have to know these things. So I would think a baby in the womb, if you could still call it a baby, then certainly it does have some kind of consciousness. I would guess this from experiences that I've had recently, because my wife is-- I have a one-year-old child now. And I remember the baby was sensitive to music already, I would say, about a month before it was born. So I think there are things going on there at that late stage. But these are questions which, at the moment, we have no handle on. And we're going to have to understand a lot more about what consciousness is about before we can really have a handle on these issues of the moral questions in relation to unborn children and so on. Well, let's see, how many more minutes do I have, if any? LIGHTMAN: Three. PENROSE: Three, OK. Let me make a few comments about some of the things I've been seeing in the conference up to this point. I must say, I've found it quite fascinating, and I do think that there are tremendous developments. A lot of these have to do with computers, and others have to do with ways in which people can explore very small objects and so on and very distant objects and so on. I did find the things about the films last night very moving, in some ways, and very impressive. But there are moral issues which come up there. And I think one has to face up to these things. One of these things, I think, that was today maybe about the question of doctoring photographs and so on. I just wonder whether there oughtn't to be some sort of a law which says that you can't use a photograph and doctor it without saying that you've done and what you've done. So it seems to me using a photograph is fine, but if it has been changed in some way, that is illegal unless you actually say the change has been made. And it seems to me, I would very much support some sort of law of that nature. It was just something that occurred to me when I was seeing these things. Let me make one slightly trivial point. Frivolous, I was going to say, point. It's not frivolous, actually. But one thing, also, I was feeling when I was noticing people giving their talks here was that there's some respects in which the developments in technology are not really in advance. And one of these, one of my little bugbears, I'm afraid, I've noticed that when I sit at the back of a room and somebody points at something with this wonderful laser pointer, I simply can't see a thing. He says, this thing over here. What? And maybe by the time-- if he's held it on the same point for five minutes, maybe I would see it. But a good old stick we used to have pointing at something, yeah, that's fine. LIGHTMAN: One minute. PENROSE: It just seems to me that sometimes technology, just by itself, is not necessarily an advance. Other times, it is. One can't tell, but one certainly has to take on what the advantages are. But not just because it's new. I don't think one should necessarily be driven in that direction. Were there any other points I should make? Yes. I guess I should make this point, that, I mean, visual images I don't regard as something fundamentally different from other means of communication. It's just that it's a way in which you convey understanding, often, very rapidly, which depends on the subject, of course. But sometimes you can do this. Sometimes, words, you need a lot more of them. Sometimes the image is pretty incomprehensible. You need to describe it. But it is a very powerful thing. And I think with technology that's been coming up, it's something which will increase in its importance. And I like that, because I like visual images. But as technology develops, there is a slightly negative element, which perhaps I would like to bring up, which is the ease of communication isn't always a positive thing. Because it does mean that fashionable ideas spread the globe almost instantaneously. Whereas, in the good, old days-- here's where I want to go back to some things which I like about the good, old days. You had these pockets of people working away at different things, and there was a kind of-- people didn't have to do what everybody else was doing. Whereas, with the internet-- internet is fine. And it's great that people in, say, developing countries can see what's going on in other countries and so on without having to buy the journals and things like that. OK. And international cooperation and so on is great. But on the other hand, there is a downside, which means that fashionable ideas sometimes have a much greater hold, I think, in modern science than they did before communication was so easy. So I think that's something that one has to face up to and maybe see how one could move things in a way which increases the possibility of having more variety in what they do. So I'd just make that comment. LIGHTMAN: Thank you. We'll let Susan speak now. SONTAG: Well, there are a very large and wonderful subjects on the table, such as the role of visual information or visualizing in the creative process and what it means to represent knowledge visually, which I presume in the word represent is entailed, also, the notion of communicating knowledge and how visualizing and visual representation aids in the pedagogic process, for instance. Those are very important issues. But I think I will wait for a moment and just address these fascinating images. I guess the first thing I would say is that what strikes me about these images, and Roger Penrose, in a way, responded to what I think is at the heart of this particular display of six images, is he took them as representative. He was invited, we're all invited, to respond to them. But to say that they're representative is not the only way of responding to them. But what he did was to say, well, that image of the atom bomb or the hydrogen bomb, whatever it is, reminds us of the ethical issues in certain kinds of scientific and technological work. The image of the Earth seen from the moon reminds us or suggests questions about space travel. Crick and Watson, let's say, remind us of the glories of scientific achievement, et cetera, et cetera. Each of them are taken as representative of a thought, a problem, a task, a confluence. I'm rather suspicious of this way of thinking about images. I think it's more and more foisted on us by our televisual culture, but I think it's actually a rather shallow approach to thinking about images. I'm not saying you are shallow. I'm saying that this display encourages-- please understand me. This display precisely encourages that way of looking at images. I'm not talking about the response, because I think it's so it's a very normal response. But you put images which are, in fact, famous images-- no, please, bear with me. These are famous images. These are celebrity images. These are images chosen for the fact that even I, a scientific illiterate, know what all of those images are. I recognize them. Very few people in this space are as ignorant of science as I am, but I recognize all six of these images. I know exactly what is being shown there. So they are chosen precisely because they're representative, precisely because they are, as it were, celebrity images. Or let me put it even more bluntly. They are the visual equivalent of sound bites. I think this is not a very good way into the question of images. I think it encourages thinking about images in a way that takes us away from real knowledge. I mean, there is, after all, I think an argument for saying-- a case, rather, to be made out for the argument that we really don't understand very much through images. Images are, at best, only aids, and they always are in a particular context. The context of these images is that we're having a conversation, and this is a way of introducing the conversation. But my first reaction was, oh, those famous images. And as Alan Lightman told you, we weren't told what the images were going to be, and they were kind of a surprise. And when they came up, I thought, oh, shit, those images. I know those images. I thought they were going to be more interesting, more weird. The only one that seems genuinely weird is the so-called fetus, which could be-- maybe I'm too much of a movie goer-- the Starchild in 2001. I'm not 100% convinced-- although if Alan tells me it is-- that it's a real fetus. But anyway, Stanley Kubrick and his art director Douglas Trumbull made an imitation of that, if those of you know that great movie of Stanley Kubrick. It ends with, indeed, a version of that image. So we're not only in an era of celebrity and an era of televisual reality, which is so compelling for people, we're in an era of celebrity images, in which certain images, then, are taken as representative. They trigger responses where we say, OK, this is a subject of debate. And everything that Roger Penrose said about how we could think about these problems-- they are real problems. What I'm questioning is, more and more, a kind of short circuiting of the long, laborious process that is conducted in words and in argument. As if, really, we understand-- I think what's suggested is that we understand more from images than we really do. My own view is-- except, again, thinking of these 5,000 images of ants in 800 pages of text. I'm sure these are incredibly informative, but they are in a context. I think images, obviously, always appear in a context. And the way we think about images is contextually driven. So I suppose the first thing I want to say, as perverse as it may seem, is that the context of these images is this discussion. And it's completely adventitious. It's, in a way, completely false. In fact, these images have nothing to do with each other. And this use of images, I think, tends-- images in series, famous images, celebrity images. In how many contexts-- magazines, books, television, et cetera-- are we invited to recognize the image? In fact, if you go to a movie theater now, after you start munching on the popcorn and before the ads and the trailers start, you may get a lot of images. And then you're invited to recognize what movie this is from or what actor is represented. So I'm a little worried about the extent to which we take images as telling us very much. My feeling is more we remember through images, but we understand through words. And I'm not sure how much we understand outside of context supplied by preexistent assumptions by argument that can be expressed in words. I don't think the images are telling us really anything at all. They are very often a form of entertainment. Now, they are entertaining, and even more than that, they give pleasure. Images give pleasure. They don't only give information. They give pleasure. There's also another thing to be said, obviously. It's so obvious that you feel you don't have to say it, and yet, I think it is worth saying. These are all photographs, and obviously, that is not the only form of image making. And far from the only form of image making which is instructive or useful, I should imagine, in scientific work. So I'm not so sure what images are standing for except as this kind of shorthand, or what I call the visual sound bite. Yes, it's true, and if it's a famous image, we'll have some associations with it, and we'll have associations about particular problems. But I don't think we know very much. And I don't think, except insofar as any image can be an object of reverie, an incitement to dream, to fantasize, that the image is telling us anything at all. And also, images identify things that we think we should be thinking about. I've been I've been thinking a lot about the use of photography in alerting us to catastrophe and disaster and giving us a sense of war and what goes on in war. And there's, of course, a very long history of this that goes back, in photography, to, let's say, the Crimean War, which is the first war that had any real coverage by photography. And what's interesting is what wars we know about through photography and what wars we are much less aware of because we don't have photographic evidence of them, photographic witness of them. So photographic knowledge identifies, defines, makes memorable, and it also excludes lots of other things that we should-- it not only points us to things we should be thinking about. In fact, the repertoire of famous images obscures, occludes, and hides, I think, at least as many, probably more, issues than the ones that it draws to our attention. LIGHTMAN: Well, thank you. [APPLAUSE] Ed? WILSON: Well, now, ants having crawled into the discussion, I would like to use them to first show the use, at least in science, of images in the context of creative work and basic research. It's true that I am just completing the monograph of about 625 species of ants. Some 335 of them are new to science, and they constitute about 20% of all the known ant species in the Western hemisphere. Why am I doing that? Well, let me explain. And then I have personally drawn the aspects of their anatomy, appearance, and diagnostic traits with over 5,000 drawings. This is part of the process of addressing a group of organisms that you love, that you really care about and are intellectually excited about. But it's much more than that. As you go into a monograph of this kind, you are living within the subject. You're looking at all of the aspects of the traits of the species. You are drawing them yourself. You're getting that visual feedback. In biology, especially, we are focused on and we are driven by images. So we learn in detail, and it goes deep into our consciousness. And then, part of this is collecting these creatures in the field, of getting the sense of where they live, entering the actual habitats and looking at their ecology and their behavior. You learn more and more. And this, then, helps us illustrate what I perceive as the two strategies of doing research in biology. First is-- well, lets call it two types of biologists, to be a stereotypical about it. The first type addresses a problem and knows that for every problem in biology, there is an organism ideally suited to its solution. So that's bacteria for molecular genetic. The other loves the organism, wishes to find out everything he can about it, and recognizes that for every organism, there is a problem to the solution of which it is ideally suited. And that is how I address ants. Now let me go back in time to the start of my career. I've just graduated from Harvard, a PhD, 1955, and I'm in the South Pacific, in New Guinea and the islands of the South Pacific. And I'm doing this kind of study then, totally absorbed in it, and the habitats in which they lived. And I am thus coming intimately to know hundreds of species of ants. And out of this, I'm finding patterns. The evolutionary biologist is a typical example of the person who goes to the organism and derives the solution of problems to which it's ideally suited and often perceives the problem, what it is, in the first place, because we're looking for pattern. And out of this work, I see two things. I see the patterns in which the species are flowing out of the Indo-Australian staging areas into New Guinea and the outer islands of Melanesia. Just flow. And I see the circumstances under which species can spread most readily, and I develop a broad picture of that. And the second thing that I see is that there's a very regular relationship between the number of species on the island and the area of the island. And out of this, to make a long story short, later, I come back and I collaborate with a young mathematical ecologist named Robert MacArthur. And we developed a theory of island biogeography, which is an equilibrium theory of species in which it leads us into the concept and the processes of immigration and extinction and so on and connects it with ecology. Now, let me, having said that-- and mentioning that many, many discoveries in biology are made this way, by solving problems that were never dreamed of until you learn to live with the organism, to move to-- how much time have I? LIGHTMAN: You've got about five minutes. WILSON: Five minutes. To move to the image of the Earth rise. And what do I see when I look at that distant planet, Susan? What I do, first of all, because I'm a biogeographer by nature, the first thing automatically I do when I see these distant photographs, I say, how do the continents look? And are those maps we've been using accurate? At last, we can find out. And then, of course, I see it as the astronauts see it. I see it as a distant and fragile planet. And then I say, but what do we mean by fragile? It's not fragile. What's fragile is the biosphere. The biosphere is that layer of multitudinous organisms that envelops it pole to pole and on which our lives depend. And that biosphere, an astronomical number of organisms of some 10 million species, perhaps, creates a disequilibrium. It's an atmosphere and a temperature regime which is out of equilibrium from what it would be if the organisms were not there driving it to a new point. And that's terribly fragile. You look at that and you tried to see the biosphere. You cannot. You can't even see it from a space shuttle. It's razor thin. It cannot be seen with the naked eye edgewise. And we now know, from many lines of evidence, that we are disturbing the biosphere in a way that is almost unprecedented, at least in recent geologic history. And that we have become a geological force. So let's go to the progression from Australopithecus on the left there up through the species of Homo to Homo sapiens. And Homo sapiens is the great destroyer. And incidentally, an interesting fact is that we've estimated that at any given time on Earth, there are about 1,000 trillion individual ants alive. And each ant weighs about one millionth of a human being. And that means that there are approximately about as much biomass of ants as there are humans. Now, this is really abnormal for the following reason. If all humans were to disappear, everything would come back to the equilibrium, approximately, and that planet would be-- shall we say, the biosphere would be safe for the indefinite future. But if all ants were to disappear, the terrestrial ecosystems would collapse. It would be a catastrophe, and the whole thing would be thrown out of kilter. [APPLAUSE] So out of our knowledge-- to conclude with something of a rhetorical note-- that we have learned by all of these painful methods of the natural sciences, in particular, the studies of the diversity of life, has come the realization that we've got to-- somehow, we've got to settle down before we've wrecked the planet. LIGHTMAN: Thank you [APPLAUSE] Well, let's have some back and forth now. Any of you have-- WILSON: Why don't we ask Susan, if I might? Have either one of us gotten close to what she wants us to do with images? SONTAG: I don't want to be cranky, but I just think that these images are just inviting us to free associate about things that we think of when we look at-- I mean, I look at that image, you know, and I say, it's a man. It's not a woman. Isn't it interesting? It's a man. [APPLAUSE] Well, I belong to that half of the human race that is not likely to be represented in a representative chart of, let's say, human evolution. Whereas, those of you who are men probably find it quite normal, just as he stands for everybody, but she is kind of weird to stand for everybody. Let's say I bring that to that image. But at the same time that I do sincerely notice that, that it is, in fact, a male and not a female, which could, after all, just as easily illustrate that evolution, I think it is, to use a word that is both used and withdrawn at the same time, it's kind of frivolous observation. It's just an association that I have because of my particular ethical sensibility, et cetera. One I'm sure is shared by many other people, needless to say. But it is simply an association. We could have associations to all of these images. But I'm not sure associations, using images as a pretext to associate and present what we think or feel or want to argue, is a very interesting response to images. Because this is precisely a little, tiny anthology. It's an anthology of famous or easily recognizable images. I think would be more interesting to talk about how the visual has become so important for us. Alan Lightman and I, who are both novelists, we're having a long discussion in the middle of the afternoon about the difference-- it's something that preoccupies, I think, reflective writers of fiction very much, the difference between writing in the first person and writing in the third person. We could also have a conversation about the difference in photographed images as opposed to drawn images. We could have a conversation about the difference between still images and moving images, et cetera, et cetera. Those, I think, would focus us on how we think visually, how we remember visually, the way in which visualizing is essential to the imagination. And it's essential, can become essential, in pedagogy and understanding. But simply to respond to individual images, I find, not getting very far to the kinds of problems that are really, I think, interesting. PENROSE: I don't really understand your point-- is this working-- about your objection to these particular images. I mean, in particular that one, which actually isn't a photograph, of course. The one on the left at the bottom. SONTAG: No, it's not a photograph. You're quite right. PENROSE: Which evoked a response from you. Fine. I think that's the sort of thing he was trying to do. OK, these are images which, in different ways, can evoke responses from us. And I think that's something valuable. SONTAG: No, my objection is not-- my objection is that I did think we were being invited to reflect on the role of the visual in helping us to understand. And therefore, I find responses to individual images, because they trigger associations-- whether they're my associations or your associations, that's not the point-- not to take us very far. PENROSE: What kind of would you prefer to have? What would you have put up there? SONTAG: Well, perhaps which were-- WILSON: And what would you understand? SONTAG: Perhaps images which all related to one subject. Look, listen, we have a precedent. Let's talk very concretely. Darwin writes a book called The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, and he uses a bunch of photographs, which are largely faked or staged. And yet, he didn't think that that was a useful thing. And we're talking about 1872, I believe that book is, 1872, 1873. It's an early example of somebody thinking that visual aids, in particular photographed images, would be helpful in making clear a scientific or a descriptive or a taxonomic argument. I mean, I find that very interesting that it happened that long ago. We know, of course, the Encyclopedia, the great encyclopedic project of the late 18th century, had images. Obviously, they were drawn images and not photographic images. Anyway, I think that's an interesting thing to talk about. For instance, here's an obvious question and one that troubles me, is the rise of such images and the frequency with which they occur in books and scientific and historical works a part of a kind of democratization of popularization of knowledge or not? Is the feeling that an argument isn't compelling to people unless it has a visual accompaniment-- I mean, haven't you all been struck by the extent to which pictures, news pictures, have come onto the front page of newspapers, of newspapers which didn't feature them? The extent to which we now view black and white pictures as not appropriate in newspapers, but rather, that they should be in color, et cetera, et cetera. Why have we, more and more, wanted to accompany narratives-- political narratives, scientific narratives, descriptive accounts-- with visual information? I think this has a sociological and political aspect. I don't know. That's just the kind of thing that I think about, anyway. WILSON: May I suggest another connection, a wholly different direction that might help illuminate this, that has been yielded by neurobiology? It's just a tentative on the basis of one set of experiments I know. And that is arousal of the brain, automatic arousal, which you may not even be conscious of. It's a measure of the dampening of the alpha wave, which is a good proxy for-- well, actually, it's directly connected with arousal. And the experiments seem to indicate that if we were to turn each one of these into abstract form so that they weren't recognizable images in our ordinary lives but make them abstract, it's very likely that the fetus would cause maximum arousal and to be pretty close to a spike in how you were automatically aroused. And that would be a figure with about 20% redundancy. And that's about the amount of complexity you see in that fetal diagram. And that happens to be where we settle in a great deal of abstract art. That may be a coincidence, but that's where Mondrian settled after all his experimentation and movement away from literalism. And it also is the amount of complexity you see in Asian pictographs and in glyph characters and in frieze design and in coliforms. And in fact, it's what automatically we pay attention to instantaneously more than other degrees of complexity. So it's just a thought. In other words, what does this tell us about image and meaning? I think it probably tells us something important. It certainly tells us where what might be a gravitational force in the evolution of our so-called primitive art, design. Is it about that 20% redundancy level? Just an observation. PENROSE: I think you raised a point which I don't think has been-- at least, I haven't seen it discussed at this meeting. The question of cartoons and that sort of thing, where you can convey an impression. I mean, not photographic, but with much less information, if you like. But nevertheless, you can instantly recognize what it is. And as you say, with that image, you could have done that probably with a few lines. WILSON: That's what we call diagnostic traits in systematics. We use it in a field guides like Peterson's field guide. But there's another aspect, too, I'd like to mention that has come out of the subject of ethology, which is experimentation, experimental natural behavior study. And that's a supernormal stimulus. I'm reminded of that by your allusion to cartoonists. Cartooning is a substantial process, the exaggeration of certain features that release-- that is, stimulate us-- in a certain way. Emotionally, perhaps, through cultural mediation. Sometimes automatically. So we go for the infant, for example. You exaggerate the amount that the nose is pushed in and the eyes grow large and the body of the head is disproportionately large for the infant's form and the body and so on. And when we present horrific figures, either in horror films or in our meaning to dramatize the horrors of war and so on, we use supernormal stimuli. This means that in certain stimuli, certain categories of stimuli, exaggerating the features that you would find in a normal context would-- from predators, from children, for what we consider beautiful men or women. By exaggerating them, you get an even stronger response. SONTAG: Don't you think, also, that it has to do with framing? I recently saw an exhibit of war photography, because I am very interested in this right now. I'm trying to write something. In which you saw the original photograph and then you saw the photograph as printed. For instance, that very famous photograph from the Vietnam War, probably the most famous single photograph, of the naked child running down the highway toward the camera who's been napalmed. It's actually a much larger image, and I've seen the original image. And of course, it's shrunk so that she's really in the center so you can't miss her. On the other hand, the larger picture is also very upsetting, because it shows quite a few people, including American soldiers-- mostly American soldiers-- standing on the side of the road not paying any attention at all. One is talking to another one. And this child, who must be screaming-- as well as there are other children in the picture, too. They're not paying any attention. But nevertheless, we would look differently if the picture-- and it would have had a different impact. So it's not just exaggeration. But I think one can never ignore framing, what is excluded, and how information is centered in a picture. WILSON: Let me make a quick allusion to that final image. And that is where our cognitive neuroscience may be leading us. And that is that a lot of these appear to be fundamental traits, the way the brain and the way we respond to certain types of stimuli, contexts, and so on. A lot of that appears to be programmed. And how much it is and how much can be culturally modified, I think, is going to be understood a great deal more as time goes on with the aid of techniques like the one displayed here. I just wanted to mention that in passing. And what that means is I'm not sure, but it certainly does allude to the-- or is relevant to the general topic of tonight, which is the relation between image and meaning. LIGHTMAN: I wanted to ask both of you a question that's sort of perpendicular to Susan's comment that a lot of images are just celebrity images and bring forth a canned set of associations. Both of you use images in your work. I mean, Ed, you mentioned that you are drawing 5,000 parts of ants or whole ants. And I know Roger, among all physicists, uses images to an unusual degree-- geometric constructions, which you must visualize. How do these images actually help you in your scientific work-- the visualization, in your case, Roger, and the actual drawing by hand, in your case, Ed? PENROSE: Well, certainly, I find it very useful in understanding mathematical things. I mean, in my notebooks, I tend to draw lots of pictures, far more than I would actually have calculations. Once a problem is reduced to a calculation, I feel it's almost solved, because then you can just write it down. Whereas, it's the conceptual ideas which are very difficult to get to grips with without having some kind of visual image. Often, it's very difficult to have accurate images. Even people who don't think very visually-- there's a famous little book by Hadamard, where he writes on how mathematicians think and so on. And he describes his ideas, and he has these blobs and things like this. And then he stands back and thinks about it and says, well, these blobs don't actually have much information in them. And he regards himself as not on the visual side. He's a sort of analytical thinker. So these images are very important for mathematical thinking. I think Keith Devlin, whose talk yesterday brought up this issue that bringing up visual images in actual mathematical demonstrations for other mathematicians is often regarded as being kind of inferior. And you should try to get rid of the diagrams. You can do them for your own purposes. But when you want to make an honest article, you don't put them in. I think that things have moved away from that, to some degree. The pendulum swings one way and the other. And I think images are used quite a bit more in very advanced mathematical articles sometimes. It depends on the subject. The problem with these visual images is how to make them rigorous. And mathematicians want to make sure the arguments actually hang together in a very strict way. And the images may be thought be distracting from that. But I think in the exploratory thinking, they're absolutely vital. I found them vital. I don't know to what degree other people who work in mathematics find this-- probably less, because I happen to be on the visual side. That's just in one's own thinking. But then, of course, in explaining to other people, they are extremely important. It's quite curious that in mathematics teaching, you will often find that mathematic students find the diagrams not very helpful. And I think there's a curious reason for that. And that is that there's a kind of selection effect, that it's very hard to have examinations which test the visual ability. Whereas, to test the analytic and calculation abilities, that's easy. And so the people who do well on that side come through, do well in the exams, and you find a lot of them in math classes. Whereas maybe the best ones, or the one who come through, will be able to do things on the visual side, too. But you find that, on the whole, the mathematics students-- at least, that's been my experience-- are not at all visual. Now, it's a curious thing, because if somebody says to me, OK, we want you to do some public lecture or something like this where you can to talk to people who are not mathematicians. Lots and lots of pictures. Lots of pictures, they say. And that's the way you get the ideas across to people who are not mathematicians. LIGHTMAN: It works at the two extremes. PENROSE: Yes. I mean, I find they're very important. I think they are extremely valuable in getting ideas across to people who are not mathematicians. Probably more so than with mathematicians. But on the other hand, I am somebody who believes that they have a very big value within mathematics, too. But for me, they're absolutely essential. LIGHTMAN: Do you feel like you know your ants better after drawing them? WILSON: Oh, certainly. You just gain that much more familiarity and then affix it into your mind. But watching Roger using movements, paralinguistic signaling-- and then the dinner conversation, trying to explain an important principle of quantum mechanics to a admittedly baffled dinner companion. It was very effectively using objects on the table to move around. And I was reminded then of the greater importance of narrative motion and kinesthetic involvement. Kinesthetic. You know, we are not just creatures of the ordinary senses we think of. We're also creatures exquisitely adapted to doing things, especially with our hands, and creating and producing products and so on. So this is very pleasing to us, to use our hands and to work with them. And this is extremely true of biologists who work with whole organisms. So yes, it's the kinesthetic element, actually doing it-- PENROSE: That came up yesterday, incidentally, with the-- sometimes, in the architectural discussion, with producing actual models you can get your hands on. WILSON: Exactly. It's aesthetically pleasing. It enhances learning, and it certainly enhances creativity. And I'd like to ask you a question about that. I've often wondered, Stephen Hawking-- who I think was your student, was he not? PENROSE: No, he was-- WILSON: Well, that's what they-- PENROSE: He wasn't my student. He was Dennis Sciama's student. WILSON: Let's put it you lead the way for some of his own thinking. But he has once said that being able to do kinesthetics now, he's glad he chose theoretical physics, because it's all in my head. And I wondered, do you have any sense of how not being able to write, move, do these things but becoming purely cerebral has maybe-- maybe I've got it wrong, but how this might influence his thinking or what subjects he takes or anything else to comment? PENROSE: I mean, this came on, of course, during the course of his research. WILSON: Yes. He's had a long history of being able to use his body. PENROSE: Well, he was diagnosed, I think, in his first year of research, graduate work. Dennis Sciama, who was his supervisor, was told that he probably wouldn't live the three years to do a PhD. Well, that was proved wrong. But I think Stephen was very visual also. I mean, he was good on the analytic side, but he was good on the visual side. So presumably, earlier, he was able to have a sort of feeling for things in a tactile sense, as well. But I think the visual aspect of it wouldn't have been impaired by his condition. But later on, he would do work by getting a student, and he would tell the student what to put on the board. So that might be a diagram sometimes, or it might be a calculation. WILSON: Does it by a surrogate, and he sort of still does the visual. I mean, the movement and the kinesthetic. PENROSE: That's right, but the visual aspect of it was certainly very important in a lot of his thinking. So I don't think that would have been impaired by his condition. The kinesthetic aspect, yes, I can see that. That must have been-- LIGHTMAN: Why don't we, at this point, open up the floor for questions or comments? And I think we may have some microphones here. So if you have a question or a comment, please come down to the microphone. And we'll just start right here. AUDIENCE: Hi. Can you hear me? OK. I was interested in Ms. Sontag's remarks, and I sort of thought you were going in a direction that you didn't quite get to. When you talk about these as celebrity photographs, I think the reason that they're celebrity photographs is because I think they're so compelling. And maybe that just makes me as naive as John Q. Public. I recognize all these, too, but as I was watching them, I was sort of saying, wow. And what I'm struck by really is the potential for photographs like these to lie, basically, and to serve a primary propaganda function. So, for instance, if you look at this, what's remarkable about this picture of the Earth, of the Earth rising, is that when you look at this, you're suddenly struck by the fact that 6 billion of us, most days, see the moon in the sky. And none of us see it the other way around. And this picture here shows us the opposite, which is so out of our experience and yet taken, I believe, by human beings. That shows there's been a tremendous shift in our perspective of the universe. And frankly, I think it's a wonderful add for NASA. Because you look at this and you say, my god. You know, how can we not give billions of dollars to those people so we can change our view of the universe? This picture here, Watson and Crick, it's not a photograph taken by Mrs. Watson. It's not a snapshot taken by Mrs. Watson. It's a marvelous picture with a classic composition. You talked about the framing of these, but it's really the composition of this picture, the photograph, is what makes it so remarkable. It's very classic. And Crick, the movement of his body is mirroring the movement of the double helix here. And what's so striking about this is we've all seen, probably, pictures of Goddard standing next to his rocket. Well, Goddard is all dressed up in a suit. His tie is very neat. Everything's in place. And he looks, frankly, like a nerd. Everybody's seen these pictures from the '30s, I think. There was recently another one in the-- whereas, there's something very fetching about Watson and Crick. Watson, I think that's Watson on the left-- LIGHTMAN: I'm going to-- because we have a lot of people wanting questions. I'm sorry to-- AUDIENCE: Let me just one-- if you look at that picture of the fetus-- [APPLAUSE] LIGHTMAN: Let's take one over here. AUDIENCE: I hope I don't go on that long. I see this panel a little bit as my daily life, because we've got the scientists on the right and the writers on the left. And I'm in the center, because my job, for example, coming to Science magazine was to turn it from what I'm going to show you tomorrow, which some of you remember, which was a totally black and white-- had almost no photos, no illustrations-- to something you recognize today, which has images for the purpose that Susan worries about, which is to try to make our audience broader. When I came, the audience was getting older, and young people were used to a colorful Newsweek and Time kind of universe. And we knew that we weren't going to have subscribers if we stayed sort of like the New England Journal of Medicine is with its cover. As you know, it just has tables of contents on the cover. So I think we live with this interesting battle in our staff all the time. How much space should we give to images versus how much space do we need for our words? And I thought it'd be just fun to tell one story for the panel and see if it relates to this sort of thinking that we have here. I had one time come to Newsweek, and one of my first and most important lessons when I started working in Newsweek was the following. It was right at the second most lively period-- the most lively period after Watergate, when the Iran Contra events were taking place. And I learned what made a great writer for Newsweek or Time by the following. I would meet people in some months after the first press conference Reagan had-- you'll remember, some of you. After many months, when there were no press conferences because he was hiding, worrying about what to say. And I would meet people, and they'd say, where do you work? And I'd say, Newsweek. And they'd say, oh, you know, I really loved that story that you guys did where that guy wrote that sentence, Ronald Reagan is a tall man, but he looked small behind the podium last night when he tried to explain what was going on. And I call that a word picture. And the word picture has the same function as the images when they're working right, which is to be able to teach people a lesson in a very quick way. And I think the contrast between that important kind of iconic way of doing word pictures or image pictures versus the kind of thing that Susan Sontag probably is worrying about, like the sort of Mao image, or even the word image that is like Mao propaganda that entire populations stop thinking about what's behind them because that's the image, to me, that's the interesting debate that's going on there in the panel. And that's what I wanted to mention. Thanks. LIGHTMAN: Thank you very much. Thank you. Let's go here. AUDIENCE: Hi. I think that the images have been misclassified, actually. The bomb and the baby, yes, they're images. I think Watson and Crick are illustrating a model. And I also think that the human evolution, that's illustrating a model. In other words, those two images are getting across ideas. And then, the moon and the picture of the brain, that's actually data. So those observations we then infer results from. So I think you can too easily dismiss all these images as merely images. LIGHTMAN: Thank you. SONTAG: Can I just say something? I'm not trying to dismiss these images. I'm saying that there is a problem in thinking that images really speak to us. I think it's more that we're speaking to them. That's what I'm saying. Of course, these are wonderful images. One of my most treasured books, if I had to sort of pare my inflated private library down to a few hundred books, I'm sure the NASA-- I have a big, big book of NASA photographs of things seen from the moon. Includes that image. I adore that image. It's not that I don't think these are great images, most of them. I just think there's a problem in our using images iconically, that they're not really telling us. We're telling them. We're using them as platforms for associations. And that we have to understand always that images are seen in a context. I'm not saying these aren't good images or beautiful images or exciting images. And I'm not, certainly, saying that they're not famous for a reason. They're famous for a reason because several of them are absolutely wonderful. The question is, what do they actually say? Do they speak for themselves? I think they speak very little for themselves, including Crick and Watson. I don't think that's telling you anything. It's because we care about them that we care about that image. PENROSE: But wasn't the point of them to stimulate conversation? I thought that was the idea. SONTAG: Well, it is, but that's the conversation that it stimulated in me. It stimulated in me-- [APPLAUSE] --the conversation that there's a problem about dealing with very well-known images that we can simply associate to as opposed to images that are more obscure or more grouped, I think. Grouped in the sense of sequential. AUDIENCE: Hi. Susan Sontag, I enjoyed your comment that these celebrity images are the visual equivalent of sound bites. Thanks very much for that memorable comment. You also said, though, that you worried that we're not learning anything from the images beyond what we would from reading narrative and text. And you also implied-- you asked whether images are actually helping democratization, even implying that there's some sort of tyranny of an image. And I want to give you a different image, a different picture, of how images aren't tyranny. When I read a scientific journal article in my area of expertise, I begin reading the article, and as soon as I've gotten the main idea, I stop reading the text and I turn to whatever non-text material the author has given me. I turn to the tables, the charts, the pictures, perhaps the PET scans if it's a neuroscience article. And at that point, I'm not reading the text anymore, and I'm reading the images. And anyone else do that? I think I'm doing it, and I'd like to get your reaction, because I want the pleasure and achievement of figuring out the story for myself and coming to my own interpretation. Thank you. LIGHTMAN: Thank you. [APPLAUSE] SONTAG: I guess I don't know, really, how to respond to that. First of all, I never used the word tyranny or any of those notions. That's very much not what I was saying. But I guess I'm not so interested in figuring things out for myself. I'm more interested in learning. So I wouldn't say that I would abandon a text to look at the image, as much as I am extremely visual and spend a great deal of time looking at images. I mean, Alan Lightman picked me up at the airport, and we went to the museum and looked at images at the Boston Museum. You have a great museum here. I don't get to Boston more than every two months or so, and I go to a museum. I live in a visual world. I'm visually besotted. I'm just saying I think the question of what we learn from images and what kinds of images we learn from and the very many different contexts that we look at images in is a critical question. That's all. I'm not talking about images tyrannize over us or anything like that. There's so many different uses for images. WILSON: May I suggest that much of what is being said is missing the point. If the aim is to somehow conjoin science and the humanities, the best of science and the best of humanities-- in other words, what you've been describing is a kind of phenomenon. You don't repeat it over and over again without the framework and relevance and so on. The question of interest, a question of interest, is, why do we respond this way? Why do certain images affect us a certain way? Why does framing occur at a certain degree? Why do we select a certain complexity of imagery in art and photography? If we can't answer why, then we really don't understand the human condition very well. And I suggest that where science and humanities are likely to come together in this particular subject is, in fact, through neuroscience and through the reconstruction of human evolutionary history pieced together with the particularities of cultural history. And that then, knowing how the brain is constructed and programmed, what our sensory biases are, how we develop these capacities and biases and emotional responses, then we will have a true theory of, say, the arts. LIGHTMAN: I noticed from the audience, we've been getting a lot more comments than questions, which is just fine. Let's go here. AUDIENCE: I believe that vision and language and abstract thinking have common origins in the physiology of vision and thinking and language. So the process of getting meaning from image through paying attention and parsing and interpreting and ultimately changing our internal state is substantially similar to the process of understanding a speech act or understanding this thought process. So could you comment on that? SONTAG: Yeah. I certainly think-- as I said earlier, I don't think there's a fundamental difference. I mean, the title of this meeting is image and meaning. The meaning is something which is internal, if you'd like. But it's not so different from how one responds to verbal or written words. And again, there's something down there. There's some configuration of words on the page, and the meaning comes in you when you read that. And it's similar to an image. I mean, the image may convey some meaning to you, which it isn't there, in a sense, abstractly in the image. It's something which is how one responds to the image. All I'm saying is I think I'm agreeing with you, if that's what you're saying, that there isn't a fundamental difference between how one responds to a visual image and how one responds to words, say. It's just different part of the brain, for example, and it has different characteristics, valuable in slightly different ways. AUDIENCE: And the meaning would be that we change the distribution of propensities to do things in the future. PENROSE: Meaning's one of these very difficult things to come to terms with. And I think it does require consciousness. I mean, something can't mean anything without being aware of it, it seems to me. I mean, that's why it's a very difficult issue, because it's things that we don't know much about at the moment. I mean, my experience comes largely from things like mathematics, where one can see that it's fundamentally important what the meaning is behind a set of symbols. I mean, you can't know whether something is right or wrong, if you like, without knowing what it means. Just simply manipulating the symbols isn't sufficient. The meaning that underlies those symbols is often very important. Sometimes you can get away without the meaning, but ultimately, you need to know what these things mean. And it must apply, also, to visual images. AUDIENCE: But subliminal messages may convey meaning without awareness. PENROSE: Well, I don't think so. No, they could make you do things, maybe, or they could make you-- but I don't think the meaning is there. I think that's more a kind of automatic response, if they work. I'm never quite sure whether they do work. But if they do, it's, as you say, an unconscious thing. That's the whole point. But it's not really there's any meaning that gets through to you. It's that you may feel you like something that you didn't like otherwise. Maybe that's how it works. But I don't see any actual meaning there, really. LIGHTMAN: Let's move to a question or a comment over here. AUDIENCE: Yes, thank you very much. My name is Michael Charney. I want to thank the panel for allowing the audience to participate in this wonderful dialogue. I'd like to say that, by the way, sight bite is another way to talk about a sound bite for the eye. Perhaps it's B-Y-T-E in the current context. In any event, looking at this, I see an ensemble. Perhaps they're icons and they're trivial or trite cliches, but actually, there's a narrative here. And in looking at these images, for me, I try to see what's in the mind of the person who edited and selected them and arranged them in a particular order. What I see here is seeing the unseen. And so image and meaning, the image is giving a meaning. The meaning is what do we see, what do we want to see? Here, we see, I think, my interpretation, is a creation myth, as done perhaps for MIT. It is rather cold in its own way. We start out with energy. Perhaps God is up there in the sky, but there is this light and dark, a creation of light and dark. The Earth is then separated. We see the Earth, the water. It's been created. We then see the beginning of life in the image of the Watson-Crick genome. We then see the product of that, which is the evolutionary stage of primates. Notice that we're missing plants and other general taxonomic groups. Then we see the neonate, which is recapitulating phylogeny, I guess. And then we see consciousness. We see an image of creation and the creative thought, which then closes the circle. Because then we're back to the mind of the creator. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] SONTAG: I do think it takes quite a feat of imagination to see that first image has an image of energy and creation, but maybe I'm being too literal here. AUDIENCE: Big bang. WILSON: It's the little bang. SONTAG: Looks like an atom bomb to me, but I'm just being naive, I guess. LIGHTMAN: That was a brilliant analysis. PENROSE: Was that the idea, or did he-- WILSON: Confess. LIGHTMAN: It was not the conscious idea. But since we're talking about the unconscious as well as the consciousness, who knows? Another question here. AUDIENCE: Hi. Good evening. I was wondering if each of you, and if it's appropriate, Mr. Lightman, you as well, comment on the distinction between science communication and art, as concisely as possible, if you can. WILSON: May I do that? May I give that a try, Alan? Let me give that a try. Science communication as you would get in science and nature. I'm trying to be brief. It's all about objectivity repeatability. It is not about metaphor. Metaphor is not welcome. Emotional expression is not welcome, unless it's done very chastely in the introduction of the discussion. The exact reverse of-- and it's about repeatability. The exact reverse is true of art. Art is designed to transmit emotion directly from the creator to the audience. And it is all about metaphor. The gold and silver of science writing is the discovery of something that is verifiably new in the physical world. The gold and silver of art is the power and the originality of the metaphor and the expression and the impact, the general nature of the impact it has on the audience. [APPLAUSE] PENROSE: I'll just make a brief comment. And I think they are different. And the purpose of science journalism is clarity. You want to get an idea across as clearly as you can, and you might use a visual image to do this. Whereas, art isn't necessarily trying to do that. But on the other hand, I do think it is important that these images should be pleasing. And to have an artistic quality means you're more likely to want to look at them. And I think it's important, but it shouldn't detract from the clarity. I think the clarity is the major thing that is important in science journalism, at least the visual part of it. Clarity's important to both parts, but I mean, we're talking about the visual image. Whereas, art doesn't necessarily aim at the same thing. But I would like to see art also in such images. It's not the important thing. LIGHTMAN: Let's have a comment or question here. AUDIENCE: I'd like to make a comment on the Watson and Crick photo. This is a very iconic image, and it represents, of course, one of the century's greatest discoveries. And this has a bearing on both this morning's session and on Susan Sontag's comments. I think this photo is most interesting for what it actually leaves out, and that's the fact that Watson and Crick based their model, in part, on data which they took from Rosalind Franklin. [APPLAUSE] And I think this is image, which we see over and over again, it really only tells us half the story. And I wondered if people could comment on that. SONTAG: Well, we've got two images that rather obscure half the human race, don't we? I think it's very important, absolutely. They're iconic images and images that tell us what we should remember. That's one of the things that-- that's what I started to say at the end of my remarks, rather incoherently, that images tell us what we should remember. And they occlude or obscure things, cast them into darkness. And that's a perfect example. I'm very glad you made that point. LIGHTMAN: Comment here. AUDIENCE: Thank you. I'm sure we all bring our own context to what we're seeing up here. And I have a brief comment and a quick question. And when I looked at the images, it seems to me that all of them can cause us to reflect on a number of different things. But that brain scan, I'm not a neuroscientist, but it may be the state in which the mind is actually meditative in reflection. There's been some articles of that of late in some of the magazines and journals. When I see the images together, all of them except the upper far left have to do with life or evolution or reflecting on that beautiful planet or that child or that fetus or that reflective mind or discovering life in DNA, except the one on the left. I agree with you, Susan. To me, I see destruction, so that was quite a contrast. I'm wondering if you could share with us briefly, if you had to describe your image of what would represent God is, what would that visual image be for each of you, if you could share that? Thank you. PENROSE: I actually drew a picture of a creator in one of my books. And Susan might be interested in this, because I gave a lecture in which I'd shown this picture. And somebody, at the end of the lecture, asked the question and said, in your depiction of God creating the universe, why did you depict her with a beard? And so I said, well, look, let's have that picture back again. And I pointed out that, actually, there's deliberately two different interpretations of that picture. One is a beard, and the other is the hair coming around like this. But anyway, I should say I'm not sure an atheist should really talk about this question at all, so somebody else maybe have the-- LIGHTMAN: Does anyone want to-- any of you want to-- SONTAG: I'm afraid, for the same reason Roger Penrose just stated, I would have to disqualify myself. WILSON: Pass. LIGHTMAN: Well, we have run out of time tonight. SONTAG: Oh, no. A couple more. LIGHTMAN: Should we have a couple more? AUDIENCE: Yeah, a couple more. LIGHTMAN: We'll have two more comments or questions from the audience from both sides here. AUDIENCE: I'd like to ask Ms. Sontag about her experience last month in accepting the Jerusalem Prize, in which she challenged some of the popular images and meanings that go along with it in the political arena. I believe you were quoted as saying, "I believe the doctrine of collective responsibility as a rationale for collective punishment is never justified militarily or ethically. And I mean, of course, the disproportionate use of firepower against civilians, the demolition of their homes, the destruction of their orchards and groves, the deprivation of their livelihood and access to employment, to schooling, medical services, or as a punishment for hostile military activities in the vicinity of those civilians." And you are, of course, referring to the Palestinians. And I congratulate you for making that statement, more or less in the jaws of the lion. And I wonder what sort of reaction you've gotten for it. And what sort of visual images would make those sentiments come home to people in America that paid a lot of the bills for those types of activities and to people in Jerusalem where you spoke? [APPLAUSE] SONTAG: I only like to make political statements about things that I know firsthand. I don't think it's appropriate. I mean, I thank you for your support. But I think we should stay with the subject this evening. Maybe we can talk about it after. I do stand very much for those sentiments. I was very glad to make that statement, and I feel very passionately about it, but it's not the subject tonight. LIGHTMAN: One more question or comment. AUDIENCE: Hi. This isn't for Ms. Sontag, nor is it about images. This is a question for Dr. Wilson. I personally have always found myself kind of not really knowing what I want to do, drifting around, without really a sense of purpose. But you've taken ants, and you've made them your life. And I was wondering how you can-- I could never imagine taking something so specific and indulging myself completely in it. And I was wondering whether-- I mean, how you think your life is-- how, by focusing on something so specifically, you think that-- do you think that you have a broader-- I don't know. Just your thoughts on it, really. [APPLAUSE] WILSON: I think the greatest advice, possibly the most effective advice, I've ever given to young scientists is to find the subject in the great temple of science-- it's the room and the bench and the subject that you feel a surge of passion of interest in, and go for it. That's the best I can say. AUDIENCE: How did you become passionate about ants? SONTAG: Let somebody-- let's let in a higher-- WILSON: Why did I become passionate about ants? AUDIENCE: Yes. SONTAG: Most interesting thing in the world. WILSON: Let me suggest-- SONTAG: Go for it. Go for it. WILSON: --at the next opportunity, you put down some cookie crumbles on the ground near an ant nest and watch and start studying them. And you will see what comes as close to what life must be like, might be like, on another planet as you might hope ever to see on this one. [APPLAUSE] LIGHTMAN: I'm going to allow one more question, and then we have to end. AUDIENCE: I'd like to ask it. It's poignant. LIGHTMAN: The question is coming from over here. Can you ask a comment or question, please? AUDIENCE: Thank you. I was wondering if the members of the panel could comment about the importance of images for the education of the general public about science, including the notion that perhaps images could contribute to the inspiration of the public toward supporting great scientific achievements, such as a trip to Mars? Or simply the importance of images that serve to draw the public into learning about the science about the world around us? WILSON: Alan, excuse me, why don't you answer that? SONTAG: Yes. WILSON: We've left Alan out of this a bit, and Alan is one of our most distinguished and practiced expositors of just the subject of that question. [LAUGHTER] This is known as Wilson's revenge. LIGHTMAN: Well, I think that images inspire us, just as novels do. And you're really speaking about looking to the future and getting excitement for the future. And I believe that a picture of Mars from space, the Mars pictures, whatever the scientific enterprise is-- a picture of Ed Wilson's ants-- I think inspire us. I know that's a trite phrase, but it's true. I mean, we've all reacted to these images in a very visceral way. Susan pointed out that those are somewhat-- they're all pictures that we've seen before. And yet, they still have the power to evoke a reaction to us. As Roger Penrose began speaking, we could see that he was emotionally affected by these images. And I think that images have that power. And to the extent that the scientific enterprise is a human enterprise, that our emotional support is important, and images have that power. So I will end there. And let me thank everyone for coming tonight. [APPLAUSE]
1098	dbpedia	1	6	https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/134655370/dennis-william_siahou-sciama	en	Dennis William Siahou Sciama (1926	https://images.findagrav…c7c966b39ea.jpeg	https://images.findagrav…c7c966b39ea.jpeg	[ "https://www.findagrave.com/assets/images/logo-fff.png", "https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2023/256/134655370_f6d1a22a-79c9-4211-8d0e-6c7c966b39ea.jpeg?size=photos250", "https://images.findagrave.com/default-image.png", "https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2023/256/134655370_f6d1a22a-79c9-4211-8d0e-6c7c966b39ea.jpeg", "https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2022/177/134655370_5b30549c-574f-480d-91e7-9bf130e0e450.jpeg", "https://images.findagrave.com/photos/2014/232/134655370_1408630931.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		de	/assets/images/fg-icon.svg		https://de.findagrave.com/memorial/134655370/dennis_william_siahou-sciama	Es gibt ein Problem mit Ihrer E-Mail bzw. Ihrem Passwort. Es gibt ein Problem mit Ihrer E-Mail bzw. Ihrem Passwort. Es gibt ein Problem mit Ihrer E-Mail bzw. Ihrem Passwort. Wir sind auf ein unbekanntes Problem gestoßen. Warten Sie einige Minuten und versuchen Sie es noch einmal. Wenn das Problem weiterhin besteht, kontaktieren Sie Find a Grave. Wir haben die Sicherheit auf der Seite aktualisiert. Sie müssen Ihr Passwort zurücksetzen. Ihr Konto wurde wegen zu vieler fehlgeschlagener Anmeldeversuche für 30 Minuten gesperrt. Bitte kontaktieren Sie Find a Grave unter [email protected], wenn Sie Hilfe beim Zurücksetzen Ihres Passworts benötigen. Dieses Konto wurde deaktiviert. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie bitte [email protected] Dieses Konto wurde deaktiviert. Bei Fragen kontaktieren Sie bitte [email protected] E-Mail nicht gefunden. Bitte füllen Sie das Captcha aus, damit wir wissen, dass Sie eine echte Person sind. Mehr als einen Datensatz für eingegebene E-Mail gefunden. Wir haben Ihnen zur Aktivierung eine E-Mail geschickt. Sign in to your existing Find a Grave account. You’ll only have to do this once—after your accounts are connected, you can sign in using your Ancestry sign in or your Find a Grave sign in. We found an existing Find a Grave account associated with your email address. Sign in below with your Find a Grave credentials to link your Ancestry account. After your accounts are connected you can sign in using either account. Geben Sie zum Anmelden Ihre E-Mail-Adresse ein. Geben Sie zum Anmelden Ihr Passwort ein. Geben Sie zum Anmelden Ihre E-Mail-Adresse und Ihr Passwort ein. Es gibt ein Problem mit Ihrer E-Mail bzw. Ihrem Passwort. Es ist ein Systemfehler aufgetreten. Bitte versuchen Sie es später erneut. Eine E-Mail zum Zurücksetzen des Passworts wurde an Email-ID gesendet. Wenn Sie keine E-Mail erhalten haben, durchsuchen Sie bitte Ihren Spam-Ordner. Wir sind auf ein unbekanntes Problem gestoßen. Warten Sie einige Minuten und versuchen Sie es noch einmal. Wenn das Problem weiterhin besteht, kontaktieren Sie Find a Grave.
1098	dbpedia	2	11	https://www.wanabqa.com/9-world-renowned-syrian-scientists-you-should-know-about/	en	Renowned Syrian Scientists You Should Know About	https://www.wanabqa.com/…a-logo-final.png	https://www.wanabqa.com/…a-logo-final.png	[ "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Wa-Nabqa-logo-final.png", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Wa-Nabqa-logo-final.png", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Wa-Nabqa-logo-final.png", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Wa-Nabqa-logo-final.png", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Wa-Nabqa-logo-final.png", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Wa-Nabqa-logo-final.png", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/themes/shock/assets/svg/send-outline.svg", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/themes/shock/assets/svg/send-outline.svg", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/themes/shock/assets/svg/send-outline.svg", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/themes/shock/assets/svg/send-outline.svg", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/photo1712828378-768x960.jpeg", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/photo1712828378-768x960.jpeg", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/60188-819x1024.jpg", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/60188-819x1024.jpg", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Julia-Domna-1--819x1024.jpg", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Julia-Domna-1--819x1024.jpg", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Layal-Watfeh-819x1024.jpg", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Layal-Watfeh-819x1024.jpg", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/ezgif-3-aefcb69510.gif", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/ezgif-3-aefcb69510.gif", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/ezgif-3-2f3358edc8.gif", "https://www.wanabqa.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/ezgif-3-2f3358edc8.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "admin", "Tariq Machhad" ]	2024-04-12T09:59:46+00:00	From groundbreaking discoveries to revolutionary innovations, these Syrians became pioneers in their respective fields and left a lasting impact on the scientific community and beyond. In this post, we are going to briefly explore each person’s story.	en	https://www.wanabqa.com/…icon-150x150.png	Wanabqa -	https://www.wanabqa.com/9-world-renowned-syrian-scientists-you-should-know-about/	Dennis Sciama (1926-1999) One of the Fathers of Modern Cosmology Born in England to Syrian Jewish parents who traced their roots to Aleppo, Dennis was one of the world’s leading physicists. He is known for the huge role he played in the renaissance of British physics in the post-WWII era, both through his own work and that of his extremely influential school of students which he created. He mentored and supervised over 70 PhD students, of whom were: Stephen Hawking; George F. R. Ellis; Brandon Carter (formulator of the Anthropic Principle in cosmology); and David Deutch (the founding father of quantum computing). Jerrier A. Haddad (1922-2017) Co-developer of IBM’s First Commercial Scientific Computer The son of the prominent Syrian writer Abd al-Masih Haddad, Jerrier was a US-born pioneer computer engineer at the multinational technology company of IBM, he co-developed and designed IBM’s first commercial scientific computer, the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, which was also its first mass-produced mainframe computer. He was also the co-developer of IBM 604, the world’s first mass-produced programmable electronic calculator. During his journey, he secured 19 patents in the computer and electronics fields. Frank Harary (1921-2005) The Father of Modern Graph Theory Born in the US to a Jewish family originally from Syria, Frank was widely recognized as the father of Modern Graph Theory, a theory he helped found and popularize through the 700 academic papers he wrote and/or contributed to, in addition to 8 books he wrote or co-authored. Among other things, Harary is credited with the invention of the signed graph, a type of mathematical structure in which each edge is assigned a positive or negative sign. This concept has proved to be a useful tool for sociological and psychological research, in addition to being useful for the fields of physics and chemistry. Jorge Sahade (1915–2012) First Latin American to Become President of the IAU An Argentine-born internationally recognized astronomer who was the first Latin American to become the president of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) from 1985 to 1988, a union in which he had held many other prestigious positions. In the Argentinian Capital, he established the Institute of Astronomy and Physics of Space within the University of Buenos Aires and was its first director. Sahade was extremely dedicated to the promotion and development of astronomy in Argentina and Latin America, his efforts eventually led to the establishment of the Latin American League of Astronomy. Ayah Bdeir (born in 1982) One of the World’s Leaders of the Open Source Hardware Movement Born in Lebanon to a Syrian family, Ayah is an entrepreneur, inventor, and interactive artist. She is the founder and CEO of LittleBits, an open-source library of electronic modules that enables users to explore and learn about electronics through prototypes. Ayah’s LittleBits has had a huge impact on millions around the world. Having written curricula that are used in more than 20,000 schools worldwide, LittleBits is an industry leader with over 20 million users. Ayah received numerous recognitions & awards, in addition to her inventions being included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Dina Katabi (born 1970) One of the World’s Most Influential Women Engineers A Damascus-born professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recognized as one the world’s most innovative researchers in the field of wireless networks. Among many other achievements, she co-developed a faster technique for carrying out the Fourier transformation, a mathematical technique for handling continuous data flow that is fundamental to the functioning of various technologies such as digital medical imaging, Wi-Fi routers, and 4G cellular networks. Rolando Chuaqui (1935-1994) A Mathematician Who Shaped Chile’s Scientific Legacy A Chilean mathematician whose family emigrated from Homs, Syria, who became one of the most influential figures in the advancement of formal sciences in Chile in the twentieth century through his development efforts. He played a pivotal role in establishing and developing mathematics departments at multiple universities throughout Chile. Fawwaz Ulaby (born 1943) Designer of the World’s First Radar to Fly in Space Damascus-born professor of electrical engineering who is known for his abundant and groundbreaking contributions to the fields of Terahertz technology and Microwave remote sensing. In the 1970s, he designed the world’s first radar to fly on satellite for Skylab, the first US space station. In addition to serving as the founding director of a NASA-funded Center for Space Terahertz Technology at the University of Michigan, he has also led many large interdisciplinary NASA projects aimed at the development of high-resolution satellite radar sensors.
1098	dbpedia	1	44	https://www.amazon.co.uk/Renaissance-General-Relativity-Cosmology-2005-09-22/dp/B01JXO90NG	en	The Renaissance of General Relativity and Cosmology: A Survey to Celebrate the 65th Birthday of Dennis Sciama (2005	https://m.media-amazon.c…CB600084585_.png		[ "https://fls-eu.amazon.co.uk/1/batch/1/OP/A1F83G8C2ARO7P:261-4860005-2688649:Z2FS4W4MRFXGZZMG8JCS$uedata=s:%2Frd%2Fuedata%3Fstaticb%26id%3DZ2FS4W4MRFXGZZMG8JCS:0", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/02/gno/sprites/nav-sprite-global-1x-reorg-privacy._CB600084585_.png", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/21w96uWNM7L.jpg", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/02/kindle/app/kindle-app-logo._CB666560582_.png", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/02/kindle/app/QR-store-link-kindle-app._CB626292679_.png", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41W4OzLfE2L._SY445_SX342_.jpg", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/02/samplePlayers/assets/Spinner._CB575171377_.svg", "https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/common/transparent-pixel._V192234675_.gif", "https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/common/grey-pixel.gif", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/02/personalization/ybh/loading-4x-gray._CB485916908_.gif", "https://fls-eu.amazon.co.uk/1/batch/1/OP/A1F83G8C2ARO7P:261-4860005-2688649:Z2FS4W4MRFXGZZMG8JCS$uedata=s:%2Frd%2Fuedata%3Fnoscript%26id%3DZ2FS4W4MRFXGZZMG8JCS:0" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2005-09-22T00:00:00	Buy The Renaissance of General Relativity and Cosmology: A Survey to Celebrate the 65th Birthday of Dennis Sciama (2005-09-22) by (ISBN: ) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.	en			https://www.amazon.co.uk/Renaissance-General-Relativity-Cosmology-2005-09-22/dp/B01JXO90NG	Select your cookie preferences We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements.
1098	dbpedia	2	85	https://nautil.us/even-physicists-find-the-multiverse-faintly-disturbing-236365/	en	Even Physicists Find the Multiverse Faintly Disturbing	https://assets.nautil.us…&ixlib=php-3.3.1	https://assets.nautil.us…&ixlib=php-3.3.1	[ "https://nautil.us/wp-content/themes/nautilus-block-theme/images/icons/home-icon.svg", "https://nautil.us/wp-content/themes/nautilus-block-theme/images/icons/search-dark.svg", "https://nautil.us/wp-content/themes/nautilus-block-theme/images/icons/search-dark.svg", "https://assets.nautil.us/sites/3/nautilus/qkQZ8WA9-art-science-4.png?auto=compress&fit=scale&fm=png&h=47&ixlib=php-3.3.1&w=300&wpsize=medium", "https://assets.nautil.us/sites/3/nautilus/Biology_Beyond-1.png?auto=compress&fit=scale&fm=png&h=24&ixlib=php-3.3.1&w=300&wpsize=medium", "https://assets.nautil.us/sites/3/nautilus/Cosmos-logo.png?auto=compress&fit=scale&fm=png&h=55&ixlib=php-3.3.1&w=300&wpsize=medium", 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"Tasneem Zehra Husain" ]	2017-01-09T17:37:35+00:00	It’s not the immensity or inscrutability, but that it reduces physical law to happenstance.	en	https://nautil.us/wp-con…ages/favicon.png	Nautilus	https://nautil.us/even-physicists-find-the-multiverse-faintly-disturbing-236365/	How do you feel about the multiverse?” The question was not out of place in our impromptu dinner-table lecture, yet it caught me completely off-guard. It’s not that I’ve never been asked about the multiverse before, but explaining a theoretical construct is quite different to saying how you feel about it. I can put forth all the standard arguments and list the intellectual knots a multiverse would untangle; I can sail through the facts and technicalities, but I stumble over the implications. In physics we’re not supposed to talk about how we feel. We are a hard-nosed, quantitative, and empirical science. But even the best of our dispassionate analysis begins only after we have decided which avenue to pursue. When a field is nascent, there tend to be a range of options to consider, all of which have some merit, and often we are just instinctively drawn to one. This choice is guided by an emotional reasoning that transcends logic. Which position you choose to align yourself with is, as Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind says, “about more than scientific facts and philosophical principles. It is about what constitutes good taste in science. And like all arguments about taste, it involves people’s aesthetic sensibilities.” My own research is in string theory, and one of its features is that there exist many logically consistent versions of the universe other than our own. The same process that created our universe can also bring those other possibilities to life, creating an infinity of other universes where everything that can occur, does. The chain of arguments starts from a place I’m familiar with, and I can follow the flourishes that the equations make as they dance down the page toward this particular conclusion, but, while I understand the multiverse as a mathematical construction, I cannot bring myself to believe it will leap out of the realm of theory and find a manifestation in physical reality. How do I pretend I have no problem accepting the fact that infinite copies of me might be parading around in parallel worlds making choices both identical to, and different from, mine? I am not alone in my ambivalence. The multiverse has been hotly debated and continues to be a source of polarization among some of the most prominent scientists of the day. The debate over the multiverse is not a conversation about the particulars of a theory. It is a fight about identity and consequence, about what constitutes an explanation, what proof consists of, how we define science, and whether there is a point to it all. Whenever I talk about the multiverse, one of the questions that inevitably comes up is one I actually have an answer to. Whether we live in a universe or multiverse, these classifications relate to scales so large they defy imagination. No matter the outcome, life around us isn’t going to change one way or another. Why does it matter? It matters because where we are influences who we are. Different places call forth different reactions, give rise to different possibilities; the same object can look dramatically different against different backgrounds. In more ways than we are perhaps conscious of, we are molded by the spaces we inhabit. The universe is the ultimate expanse. It contains every arena, every context in which we can realize existence. It represents the sum total of possibilities, the complete set of all we can be. A measurement makes sense only within a reference frame. Numbers are clearly abstract until paired with units, but even vague assessments such as “too far,” “too small,” and “too strange” presume a coordinate system. Too far invokes an origin; too small refers to a scale; too strange implies a context. Unlike units, which are always stated, the reference frame of assumptions is seldom specified, and yet the values we assign to things—objects, phenomena, experiences—are calibrated against these invisible axes. If we find out that all we know, and all we can ever know, is just one pocket in the multiverse, the entire foundation upon which we have laid our coordinate grid shifts. Observations don’t change, but implications do. The presence of those other bubble universes out there might not impact the numbers we measure here on our instruments, but could radically impact the way we interpret them. The first thing that strikes you about the multiverse is its immensity. It is larger than anything humankind has ever dealt with before—the aggrandizement is implicit in the name. It would be understandable if the passionate responses provoked by the multiverse came from feeling diminished. Yet the size of the multiverse is perhaps its least controversial feature. The debate over the multiverse is a fight about identity and consequence. Gian Giudice, head of CERN’s theory group, speaks for most physicists when he says that one look at the sky sets us straight. We already know our scale. If the multiverse turns out to be real, he says, “the problem of me versus the vastness of the universe won’t change.” In fact, many find comfort in the cosmic perspective. Framed against the universe, all our troubles, all the drama of daily life, diminishes so dramatically that “anything that happens here is irrelevant,” says physicist and author Lawrence Krauss. “I find great solace in that.” From the stunning photographs the Hubble Space telescope has beamed back to Octavio Paz’s poems of “the enormous night” to Monty Python’s “Galaxy Song” to be sung “whenever life gets you down,” there is Romanticism associated with our Lilliputian magnitude. At some point in our history, we appear to have made peace with the fact we are infinitesimal. If it isn’t because we are terrified of the scale, are we resistant to the notion of the multiverse because it involves worlds that are out of sight and seem doomed to remain so? This is indeed a common complaint I hear from my colleagues. South African physicist George Ellis (who is strongly opposed to the multiverse) and British cosmologist Bernard Carr (an equally strong advocate) have discussed such issues in a series of fascinating conversations. Carr suggests their fundamental point of diversion concerns “which features of science are to be regarded as sacrosanct.” Experimentation is the traditional benchmark. Comparative observations are an acceptable substitute: Astronomers cannot manipulate galaxies, but do observe them by the millions, in various forms and stages. Neither approach fits the multiverse. Does it therefore lie outside the domain of science? Susskind, one of the fathers of string theory, sounds a reassuring note. There is a third approach to empirical science: to infer unseen objects and phenomena from those things we do see. We don’t have to go as far as causally disconnected regions of spacetime to find examples. Subatomic particles will do. Quarks are permanently bound together into protons, neutrons, and other composite particles. “They are, so to speak, hidden behind a … veil,” Susskind says, “but by now, although no single quark has ever been seen in isolation, there is no one who seriously questions the correctness of the quark theory. It is part of the bedrock foundation of modern physics.” Because the universe is now expanding at an accelerating rate, galaxies that currently lie on the horizon of our field of vision will soon be pushed over the edge. We don’t expect them to tumble into oblivion anymore than we expect a ship to disintegrate when it sails over the horizon. If galaxies we know of can exist in some distant region beyond sight, who’s to say other things can’t be there, too? Things we’ve never seen and never will? Once we admit the possibility that there are regions beyond our purview, the implications grow exponentially. The British Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, compares this line of reasoning to aversion therapy. When you admit to there being galaxies beyond our present horizon, you “start out with a little spider a long distance away,” but, before you know it, you unleash the possibility of a multiverse—populated with infinite worlds, perhaps quite different to your own—find “a tarantula crawling all over you.” The lack of ability to directly manipulate objects has never really figured in my personal criteria for a good physical theory, anyway. Whatever bothers me about the multiverse, I’m sure it isn’t this. The multiverse challenges yet another of our most cherished beliefs—that of uniqueness. Could this be the root of our trouble with it? As Tufts cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin explains, no matter how large our observable region is, as long as it is finite, it can only be in a finite number of quantum states; specifying these states uniquely determines the contents of the region. If there are infinitely many such regions, the same configuration will necessarily be replicated elsewhere. Our exact world here—down to the last detail—will be replicated. Since the process continues into infinity, there will eventually be not one, but infinite copies of us. “I did find the presence of all these copies depressing,” Vilenkin says. “Our civilization may have many drawbacks, but at least we could claim it is unique—like a piece of art. And now we can no longer say that.” I know what he means. That bothers me, too, but I’m not sure it quite gets to the root of my discontent. As Vilenkin says, somewhat wistfully: “I am not presumptuous enough to tell reality what it should be.” The crux of the debate, at least for me, lies in a strange irony. Although the multiverse enlarges our concept of physical reality to an almost unimaginable extent, it feels claustrophobic in that it demarcates an outer limit to our knowledge and our capacity to acquire knowledge. We theorists dream of a world without arbitrariness, whose equations are entirely self-contained. Our goal is to find a theory so logically complete, so tightly constrained by self-consistency, that it can only take that one unique form. Then, at least, even if we don’t know where the theory came from or why, the structure will not seem arbitrary. All the fundamental constants of nature would emerge “out of math and π and 2’s,” as Berkeley physicist Raphael Bousso puts it. This is the lure of Einstein’s general theory of relativity—the reason physicists all over the world exclaim at its extraordinary, enduring beauty. Considerations of symmetry dictate the equations so clearly that the theory seems inevitable. That is what we have wanted to replicate in other domains of physics. And so far we have failed. An infinity of universes is simpler than a single universe would be—there is less to explain. For decades, scientists have looked for a physical reason why the fundamental constants should take on the values they do, but none has thus far been found. In fact, when we use our current theories to guess at the probable value at some of these parameters, the answers are so far from what is measured that it is laughable. But then how do we explain these parameters? If there is just this one unique universe, the parameters governing its design are invested with a special significance. Either the process governing them is completely random or there must be some logic, perhaps even some design, behind the selection. Neither option seems particularly appealing. As scientists, we spend our lives looking for laws because we believe there are reasons why things happen, even when we don’t understand them; we look for patterns because we think there is some order to the universe even if we don’t see it. Pure, random chance is not something that fits in with that worldview. But to invoke design isn’t very popular either, because it entails an agency that supersedes natural law. That agency must exercise choice and judgment, which—in the absence of a rigid, perfectly balanced, and tightly constrained structure, like that of general relativity—is necessarily arbitrary. There is something distinctly unsatisfying about the idea of there being several logically possible universes, of which only one is realized. If that were the case, as cosmologist Dennis Sciama said, you would have to think “there’s [someone] who looks at this list and says ‘well we’re not going to have that that one, and we won’t have that one. We’ll have that one, only that one.’ ” Personally speaking, that scenario, with all its connotations of what could have been, makes me sad. Floating in my mind is a faint collage of images: forlorn children in an orphanage in some forgotten movie when one from the group is adopted; the faces of people who feverishly chased a dream, but didn’t make it; thoughts of first-trimester miscarriages. All these things that almost came to life, but didn’t, rankle. Unless there’s a theoretical constraint ruling out all possibilities but one, the choice seems harsh and unfair. In such a carefully calibrated creation, how are we to explain needless suffering? Since such philosophical, ethical, and moral concerns are not the province of physics, most scientists avoid commenting on them, but Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg spelled it out: “Whether our lives show evidence for a benevolent designer … is a question you will all have to answer for yourselves. My life has been remarkably happy … but even so, I have seen a mother painfully die of cancer, a father’s personality destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease and scores of second and third cousins murdered in the Holocaust. Signs of a benevolent designer are pretty well hidden.” In the face of pain, an element of randomness is far easier to accept than either the callous negligence or the deliberate malevolence of an otherwise meticulously planned universe. The multiverse promised to extricate us from these awful thoughts, to provide a third option that overcame the dilemma of explanation. To be sure, physicists didn’t invent it for that purpose. The multiverse emerged out of other lines of thought. The theory of cosmic inflation was intended to explain the broad-scale smoothness and flatness of the universe we see. “We were looking for a simple explanation of why the universe looks like a big balloon,” says Stanford physicist Andrei Linde. “We didn’t know we had bought something else.” This something else was the realization that our big bang was not unique, and that there should in fact be an infinite number of them, each creating a disconnected domain of spacetime. Then string theory came along. String theory is currently the best contender we have for a unified theory of everything. It not only achieves the impossible—reconciling gravity and quantum mechanics—but insists upon it. But for a scheme which reduces the enormous variety of our universe to a minimalist set of building blocks, string theory suffers from a singularly embarrassing problem: We don’t know how to determine the precise values of the fundamental constants of nature. Current estimates say there are about 10500 potential options—a number so unfathomably large we don’t even have a name for it. String theory lists all the possible forms physical laws can take, and inflation creates a way for them to be realized. With the birth of each new universe, an imaginary deck of cards is shuffled. The hand that is dealt determines the laws that govern that universe. The multiverse explains how the constants in our equations acquire the values they do, without invoking either randomness or conscious design. If there are vast numbers of universes, embodying all possible laws of physics, we measure the values we do because that’s where our universe lies on the landscape. There’s no deeper explanation. That’s it. That’s the answer. But as much as the multiverse frees us from the old dichotomy, it leaves a profound unease. The questions we have spent so long pondering might have no deeper answer than just this: that it is the way it is. That might be the best we can do, but it’s not the kind of answer we’re used to. It doesn’t pull back the covers and explain how something works. What’s more, it dashes the theorists’ dream, with the claim that no unique solution will ever be found because no unique solution exists. There are some who don’t like that answer, others who don’t think it even qualifies to be called an answer, and some who accept it. To Nobel laureate David Gross, the multiverse “smells of angels.” Accepting the multiverse, he says, is tantamount to throwing up your hands and accepting that you’ll never really understand anything, because whatever you see can be chalked up to a “historical accident.” His fellow Nobelist Gerard ’t Hooft complains he cannot accept a scenario where you are supposed to “try all of these solutions until you find a universe that looks like the world we live in.” He says: “This is not the way physics has worked for us in the past, and it is not too late to hope that we will be able to find better arguments in the future.” Princeton cosmologist Paul Steinhardt refers to the multiverse as the “Theory of Anything,” because it allows everything but explains nothing. “A scientific theory ought to be selective,” he says. “Its power is determined by the number of possibilities it excludes. If it includes every possibility, then it excludes nothing, then it has zero power.” Steinhardt was one of the early champions of inflation until he realized that it generically gave rise to the multiverse, carving out a space of possibilities rather than making specific predictions. He has since become one of inflation’s most vocal critics. On a recent episode of Star Talk, he introduced himself as a proponent of alternatives to the multiverse. “What did the multiverse ever do to you?” the host joked. “It destroyed one of my favorite ideas,” Steinhardt replied. Physics was supposed to be the province of truth, of absolutes, of predictions. Things either are, or aren’t. Theories aren’t meant to be elastic or inclusive, but instead restrictive, rigid, dismissive. Given a situation, you want to be able to predict the likely—ideally, the unique and inevitable—outcome. The multiverse gives us none of that. The debate over the multiverse sometimes gets vociferous, with skeptics accusing proponents of betraying science. But it’s important to realize that nobody chose this. We all wanted a universe that flowed organically from some beautiful deep principles. But from what we can tell so far, that’s not the universe we got. It is what it is. Must the argument for the multiverse be negative? Must it be a distant second-best option? Many of my colleagues are trying to put the multiverse in a more hopeful light. Logically speaking, an infinity of universes is simpler than a single universe would be—there is less to explain. As Sciama said, the multiverse “in a sense satisfies Occam’s razor, because you want to minimize the arbitrary constraints you place on the universe.” Weinberg says that a theory that is free of arbitrary assumptions and hasn’t been “carefully tinkered with to make it match observations” is beautiful in its own way. It might turn out, he says, that the beauty we find here is similar to that of thermodynamics, a statistical kind of beauty, which explains the state of the macroscopic system, but not of its every individual constituent. “You search for beauty, but you can’t be too sure in advance where you’ll find it, or what kind of beauty you’ll have,” Weinberg says. At some point in our history, we appear to have made peace with the fact we are infinitesimal. Several times, while contemplating these weighty intellectual issues, my thoughts circled back to the simple, beautiful wisdom of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince who, having considered his beloved rose unique in all the worlds, finds himself in a rose garden. Bewildered by this betrayal and saddened by the loss of consequence—his rose’s and his own—he breaks down in tears. Eventually he comes to realize that his rose is “more important than all the hundreds of others” because she is his. There may well be nothing special about our entire universe, except for the fact that it is ours. But isn’t that enough? Even if our entire lives, the sum of all we can ever know, turn out to be cosmically insignificant, they are still ours. There is something distinguished about here, now, mine. Meaning is something we confer. Several times over these past few months, I found myself replaying my conversation with Gian Giudice. I found it reassuring how unperturbed he was by the vast range of possible universes and the seemingly arbitrary choices made by our own. Perhaps the multiverse is just telling us that we’re focusing on the wrong questions, he says. Maybe, as Kepler did with the orbits of the planets, we’re trying to read a deeper meaning into these numbers than is there. Since the solar system was all Kepler knew, he thought the shapes of the planetary orbits and the specific values of their various distances from the sun must carry important information, but that turned out to not be the case. These quantities were not fundamental; they were merely environmental parameters. That may have seemed lamentable at the time, but looking back now from the vantage point of general relativity, we no longer feel any sense of loss. We have a beautiful description of gravity; it just happens to be one in which these values of the planetary orbits are not fundamental constants. Perhaps, says Giudice, the multiverse implies something similar. Perhaps we need to let go of something we’re holding onto too tightly. Maybe we need to think bigger, refocus, regroup, reframe our questions to nature. The multiverse, he says, could open up “extremely satisfying, gratifying, and mind-opening possibilities.” Of all the pro-multiverse arguments I heard, this is the one that appeals to me the most. In every scenario, for every physical system, we can pose infinitely many questions. We try to strip a problem back to the essentials and ask the most basic questions, but our intuition is built upon what came before, and it is entirely possible that we are drawing upon paradigms that are no longer relevant for the new realms we are trying to probe. The multiverse is less like a closed door and more like a key. To me, the word is now tinged with promise and fraught with possibility. It seems no more wasteful than a bower full of roses. Tasneem Zehra Husain is a theoretical physicist and the author of Only The Longest Threads. She is the first Pakistani woman string theorist. Lead image: A Tate Modern employee views The Passing Winter 2005 by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Credit: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images.
1098	dbpedia	3	26	https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/56/2/2.9/178329	en	Vews: ‘The Theory of Everything’ is missing something	https://oup.silverchair-…IE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA	https://oup.silverchair-…IE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA	[ "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/umbrella/oxford-academic-logo.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/i.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/account.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/i.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/account.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/data/SiteBuilderAssets/Live/Images/astrogeo/astrogeo_title-1186088294.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/data/SiteBuilderAssets/Live/Images/astrogeo/astrogeo_h1760758999.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/oup/backfile/Content_public/Journal/astrogeo/Issue/56/2/1/m_cover.jpeg?Expires=1727709502&Signature=NzKDXhsC6-FjaVrPqbrURglWgbf5XHe2KRqTyw0AriUl2SQN3Rq~7dSX3z5O1w74xENZw66YvDmhcAj29yNkQDpEsSuT--ZB8ayYjgWz9ytor0SqGgapbXALcz1c7z5EZLReidKVoEdi~LzOhCRVmGkUV4kpSJfP9LE2bdz4ZCw6iC8I99zP75zGEOFohHMoH4Eyn7g8bW1beRazQRCHS5gdoz5YTePNJQrKEQ43UdD67Lg6hLeFz5r~urlyFnSEge-2O1JhBKA95ncITMFhpT9L9zdoLJ4l2u4XZ3D6VMJJiHgJV6Mb5G1E9Ud1xFRwMc~40LORVvL4CLRjRW1K6g__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/pdf.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/oup/backfile/Content_public/Journal/astrogeo/56/2/10.1093/astrogeo/atv057/3/m_10.1093_astrogeo_atv057_ufig1.jpeg?Expires=1726690672&Signature=Xeo7lf1u-kKLdmuJUCm5o9ou4q3EehrAtd1wibC1wuaEXCvSDk5p0jvxHQtEtU27PVf-Hy215GM4-DFdgIvklkqa0UGWmWEANL7bQ9L9~iWLPgGVRuDeaQ8fvlU3St-Q~fm9tQB80xm~m4QZpAfdfc1wgRtzqWLXI9zhzGNRDwOPcoJTh1NBCm7LzpXeCgDGqjlPBa-Hr3j1thAqEA0lITWC0uVSTeJwDYUrbv1e2u2fdSUGWFK1M1hqFHp6nQ5NfZ4t-PnCuD0tpDgb8Xl5hByh8xR5ddBVCosqTT4-ZkI83d5NSlumpYRF4sEBlzJ-kL09DeMDXBHpK3ggN0Nchw__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/i.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/data/SiteBuilderAssets/Live/Images/astrogeo/astrogeo_f1-232466434.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/umbrella/oup-logo.svg", "https://ouptag.scholarlyiq.com/ntpagetag.gif?js=0" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2015-04-01T00:00:00	LETTERFrom Adrian L Melott The Theory of Everything is a well-acted film (a Hawking biography, for those who may have managed not to hear about it) which p	en	//oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/img/v-638576256025047103/apple-touch-icon.png	OUP Academic	https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/56/2/2.9/178329	LETTERFrom Adrian L Melott The Theory of Everything is a well-acted film (a Hawking biography, for those who may have managed not to hear about it) which portrays scientists in a more realistic light than most films do. It is based on a memoir written by his first wife, and highlights her role in the struggle with his disability. It does, however, severely minimize and distort the role of Dennis Sciama, Hawking's doctoral supervisor. Dennis is portrayed as a cartoon character, at first a kind of authoritarian gatekeeper, who gradually develops affection for Stephen as he begins to regard him as a colleague. It is understandable that his role would not be portrayed realistically by people who were not involved in research. Dennis was much more than that portrayal suggests: he was a superb mentor who brought out the best from his students. He cleverly never directly tried to motivate them, but rather responded masterfully and encouragingly when they moved forward. As was relayed to me, after Stephen's diagnosis and some time in depression, he said to him words like, “Well, you're not dead yet. So, are you ready to work on that problem I suggested?” The rest is history. I believe the history could not have been the same without the constant interaction and feedback typical of Dennis. I am not alone in this regret. Arnold Wolfendale told me: “I'm glad that you have set the record straight about Dennis Sciama. He, Dennis, was a great help to me in the 1970s when I was endeavouring to change the direction of Durham's research towards astronomy and astrophysics. I found him to be very co-operative, friendly, unassuming and clever.” In the film he merely sits and waits for the equations to appear. In real life, Dennis was all about conversation and encouragement about the ideas. I wish that his legacy would have been strengthened by the film. Adrian L Melott, Dept of Physics and Astronomy, University of Kansas, USA © 2015 Royal Astronomical Society
1098	dbpedia	1	87	https://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_1461	en	Wheeler, John Archibald	https://static-content.s…-387-30400-7.jpg	https://static-content.s…-387-30400-7.jpg	[ "https://link.springer.com/oscar-static/images/darwin/header/img/logo-springerlink-39ee2a28d8.svg", "https://media.springernature.com/w72/springer-static/cover-hires/book/978-0-387-30400-7?as=webp", "https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image/prt%3A978-0-387-30400-7%2F23/MediaObjects/978-0-387-30400-7_23_Part_Fig1-1461_HTML.jpg", "https://link.springer.com/oscar-static/images/logo-springernature-white-19dd4ba190.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Kenneth W. Ford", "Kenneth W" ]	2007-08-10T00:00:00	'Wheeler, John Archibald' published in 'The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers'	en	/oscar-static/img/favicons/darwin/apple-touch-icon-92e819bf8a.png	SpringerLink	https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_1461	Ciufolini, Ignazio and John Wheeler (1995). Gravitation and Inertia. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Ferris, Timothy (1998). The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe(s) Report. New York: Simon and Schuster. Harrison, B. Kent, Kip S. Thorne, Masami Wakano, and John Wheeler (1965). Gravitation Theory and Gravitational Collapse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Misner, Charles W., Kip S. Thorne, and John Wheeler (1973). Gravitation. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. Taylor, Edwin F. and John Wheeler (1966). Spacetime Physics. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. (An undergraduate textbook.) ——— (2000). Exploring Black Holes: Introduction to General Relativity. San Francisco: Addison Wesley Longman. Wheeler, John (1955). “Geons.” Physical Review 97: 511–536. ——— (1957). “On the Nature of Quantum Geometrodynamics.” Annals of Physics 2: 604–614. ——— (1962). Geometrodynamics. New York: Academic Press. (For the first of his books, Wheeler chose for the title a word he had coined to emphasize that the physics of gravity is the dynamics of geometry.) ——— (1990). A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime. New York: Scientific American Library. ——— (1994). At Home in the Universe. New York: American Institute of Physics. Wheeler, John and Niels Bohr. (1939). “The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission.” Physical Review 56 (1939): 426‐–450. Wheeler, John and Richard Feynman. (1949). “Classical Electrodynamics in Terms of Direct Interparticle Action.” Reviews of Modern Physics 21 (1949): 425–433. Wheeler, John and Kenneth Ford (1998). Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics. New York: W. W. Norton. (Wheeler's autobiography) Wheeler, John and Charles Misner. (1957). “Classical Physics as Geometry: Gravitation, Electromagnetism, Unquantized Charge, and Mass as Properties of Curved Empty Space.” Annals of Physics 2 (1957): 525–603. Wheeler, John and Tullio Regge (1957). “Stability of a Schwarzschild Singularity.” Physical Review 108: 1063–1069.
1098	dbpedia	3	71	https://www.triesteconoscenza.it/en/tags/gravitational-waves	en	Gravitational waves			[ "https://www.triesteconoscenza.it/sites/all/themes/tcc/images/comune_di_trieste.png", "https://www.triesteconoscenza.it/sites/all/themes/tcc/images/logo-zkb.png", "https://www.triesteconoscenza.it/sites/all/themes/tcc/images/logo-welcomeoffice.png", "https://www.triesteconoscenza.it/sites/all/themes/tcc/logo.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en	https://www.triesteconoscenza.it/sites/all/themes/tcc/favicon.ico	Trieste Città della Conoscenza	https://www.triesteconoscenza.it/en/tags/gravitational-waves	Professor Kip Thorne brings his brand of science excitement to ICTP, where he will deliver a colloquium on Geometrodynamics: The Nonlinear Dynamics of Curved Spacetime. The next Sciama Memorial Lecture will take place on 13 December 2017 at 5 p.m. at SISSA's Aula Magna Paolo Budinich. The event will be a "Special SISSA Colloquium" to commemorate the great theoretical astrophysicist Dennis Sciama.
1098	dbpedia	1	68	https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/sciama.html	en	res stock photography and images	https://s.alamy.com/logo…avicon-16x16.png	https://s.alamy.com/logo…avicon-16x16.png	[ "https://s.alamy.com/logos/1.68.0/alamy.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/logos/1.68.0/alamy-black.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/logos/1.68.0/alamy-black.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/logos/1.68.0/alamy.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/mastercard.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/visa.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/amex.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/paypal.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/apple-pay.svg", "https://s.alamy.com/assets/latest/footer/google-pay.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Alamy Limited" ]	null	Find the perfect sciama stock photo, image, vector, illustration or 360 image. Available for both RF and RM licensing.	en	https://s.alamy.com/logo…avicon-16x16.png	Alamy	https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/sciama.html	Alamy and its logo are trademarks of Alamy Ltd. and are registered in certain countries. Copyright © 10/08/2024 Alamy Ltd. All rights reserved.
1098	dbpedia	0	32	https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/interviews/martin-rees-early-life	en	Martin Rees: Early life	https://www.thenakedscie…pg?itok=st4X6qf4	https://www.thenakedscie…pg?itok=st4X6qf4	[ "https://www.thenakedscientists.com/sites/default/files/styles/featured_image/public/media/media/54e1d7444d52a814f6da8c7dda7930791439dbed534c704c7c267edc974ec55c_1280.jpg?itok=rXqKzk7K", "https://www.thenakedscientists.com/sites/default/files/styles/media_thumbnail/public/media/media/images/TYCHE%20SATELLITE.jpg?itok=HvrGRiFX", "https://www.thenakedscientists.com/sites/default/files/styles/media_thumbnail/public/media/media/images/g43ff26b61d33b68821ea64c5fea45cd7c52554fc4e57587a0a158c5fd101eb7cd6bc14bb49a312618c0620d93e5b676c422fb51eccf7255fe7b0509a34f57269_1280.jpg?itok=Ir1XbDTH", "https://www.thenakedscientists.com/sites/default/files/styles/media_thumbnail/public/media/media/52e2d0434c52aa14f6da8c7dda7930791439dbed534c704c73277bd09e4dc251_960.jpg?itok=TWsBLDn-", "https://www.thenakedscientists.com/sites/default/files/styles/media_thumbnail/public/media/media/53e1d2464356b108f5d08460962f307f133ad6e54e507441762b79d69148c7_960.jpg?itok=j6jVHYcN", "https://www.thenakedscientists.com/sites/default/files/styles/media_thumbnail/public/media/media/images/g66c5217ab1d40d6b343ce05125c8e7fae2778ff92a9e4ba78cf12d1706922ec29bee696c19fe61b960979021a2c7a32129f64f132239182c1081d51e4d22200f_1280.jpg?itok=6U4p2DWA", "https://www.thenakedscientists.com/sites/default/files/styles/media_thumbnail/public/media/media/photo-1631824683860-9a7aa1fe0713.jpg?itok=LJ19snNQ", "https://www.thenakedscientists.com/sites/default/files/styles/media_thumbnail/public/media/Lobster_noaa.jpg?itok=rH0_obCn", "https://www.thenakedscientists.com/sites/default/files/styles/media_thumbnail/public/media/media/PETER-LIES-Photo.JPG?itok=FGjHtlwy", "https://www.thenakedscientists.com/sites/default/files/styles/media_thumbnail/public/media/media/ea30b1092ffc033ed1584d05fb1d4191e271e7dd19ac104490f0c37aa2e5b1b0_960.jpg?itok=TvYtdDVF", "https://www.thenakedscientists.com/sites/default/files/styles/media_thumbnail/public/media/media/ga3f8a7f99e3993217a78fe5979fa39fe134b4a4c1716ff20059c3d0d6a907e12229cb003ecb20ee03877b9a09538202229431d7e62854ed3d319cd2589ebe50f_1280.jpg?itok=q-p_oFYU", "https://www.thenakedscientists.com/sites/default/files/media/media/cambridge_logo_footer.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "martin rees", "hawking", "quasar discovery", "black holes", "Astronomer Royal" ]	null	[ "Martin Rees", "en-gb.facebook.com" ]	2024-01-16T15:26:00	Martin - Well, I was very lucky because I grew up in this village in the South Shropshire Hills - beautiful natural world. My parents were teachers and I was sent away to boarding school (which wasn't quite so happy) when I was 13. But I was very well taught and I did get into Cambridge and I read mathematics. I wish actually I'd done a broader curriculum at university	en	https://www.thenakedscientists.com/favicon.ico		https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/interviews/martin-rees-early-life	Chris Smith met up with Martin Rees at his Cambridge home to hear about his life's work... Martin - Well, I was very lucky because I grew up in this village in the South Shropshire Hills - beautiful natural world. My parents were teachers and I was sent away to boarding school (which wasn't quite so happy) when I was 13. But I was very well taught and I did get into Cambridge and I read mathematics. I wish actually I'd done a broader curriculum at university because, when I got to university, I realised I wasn't quite the same as other geeky people doing mathematics in that I like to think in a more synthetic or synoptic way. I became a research student in 1964, and that's when quasars had just been discovered, the evidence for the Big Bang from the radiation, the so-called afterglow of creation and lots of other exciting things and theoretical work by Hawking and Penrose on Black Holes was being done. Advice I would still give to any young person starting is, if you pick a subject, pick something where new things are happening and then the experience of the old guys is at a heavy discount and you can immediately make an impact. Don't go into some sterile subject because then you'll be trying to do the problems the old guys got stuck on. Chris - Do you think then you got lucky with the subject? Did you have some foresight? Because you've said to me, go and pick something that's an exciting, emerging, evolving area. That is current. Don't get stuck on the old stuff. Did it find you or did you already have that view and therefore you were seeking out that kind of thing and you were able to say - well, I'm good at maths. I've got the kind of mind that would suit this, that's where I'm headed. Martin - It was really just luck rather than careful planning. I had decided I didn't really want to pursue mathematics as a career. I liked the idea of something academic. I thought quite seriously about economics because I had some good friends who had defected from maths to economics and did very well as economists. I might have tried to follow that route and I might have been happy if I'd done that too, but I was very lucky to get a place as a graduate student in Dennis Sciama's group. And it was luck because some other person who'd got the job in preference to me dropped out, and so I just managed to get my position as a graduate student. Chris - What was going on in Dennis Sciama's domain that really drew you in and what did you think were the areas that were going to be the exciting ones to pursue? Martin - Well, I realised that I liked a style of thinking where you try to make sense of something from limited information rather than doing complicated deductive reasoning like in mathematics - a bit like engineering where you try to make something that works from given specifications. We had these objects that are very bright, flashing away, which we now think are massive black holes in the centre of galaxies, which are called quasars, and I wrote some papers trying to understand that sort of thing and also to understand the expanding universe where the idea of an evolving universe was a fairly new one. I think it was a style of thinking that I quite enjoyed. I mentioned Dennis Sciama. He was very plugged into what was going on in all these fields, and he'd come in excitedly every day with some new preprint for the new paper he'd been sent and circulated. He had students like Stephen Hawking, who was two years ahead of me, and he told those students to go and listen to Roger Penrose in London who had exciting new ideas. They duly did and followed them up spectacularly. He was someone who exemplified that you can be a great coach without being a great player. He didn't do any amazing science himself, but he was an enthusiast and he inspired us all, a whole group in Cambridge, and then he moved to Oxford in the 1970s where, again, he had an equally strong stable of students there.
1098	dbpedia	1	29	https://www.fandango.com/people/dennis-sciama-787833	en	A Message To Our Fans			[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	A Message To Our Fans	en			null	Sorry, Fandango is not available outside the United States.
1098	dbpedia	0	12	https://whatelseisonnow.com/2014/11/20/a-look-at-the-theory-of-everything/	en	A Look at The Theory of Everything	https://whatelseisonnow.…ing-spinning.jpg	https://whatelseisonnow.…ing-spinning.jpg	[ "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/cropped-alex-ross.jpg", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-poster.jpg?w=202&h=300", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-biking.jpg?w=300&h=200", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-jane-and-stephen-talk-at-party.jpg?w=300&h=199", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-with-professor-dennis-sciama-played-by-david-thewlis.jpg?w=300&h=157", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-gala.jpg?w=300&h=212", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-and-jane-play-croquet.jpg?w=300&h=199", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-first-child.jpg?w=300&h=168", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-plays-with-kids.jpg?w=300&h=168", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-marriage.jpg?w=300&h=210", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-spinning.jpg?w=300&h=167", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-speaks-through-device.jpg?w=300&h=177", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-works-on-his-theory.jpg?w=300&h=199", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-eddie-redmayne-as-stephen-hawking.jpg?w=300&h=199", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-felicity-jones-as-jane-wilde.jpg?w=300&h=152", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-and-jane-in-bed.jpg?w=300&h=193", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-wedding.jpg?w=300&h=154", "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2014-11-20T00:00:00	The Theory of Everything looks at the lives and relationship of Jane and Stephen Hawking. It spans years after the two year death sentence that Hawking had been given after his accident that would eventually confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Based off of a book written by Jane Wilde…	en	https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico	What Else is on Now?	https://whatelseisonnow.com/2014/11/20/a-look-at-the-theory-of-everything/	The Theory of Everything looks at the lives and relationship of Jane and Stephen Hawking. It spans years after the two year death sentence that Hawking had been given after his accident that would eventually confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Based off of a book written by Jane Wilde Hawking herself, the film takes care with its subjects and gives us a close at how their relationship developed as Stephen’s condition worsened. The film focuses more time on the family man as opposed to the physicist and shows how, despite not feeling whole, we still find hope in our lives. The film begins in Cambridge, England, 1963. We’re introduced to two pals biking to a party: Brian, played by Harry Lloyd, and our protagonist, Stephen Hawking, played by Eddie Redmayne. Also at the party is Jane Wilde, played by Felicity Jones. From a friend, she learns that this Hawking is strange, but very clever. Jane and Stephen talk. He tells her that she’s a cosmologist and is looking for that one equation that explains everything in the universe. Sounds like a simple enough task. We get a look at the busy life of Mr. Hawking. The next day, he and his colleagues are given a 10 question exam by professor and advisor, Dennis Sciama, played by David Thewlis. Stephen is also a member of the university’s rowing club as well. At a pub that night, Stephen considers calling Jane, but no need for that since she’s just a few seats over. He plucks up the courage to talk to her and asks if she plays croquet. Typical pick-up lines. When Brian returns to their dorm, he finds that Stephen hasn’t been working on the exam. Stephen has bigger things in mind: he’s applied for a PhD in Physics. He soon gets to work on the questions. He soon returns to class, but was only able to get through nine of the questions. Professor Sciama takes Stephen into a room once occupied by greats like J.J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. It’s a room full of possibility and Stephen looks on in wonder at what he sees. Professor Sciama has a great opportunity for Stephen: travel with him to see Roger Penrose speak. Elsewhere, Jane leaves church and finds Stephen waiting for her. It’s time to meet Stephen’s parents: Isobel, played by Abigail Cruttenden, and Frank, played by Simon McBurney. The parents ask about Jane’s passion- she loves art. More than that, she’s studying Spanish poetry. Jane and Stephen are also very different. After all, she goes to church, but Stephen doesn’t believe in that sort of higher authority. A physicist cannot allow his belief to be molded in the supernatural. Later that evening, they attend a gala. Stephen is not a dancer, but he is very observant. For example, he tells Jane to take a good look at the men’s shirts. They’re glowing in the light. The reason for that is due to Tide. As the two discuss their lives, Jane tells Stephen that she chose to major in Spanish poetry because she loves to travel. Soon, she refers to the creation of the Heaven and the Earth by quoting the first few scriptures of Genesis. The two join hands and dance. Professor Sciama and Stephen attend Roger Penrose’s lecture on black holes. Penrose, played by Christian McKay, tells his audience that black holes are created when stars collapse. There’s no light whatsoever in a black hole and the stars become denser and denser. The end result is a space-time singularity. When he returns, Stephen then relays this lecture to Jane, but with one change: what if you applied the theory of singularity to the entire universe? What if you reversed the process to see the beginning of time? It would be like winding back a clock. Stephen gets to work on his equation, with Professor Sciama advising him on the mathematics. Stephen is flying high right now, but as he leaves class and makes his way across campus, he trips and hits his head hard on the pavement. Stephen is brought to a doctor for examination. The impact is immediate: Stephen has little to no movement in his legs and is unable to push in when the doctor asks him to. Then Stephen learns: he has a motor-neuron disease that destroys the cells that control the muscles, breathing and anything related to movement. In time, his muscles will begin to decay and he’ll have no voluntary movement. His life expectancy is two years and the doctor, unfortunately, cannot help. Stephen asks if his brain will be affected, and it won’t be, but soon, no one will know his thoughts. Brian learns of Stephen’s disease when he returns to their dorm and Stephen tells him about Lou Gherig’s disease, though Brian isn’t up to date on baseball. Since Stephen isn’t taking Jane’s calls, she first learns about it when she runs into Brian at a pub. She comes to his dorm again- as he’d hidden from her the first time she stopped by- and tells him how much she missed him. He doesn’t discuss his condition, though. In fact, he wants her gone. Jane doesn’t leave that easily, though. She still owes him a game of croquet. If he doesn’t come, she’ll never come back. The two play, though Stephen’s movement is inhibited due to the fall. His feet drag and he’s not as mobile as he had been. Croquet comes to a quick end. Stephen returns to his dorm and begins to wreck it. He still wants Jane gone, as he needs to work. Stephen is still able to attend class, but now with the assistance of a cane. Stephen’s father tells Jane that she doesn’t realize what lies ahead. She has the weight of science against her and this is a huge defeat for everyone. Jane is defiant. Everyone thinks that she doesn’t look strong, but if there’s still love, she and Stephen can and will fight this. They do. The two are soon married following this, have a child and even move in together. Stephen now uses two canes to get around and must shuffle himself down the stairs at home. However, some good news comes when he comes before Professor Sciama and two other professors who have been looking over his theory. There are holes and unanswered questions in a few chapters. But the section regarding black holes is just brilliant. Well done, Dr. Stephen Hawking. So what’s next for Dr. Hawking? Prove that time has a meaning. At a celebratory dinner, everyone is ecstatic at Stephen being the first in his family to receive a doctorate. More problems arise. It’s hard enough for Stephen to eat, but now his hearing begins to go. Not feeling so hungry anymore, he excuses himself and struggles to make his way up the stairs. The next day, Jane presents Stephen with a wheelchair. He makes his way into the chair and it does make moving around a lot smoother. That evening, as Jane is helping him with his sweater, he finds inspiration as he stares into the fireplace. Following this, Stephen speaks with Professor Sciama about his revelation: what if a black hole wasn’t black at all, but just heat radiation. Once a star becomes a black hole, the hole itself will soon vanish. Jane and Stephen eventually move up too an electric wheelchair, but the care begins to take its toll on Jane as she must contend with Stephen and not one, but now two children. Despite Stephen’s occasional issues, he wants no doctors. Frustration is clear in her tone, but she doesn’t let it consume her. Jane’s mother suggests that she return to church since she used to love singing. She does and begins a friendship with the choir director, Jonathan Jones, played by Charlie Cox. Stephen’s work continues. He has a new project: disprove his own PhD and show that the Earth itself has no boundaries or beginning. Therefore, God must die. And on that note, we’ll stop. Telling a story based on a real life figure can be challenging. You want to be respectful of the original source and people, but also not just tell what could be explained in a documentary. You also want to stay as close to the person’s life and not add in unnecessary drama for the same of tension. That’s the big problem I had with Jimi: All is By My Side. In concept, it sounds like an interesting film, but on-screen, the history was far from flawless. Stephen Hawking has been around for a long time and is still alive. There have been films made about his life already- none of which I have seen- and if The Theory of Everything just told us the same story, there’d be no point to trying to tell us a story we’ve already seen before. We know Stephen Hawking is a physicist. We know that he had been diagnosed with a motor neuron disease and confined to a wheelchair. However, there’s a lot more in-between that. What was his personal life like, before and after his accident? What drives him? The film doesn’t answer all of these questions, but it does give us a look at how Hawking and his family dealt with the disease that took more and more control of his body. Some folks say that the movie comes off too much like a melodrama instead of a close examination of Stephen Hawking, the physicist. Others say too little time is spent on Hawking’s life before his accident. I understand these perspectives, but I feel this movie is less about Hawking the physicist and more about his relationship with Jane Wilde. Screenwriter Anthony McCarter and director James Marsh based this film primarily off of Jane Wilde Hawking’s book: Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking himself has called the film “broadly true” and while there are some changes between fact and fiction, most of them don’t change my opinion of the movie. I repeat, most of them. For example, Jane first met Jonathan while caroling, not at a church. She felt that any wrong move could impact her marriage with Stephen. In the book, Jane and Stephen’s differences over religion and science started off as not a major problem, as was the case in the film, but over time, they became contentious. These changes aren’t too big of a deal to me personally. A lot of the film’s messages and themes are handled very well. The movie examines how we overcome massive obstacles in our lives- obstacles that completely change us. It deals with the pain of loss, both physically and mentally, as seen through Stephen’s deteriorating condition and Jane’s growing frustration at having to be there for him while putting her life on hold. Though Stephen worsens over time, I never felt that the film treated him like a victim. We see a glimpse of his rage early on when he initially doesn’t want to see Jane anymore after he receives his diagnosis, but even as his condition worsens, he trudges on with his work. Much of what he wants and desires must be conveyed through facial expressions, which is where Eddie Redmayne’s performance shines. It also comes through in the direction, where some scenes are even set up and filmed like math equations- this comes at the hands of cinematographer Benoit Delhomme, who also worked on A Most Wanted Man earlier this year. Faith is also another central theme. Hawking believes in science and not, as he puts it, in a celestial dictatorial premise. He acknowledges that we are all different and, at one point, dose mention God in one of his works, but for the most part, he is a man of science, not religion. His helps come from those around him, but also through his own willpower. For example, during a family outing, Jane and Stephen’s father insist that he seek medical attention, but Stephen wants no doctors. Sure, I found it odd for a moment that a man of science wouldn’t trust modern medicine, but this is all a part of his struggle. He has challenges, but he never lets them deter him. The same applies to Jane, who does believe in a higher authority. Her faith pushes her, but also because she wants to prove, as she stated early on, that love and marriage could persevere, despite Stephen’s condition. So while I agree with the criticism that the movie doesn’t spend a lot of time on the actual science and mathematics behind Stephen’s theory, I find that this movie is more about his personal life. If people come into this expecting a deep look at Hawking’s philosophies and theories, this movie is not for them. But if they’re looking for a film in which an actor transforms himself into Stephen Hawking with such an uncanny resemblance, look no further than the fantastic job done by Eddie Redmayne. It’s scary how Redmayne embodies Hawking. When Hawking is confined to a wheelchair and must army crawl his way up stairs, you can tell what he’s feeling and going through just by watching Redmayne’s facial expressions. Whether it’s the slightest twitch of his lip or the way his lead limps to the side when in a wheelchair, Redmayne isn’t just playing Stephen Hawking- he becomes him. Even before the accident, Redmayne’s eyes are full of wonder and possibility when he explains and works on his black hole theory. When he and Professor Sciama walk through a laboratory, Redmayne looks like a kid in a candy store, but instead of wanting to play with everything, he wants to pull it all apart to see what makes it work. There’s so much wonder and fascination when he talks about the universe that I felt Hawking would be fine spending the rest of his days exploring the wonders of the universe. Having never seen the other films about Stephen Hawking, I won’t try to compare Redmayne’s performance to them, but this was a very strong portrayal. And just as powerful in her performance is Felicity Jones as Jane Hawking. She’s not reduced to being a common housewife and she doesn’t have any sort of unnecessary angst or anger toward Hawking after having to help him so much. Jones shows a lot through her facial expressions and I could feel Jane’s growing frustration at having to put her life on hold. There’s a great scene near the middle where Jane is doing housework while Stephen and the kids play around. It’s brief, but she has a look on a face that defines what her life has become: a life put on hold. Jane has aspirations and wants to make something in her life, but she has to put that on hold and go at a slower pace because she has to be there for Stephen. Stephen, though his movement is limited, doesn’t stop with his studies and theories. By contrast, Jane has to care for him, meaning she must devote less time to her own life and needs. But what’s great about Jones’ performance is that she never lets Jane be consumed by the growing dissatisfaction in her life. When we first meet Jane, she’s fully confident about who she is and what she believes. She maintains her devotion to her faith and to Stephen, despite his illness, and never feels like she’s made the wrong choice in marrying him. This is both a strike for and against the film, but I’ll address that in a bit. I like the fact that Jane doesn’t see Stephen as the typical nerd because he’s into physics and she never looks down upon or thinks differently of him because of his devotion to science. In fact, it’s their differences that make them such a good fit for one another. Yes, their dance under the fireworks feels a bit cheesy and Hallmark for my taste, especially since they had not known each other for that long, but for the purpose of getting them together before Stephen’s accident, I’m fine with it. Once the two are married, however, Jane almost becomes a background character, only there to help Stephen when he needs it. He doesn’t treat her like a servant and we know that he didn’t want any doctors, so it’s up to her to be there for him. She’s struggling, but I never got the sense that she was overwhelmed. As burdensome as it may be, Jane never treats Stephen like a burden. She made a choice to marry him and she’s going to stick with him…for as long as the narrative allows. Now I don’t have too many issues with the film, but I do want to address a few qualms. I do agree that this film kind of skips over a lot of events too fast. Whether that’s for the sake of moving the plot along or the film just wanted to focus more on Jane and Stephen’s relationship, I don’t know. Yes, this is based off of a book written by Jane Hawking, but we never really get that much into Stephen’s head. Where did his interest in physics come from and how did he become so intelligent? That’s probably asking the film to start a lot earlier than it did, and that’s not necessary, but I do wish we got to learn more about Stephen Hawking: the physicist alongside Stephen Hawking: the married man. A lot of his theories and the discussions on black holes are limited to a few scenes, but we never spend an extensive amount of time with him developing his theories. When Professor Sciama and his colleagues review Stephen’s theory, they tell him that parts of it are full of holes and unanswered questions. Okay, so what happened? As soon as we learn that they think his black hole theory is brilliant, the scene moves on and the story continues. The point I’m trying to make is that I wish the film had a bit more focus on his passion for physics. As is, we only get glimpses of it. Now I argue against this because the film’s focus seems to be on Jane and Stephen’s relationship, but given how impactful Stephen’s research became throughout the course of the film, I wish we saw he came to came up with these theories and what the public thought of them. The few times we see Stephen discussing his work, it’s during a group presentation. Smaller scenes of Stephen just working would have been nice. I also feel that the filmmakers chose to take the safe route when it came to Jane and Stephen’s relationship. Again, to go back to Wilde’s book, Jane and Stephen’s relationship sometimes became a power struggle. Those sorts of struggles were toned down for the film and anything that could have been serious or damaging to their marriage is handled like a delicate glass sculpture. Jane develops feelings for Jonathan, but the most we see her do is approach his tent during an outdoors trip while Stephen is elsewhere. Stephen also develops a friendship with a caretaker, Elaine Mason, played by Maxine Peake, but this happens so late in the film that any fallout feels inconsequential. Having to put your life on hold while taking care of your significant other is sure to cause tension at some point, but the film doesn’t touch on that. In fact, Jane and Stephen seem to weather their relationship almost too much like a fairy tale. During their wedding, the ceremony is filmed like a home movie, for example. The two rarely argue or go to bed angry at one another. At most, Jane blows off some steam, but she doesn’t explode. I’m not saying the two needed to be at each other’s throats, but a little tension would have been nice because I can’t imagine Jane enduring all of this without the slightest issue. As I mentioned, Jane never feels like she made the wrong choice. I’m glad she’s showed commitment, a bit of friction would have made this marriage a bit more interesting. What we got is still good, but their love is far from perfect and I wanted the film to explore both the positives and negatives in more detail. These strikes do not detract from my enjoyment of the film. The biggest strength of The Theory of Everything comes through the amazing chemistry and believability of Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones as Stephen and Jane Hawking. Redmayne in particular becomes Hawking and instead of just playing the man, he embodies him. Despite Stephen’s accident and Jane having to sidetrack her life, their devotion to one another exemplifies what Hawking meant when he tells an audience that there is no boundary to human endeavors. A minor setback is not the end of the world. We adjust and keep on moving forward.
1098	dbpedia	3	10	https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/sciama-dennis-william	en	Sciama, Dennis William			[ "https://www.encyclopedia.com/themes/custom/trustme/images/header-logo.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "SCIAMA", "DENNIS WILLIAM(b. Manchester", "England", "18 November 1926; d. Oxford", "England", "19 December 1999)", "cosmology", "steady state theory", "general relativity", "astrophysics", "quantum gravity." ]	null	[]	null	SCIAMA, DENNIS WILLIAM(b. Manchester, England, 18 November 1926; d. Oxford, England, 19 December 1999), cosmology, steady state theory, general relativity, astrophysics, quantum gravity. Source for information on Sciama, Dennis William: Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography dictionary.	en	/sites/default/files/favicon.ico		https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/sciama-dennis-william	(b. Manchester, England, 18 November 1926; d. Oxford, England, 19 December 1999), cosmology, steady state theory, general relativity, astrophysics, quantum gravity. Sciama was one of the key figures in the renaissance of cosmology in the 1960s, and his contributions spanned a broad array of topics in general relativity, astrophysics, and cosmology. The influence of Sciama’s own research, however, has not been as great as the influence on the development of relativity and astrophysics he exerted as an inspiring mentor and research leader. He supervised more than seventy doctoral students, many of whom became leading figures in relativistic astrophysics, and conveyed his enthusiasm for the field to many more through his lucid review articles and popular books. Early Years Sciama spent his early years in Manchester, the younger of two sons in a nonreligious Jewish family. Both sides of the family had roots in the Middle East: his paternal great grandfather emigrated to Manchester from Aleppo, Syria, and his mother was born and raised in Cairo. Sciama attended Malvern College, a public boarding school in rural Worcestershire, where he discovered an interest in and aptitude for science and mathematics that lead to a minor scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge. Sciama went up to Trinity in 1944, and studied mathematics for one year before switching to the natural sciences tripos (focusing on physics) as a condition for a continued wartime deferment. His enrollment in one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s seminars gives an indication of Sciama’s broad interests. Because of mediocre exam results (a lower second) on the BA degree, completed in 1947, he could no longer avoid conscription. Thanks to the intervention of the Cambridge physicist Douglas Hartree, most of his two-year stint in the army was devoted to research in solid-state physics (photoconductive materials, in particular) at the Telecommunications Research Establishment. Reports he wrote on the subject earned him a second chance in academia, and he returned to Trinity in 1949 in an unpaid research position. Initially Sciama planned to write a thesis under Neville Temperley in statistical mechanics regarding cooperative phenomena, but his interests soon shifted to relativity and cosmology. As a result Paul Dirac was assigned to be his advisor, although two young Cambridge fellows, Herman Bondi and Thomas Gold, had much more influence on Sciama’s research. Upon completing his thesis, Sciama made a bold wager with his father: if he won a fellowship at Trinity he would continue to pursue physics, and if not he would return to the family business in Manchester. Influence of Mach’s Principle Sciama’s thesis focused on the origins of inertia and Mach’s principle. Ernst Mach’s influential criticism of Isaac Newton purported to show that the inertia of a given body could be explained in terms of interactions with other bodies without any appeal to “absolute space.” Despite the ambiguity of Mach’s formulation of these ideas, they were an inspiration for Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. In 1918 Einstein included Mach’s principle—which he formulated as the requirement that the gravitational field is fully determined by the distribution of matter—on a list of three fundamental physical principles of his new theory. However, he eventually realized that his theory did not satisfy Mach’s principle so formulated and no longer took it to be a fundamental principle of general relativity. Sciama had the opposite response: he found Mach’s principle so appealing that he sought to formulate an alternative gravitational theory in which it holds. His thesis developed a simple theory with a vector potential based on the Machian idea that inertia and gravitation are entirely determined by the distribution of matter. This was intended as a first step toward a fully Machian theory; in the published version (1953) Sciama promised to develop a more sophisticated, relativistic theory with a tensor potential (as in Einstein’s theory) in a second paper. The second paper did not appear until 1969, and it marked a substantial shift in Sciama’s approach rather than a completion of the original program. Sciama and his coauthors (his student Peter Waylen and Robert Gilman, a student of John Wheeler) gave an integral formulation of Einstein’s theory rather than developing an alternative Machian theory. The gravitational field at a point was expressed as an integral over physical sources in the surrounding volume plus a boundary term. Mach’s principle could then be formulated as a selection criteria for acceptable solutions; roughly, in the limit as the volume under consideration grows to include the entire universe, the boundary term should vanish, so that the gravitational field is entirely determined by the distribution of matter. Derek Raine, a later student of Sciama's, further refined the definition of Mach’s principle in this approach by showing how to handle this rather subtle limit. This approach differs from that taken by other advocates of Mach’s principle; in particular, Julian Barbour (with various collaborators) has given a Machian reformulation of mechanics based on a “best-matching procedure,” a way of defining spatial position and motion intrinsically without appeal to background geometry. Mach’s principle continues to be controversial, partly because of the lack of consensus regarding its proper formulation, but Sciama and his collaborators clarified one prominent approach. Sciama’s interest in Mach’s principle reflected the philosophical orientation of his mentors Bondi and Gold. Along with their slightly older colleague Fred Hoyle, Bondi and Gold introduced the steady state theory in 1948. Unlike the standard “big bang” models of relativistic cosmology, which describe a universe that evolves with time, the steady state theory was based on the idea that the global properties of the universe do not vary with time. Bondi and Gold defended the theory on explicitly methodological grounds: In their view, the steady state theory was the only possible scientific cosmology. A theory that allowed for variation of the global properties of the universe could not rule out concomitant variation of local physical laws, hence undercutting any attempt to extrapolate physical laws that hold at present to earlier epochs. For Bondi and Gold as well as Sciama, Mach’s principle exemplified “interaction” between global properties and local laws, because it holds that the global distribution of matter determines the local inertial properties of a body. In his vector theory of gravity, Sciama derived a relation between the gravitational constant, the average mass density of the universe, and Hubble’s constant that illustrated such interconnections between parameters appearing in physical laws (the gravitational constant) and global properties of the universe (Hubble’s constant and average density). Sciama was clearly fascinated with global-to-local connections of this kind, which he made the focus of his lucid popular book The Unity of the Universe(1959). Cosmology Until 1965 Sciama was actively involved in developing and defending the steady state theory. With Bondi and Gold he wrote a paper aptly criticizing the Stebbins-Whitford effect. This effect was initially thought to indicate a correlation between the age and distance of galaxies incompatible with the steady state theory, but it was later withdrawn. Sciama’s most important contribution was an ingenious account of galaxy formation published in 1955. At the time there were competing accounts of how the transition from a homogeneous early state to a clumpy state with galaxies and other structures could occur in the big bang models. In the steady state theory, the problem was to maintain an unchanging average density of galaxies as the universe expands. Sciama argued that new galaxies would be created in the gravitational “wake” of existing galaxies, and the requirement of maintaining “equilibrium” put tight constraints on the theory. The theory led to a variety of results in rough agreement with observations, and it was in many ways superior to the speculative accounts of galaxy formation then available for the big bang models. In the early 1960s Sciama’s focus shifted to assessing the implications of radio astronomy for the steady state theory. Martin Ryle and others had measured the relationship between the number of radio sources and flux density in the 2C and 3C surveys. (These surveys are similar to astronomical catalogs of visible objects; they list the properties of radio sources observed using the Cambridge Interferometer. The 2C survey, published in 1955, includes 1,936 sources, and the 3C survey includes 471 sources.) The steady state theory made a very specific prediction that was apparently incompatible with these results, although their interpretation of the results was not without controversy. Sciama proposed that many of the radio sources were galactic rather than extragalactic in nature, and that the apparent discrepancy resulted from a local deficit of galactic sources. The discovery of quasars in 1963 made the situation more difficult for advocates of the steady state theory. Initially Sciama extended his idea of a mixed population to quasars: If some quasars are local rather than extragalactic, then it would again be possible to save the theory. However, unlike Geoffrey Burbidge and Hoyle, Sciama accepted that quasars with measurable redshifts were at cosmological distances rather than within the galaxy. Sciama and his student Martin Rees then showed that the redshift–flux density relation for thirty-five quasars was clearly incompatible with the steady state theory. This result led Sciama to abandon the steady state theory, although he clearly regretted the demise of a theory he found philosophically and aesthetically appealing. Sciama’s conversion was complete; the steady state theory merited only a brief dismissal in his book Modern Cosmology (1971), whereas the big bang models took center stage. General Relativity Sciama also explored Einstein’s general relativity throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Following his Trinity fellowship, which was interspersed with two years abroad at Princeton University and Harvard University, Sciama briefly held posts at King’s College, London (funded by Bondi’s U.S. Air Force research grant), and Cornell University (on an invitation from Gold). He returned to Cambridge in 1961 as a lecturer and later fellow in Peterhouse. Before his return to Cambridge he discovered that spin angular momentum could be introduced as a source of the gravitational field by modifying Einstein’s theory to allow for nonzero torsion and emphasized the formal analogies between this approach and a geometrical treatment of electromagnetism. The resulting theory—called the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory to acknowledge its sources in work of Einstein and Élie-Joseph Cartan and its independent discovery by Thomas Kibble—inspired further research based on the hope that it would be easier to combine this generalization of general relativity with other field theories. At Cambridge, Sciama inspired a group of exceptional students to study the then mostly neglected subject of general relativity. Sciama’s research group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics was one of the world’s best relativity groups, comparable to those led by Yakov Zel’dovich in Moscow, and Wheeler at Princeton. Sciama’s students, including George Ellis, Stephen Hawking, and Brandon Carter, played an active part in the renaissance of relativity in the 1960s. One of the main contributors to this dramatic upswing in productive research was Roger Penrose; although Penrose was never Sciama’s student, Sciama inspired him to change fields from mathematics to physics. Penrose introduced mathematical techniques that allowed theorists to study stellar collapse and cosmology without relying on specific, artificially simple solutions. One of his most important results was a proof that a collapsing star with sufficient mass will inevitably lead to a physical singularity. Hawking extended Penrose’s techniques to cosmology, and he proved that cosmological models satisfying a number of plausible requirements must likewise include an initial singularity. Ellis and Hawking wrote the definitive monograph on the subject, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time(1973), which concisely presented the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems and the new mathematical techniques. Sciama encouraged Carter to study the Kerr solution, which describes a spinning black hole. Carter discovered a number of the properties of the solution, and contributed to proving the black hole uniqueness theorems. Although Sciama himself did not actively contribute to this line of research, his students clearly benefited from his support, guidance, and ability to identify important problems. Sciama’s research interests also extended into a variety of topics in observational astronomy and astrophysics. He continued research regarding quasars and other observational results that he had initiated as an advocate of the steady state theory. After abandoning that theory, he turned to detailed studies of the big bang models, focusing on the interaction of matter and radiation in the expanding universe, the formation of galaxies via gravitational clumping, and other topics. He advised a number of students in astrophysics, including most prominently Rees. With Rees he discovered that time-variation in the gravitational potential of a lump of matter would produce a characteristic temperature variation in radiation passing through the region, which is called the Rees-Sciama effect. Sciama’s masterful review articles on observational cosmology convey his excitement at the prospects for new observations across the electromagnetic spectrum to constrain and guide theorists. In 1970 Sciama moved to Oxford as a senior research fellow at All Souls. He built a theoretical astrophysics group at Oxford and continued to support and train an impressive crop of students, including John Barrow, James Binney, Philip Candelas, and David Deutsch. In 1974 Oxford hosted a conference on quantum gravity, where Hawking announced his discovery that black holes emit black body radiation with a temperature proportional to their surface gravity. This discovery generated a great deal of interest, because it completed the analogy between “black hole mechanics” and the laws of thermodynamics. Sciama and his students contributed to the study of the thermodynamics of black holes following on the heels of Hawking’s work. In particular, Sciama and Candelas argued that the dissipation of energy by a radiating black hole could be understood physically based on the fluctuation-dissipation theorem from statistical mechanics. This work was closely tied to Sciama’s study of the vacuum in quantum field theory. Sciama retained ties to Oxford for the rest of his life, but he also held a number of visiting positions. The most important of these were a part-time position at the University of Texas, Austin, from 1978 to 1982, and his appointment as the director of the astrophysics group at the International School for Advanced Study (SISSA), in Trieste in 1983. From 1982 until the end of his life, Sciama’s research efforts were mainly devoted to the decaying neutrino hypothesis. Sciama proposed that much of the elusive dark matter detected indirectly by astronomers consists of neutrinos left over from the early universe. If the three neutrino species have different masses, then more massive neutrinos decay into less massive neutrinos and emit light at a characteristic frequency. According to Sciama’s theory, the photons emitted by this process serve to ionize the interstellar medium within our galaxy and also explain a number of other puzzling phenomena. Particle physics and astronomical observations both placed tight constraints on the idea, and in 1998 satellite observations failed to detect an emission line predicted by the hypothesis. Among numerous honors, Sciama was elected a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982, and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1983. In 1959 he married Lidia Dina, a social anthropologist, and they had two daughters, Susan (b. 1962) and Sonia (b. 1964). BIBLIOGRAPHY WORKS BY SCIAMA “On the Origin of Inertia.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 113 (1953): 34–42. With Herman Bondi and Thomas Gold. “A Note on the Reported Color-Index Effect of Distant Galaxies.” Astrophysical Journal 120 (1954): 597–599. Critical discussion of the Stebbins-Whitford effect. “On the Formation of Galaxies in a Steady State Universe.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 115 (1955): 3–14. The Unity of the Universe. London: Faber and Faber, 1959. Popular review of observational astronomy and steady state theory, including discussions of Mach’s principle and galaxy formation. The Physical Foundations of General Relativity. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. Brief popular account of general relativity. With Peter C. Waylen and Robert C. Gilman. “Generally Covariant Integral Formulation of Einstein’s Field Equations.” Physical Review 187 (1969): 1762–1766. Modern Cosmology. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1971. “The Recent Renaissance of Observational Cosmology.” In Relativity and Gravitation, edited by Charles G. Kuiper and Asher Peres. New York: Gordon and Breach Science, 1971. With George Ellis. “Global and Non-global Problems in Cosmology.” In General Relativity: Papers in Honour of J. L. Synge, edited by Lochlainn O’Raifeartaigh. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. With Chris J. Isham and Roger Penrose, eds. Quantum Gravity: An Oxford Symposium. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. “Black Holes and Their Thermodynamics.” Vistas in Astronomy19 (1976): 385–401. Useful introductory survey of black hole thermodynamics. Oral history interview conducted by Spencer Weart, in April 1978. Transcript available at the Niels Bohr Library, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD. With Philip Candelas and David Deutsch. “Quantum Field Theory, Horizons, and Thermodynamics.” Advances in Physics 30 (1981): 327–366. With Chris J. Isham and Roger Penrose, eds. Quantum Gravity 2: A Second Oxford Symposium. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Modern Cosmology and the Dark Matter Problem. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993. OTHER SOURCES Ellis, George, Antonio Lanza, and John Miller, eds. The Renaissance of General Relativity and Cosmology: A Survey to Celebrate the 65th Birthday of Dennis Sciama. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Includes a complete bibliography of Sciama’s publications (up to 1993), academic family tree (nearly complete list of students), brief biography, and many former students’ reflections on their work with him. Kragh, Helge. Cosmology and Controversy: The Historical Development of Two Theories of the Universe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Definitive historical account of steady state theory, includes detailed discussions of Sciama’s contributions to the theory and reasons for abandoning it. Lightman, Alan, and Roberta Brawer. Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Interviews with Sciama and many of his colleagues. Thorne, Kip. Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. New York: Norton, 1994. Description of research in general relativity throughout the 1960s and 1970s by a leading physicist, at a popular level.
1098	dbpedia	0	45	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8966040/	en	Introduction to the special issue dedicated to Michael J. Duff FRS on the occasion of his 70th birthday	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih…rd-share.jpg?_=0	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih…rd-share.jpg?_=0	[ "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/coreutils/uswds/img/favicons/favicon-57.png", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/coreutils/uswds/img/icon-dot-gov.svg", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/coreutils/uswds/img/icon-https.svg", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/coreutils/nwds/img/logos/AgencyLogo.svg", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/logo-proca.gif", "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8966040/bin/rspa20220166f01.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "L. Borsten", "A. Marrani", "C. N. Pope", "K. Stelle" ]	2022-03-10T00:00:00		en	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/coreutils/nwds/img/favicons/favicon.ico	PubMed Central (PMC)	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8966040/	2. A brief scientific biography of Michael J. Duff FRS Michael J. Duff FRS (Mike, from here onwards) did his PhD at Imperial College London under the supervision of Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam KBE FRS, with mentorship also from Christopher J. Isham.1 He was somewhat thrown in at the deep end, charged with resolving a bet between Salam and Sir Hermann Bondi KCB FRS, Nobel Laureate Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS HonFInstP and John Archibald Wheeler, some of the most influential quantum field theorists and general relativists of the twentieth century. Salam maintained that the Schwarzschild black hole solution of general relativity could be perturbatively reconstructed via the Feynman diagrams of quantum field theory. Mike confirmed this speculation [3] in a calculation that could be regarded as an early precursor to a now thriving industry applying scattering amplitudes to classical general relativity [4].2 Mike took up his first postdoctoral position at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy, recently established by Salam and so the destination of choice for many a protégé. There, in a follow-up paper, Mike showed that loop contributions implied a 1/r3 correction to the classical Schwarzschild solution. One should keep in mind that the problem of quantum gravity was still viewed with suspicion, or even contempt,3 in certain quarters. Mike would then initiate a fruitful collaboration with Derek M. Capper, who had also recently taken the road from Imperial to ICTP, and Leopold Halpern, further developing the interface between quantum theory and gravity [6,7]. Although this early work was somewhat forgotten for a period, it pre-empted many future and current themes in quantum gravity. As we shall see, the farsightedness of Mike’s work would become a recurring theme. On returning to the UK as part of Dennis Sciama’s Oxford group, Mike discovered with Capper [8] the Weyl anomaly. The vanishing of the trace of the stress-energy tensor implied by the local scale (Weyl) invariance, first proposed Hermann Weyl in 1918, is not preserved quantum mechanically. This was a surprise, so much so that it was largely dismissed as wrong [5] by many of the leading lights of the day.4 Such doubts, however, were quelled by an influential paper of Mike, Stanley Deser and Isham [9], which provided the most general form of the trace in various dimensions and made it plain that the anomaly could not be removed by local counterterms. It was there to stay. The possibility of Weyl anomalies is, of course, now universally recognized and has had tremendous implications across diverse contexts: Hawking radiation [10], asymptotic safety [11,12], string theory [13], supersymmetry and supergravity [14–17], inflation [18–20], holography [21,22], braneworlds [23], condensed matter [24] and conformal colliders [25]. For instance, Tohru Eguchi and Peter G.O. Freund had identified the Pontryagin number as characterizing the axial fermion number current anomaly, but noted that there did not seem to be any analogous role for the Euler characteristic [26]. Motivated by this apparent gap, Mike showed [27] that the Euler characteristic corresponds to the integrated trace anomaly, of course! In particular, in d=2 dimensions the Weyl anomaly is just aR, where R is the Ricci scalar and a is the anomaly coefficient. In the context of string theory Polyakov famously showed [13] that the vanishing of the world-sheet Weyl anomaly picks out the critical dimensions, where the a anomaly coefficient is related to the Virasoro algebra central charge by c=a/24π. Moreover, on including space–time background fields the vanishing of the world-sheet Weyl anomaly implies the space–time Einstein equations of (super)gravity [28,29], a remarkable result sitting at the foundations of string theory. Crossing the pond to Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, USA, in 1977, Mike joined forces with Steven M. Christensen at Harvard to compute Weyl and axial anomalies in the then recently discovered theory of supergravity. In particular, they were to show that the superpartner to the graviton, the gravitino, contributes an axial anomaly -21 times that of a Dirac spinor [30]. This was again met with some disbelief, but perhaps most interesting was their approach, generalizing the classical index theorems, such as Atiyah–Singer, to arbitrary spin [31]. Such calculations revealed some unexpected subtleties. Together with Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, Mike demonstrated that the partition function and Weyl anomaly of a given field may not coincide with those of its electromagnetic dual [32]. Here the anomaly is given by tr⟨T⟩reg−⟨trT⟩reg, where tr denotes the trace, ⟨−⟩reg is the regularized expectation value and T is the stress-energy tensor [27]. They used this observation to argue that theories, classically equivalent under electromagnetic duality, may fail to be so quantum mechanically [32], which is by now a well-recognized property of quantum field theory on topologically non-trivial manifolds [33–36]. This anomaly should not be confused with tr⟨T⟩reg alone, which yields equivalent results [37–39]. Fast-forward some 42 years, Mike demonstrated that the Weyl anomaly of (the massless sector of) type IIA string theory compactified on a 6-manifold is given by a product of Euler characteristics χ(M×X)=χ(M)χ(X), where M is the (Euclidean) space–time 4-manifold and X is the internal 6-manifold. Moreover, for (the massless sector of) M-theory compactified on a 7-manifold Y, the Weyl anomaly is given by the product ρ(M×Y)=χ(M)ρ(Y), where ρ(Y) is a topological invariant reminiscent of the Ray–Singer torsion [36]. If you like, ρ is to M-theory what χ is to strings. This early foray into supergravity marked the beginning of Mike’s next major movement: Kaluza–Klein theory. In the early 1980s, Mike was to return to Imperial College London and also spend time at CERN, Meyrin, Switzerland, two institutes that played an important role in the development of Kaluza–Klein supergravity. At this time, supergravity offered much promise as a unified theory, necessarily including gravity. First, it was hoped that supersymmetry might ameliorate the UV divergences plaguing perturbative quantum gravity. Second, supergravity is unique and particularly elegant in D=11 space–time dimensions, the maximum allowed by supersymmetry. Thus, when combined with Kaluza–Klein compactification, supergravity stood out as an approach to unification.5 In this context, Mike and his colleagues made several key advances. With Christopher N. Pope, Mike showed that D=4, SO(8) gauged N=8 supergravity theory could be derived as a spontaneous Kaluza–Klein compactification of D=11 supergravity on AdS4×S7 [40]. Besides its importance for unification at that time, this particular compactification has been a cornerstone of many of the subsequent advances in supergravity and string/M-theory. With Mike’s PhD student, Moustafa A. Awada, they further showed that by preserving the S7 topology while deforming its geometry one could break the N=8 supersymmetry down to N=1 [41]. This entailed two important insights that would shape much future work on string/M-theory compactifications. First, the holomony of the internal manifold dictates the degree of supersymmetry preserved. In the context of heterotic superstring compactifications with vanishing fluxes this famously picks out Calabi–Yau 3-folds as the internal manifolds of choice for model building. Second, Mike, Pope and Bengt E. W. Nilsson subsequently showed that the supersymmetry breaking induced by the squashed S7 corresponded to a Higgs mechanism from the D=4 perspective [42]. Not long after, the same trio performed the first K3 compactification [43]. This was motivated, in part, by its special SU(2) holonomy, a prelude to the all important SU(3) holonomy Calabi–Yau 3-fold superstring compactifications that would be initiated shortly after [44]. Moreover, the SU(2) holonomy implies that K3 compactifications preserve one half of the supersymmetries, opening the door to type IIA on K3 and heterotic on T4 string/string dualities. More on that later. These developments, along with manifold pioneering contributions made by many others (some of whom can be found in this very collection), were pulled together by Mike, Nilsson and Pope in what has become a standard reference for Kaluza–Klein supergravity [45]. The sharp crescendo of excitement surrounding supergravity was just as quickly muffled.6 It had started to seem unlikely that supergravity could ultimately stave off the divergences inherent to a perturbative quantum field theory of gravity (almost 50 years on this chapter is still not quite closed, however) and Edward Witten had demonstrated that D=11 supergravity compactified on a manifold could not accommodate the chirality needed to make contact with the Standard Model [46]. By the end of 1985 the groundbreaking discoveries of the Green–Schwarz mechanism, heterotic superstrings and Calabi–Yau 3-fold compactifications had firmly, and rightly, cemented themselves as the most promising route to superunification. Yet, Mike and many like-minded folk had not yet given up on D=11. On the one hand, superstrings were not an open and shut case and in his 1987 ‘Not the standard superstring review’ [47] Mike erred on the side of caution, In order not to be misunderstood, let me say straight away that I share the conviction that superstrings are the most exciting development in theoretical physics for many years, and that they offer the best promise to date of achieving the twin goals of a consistent quantum gravity and a unification of all the forces and particles of Nature. Where I differ is the degree of emphasis that I would place on the unresolved problems of superstrings, and the likely time scales involved before superstrings (or something like superstrings) make contact with experimental reality. He emphasized, in particular, the challenges (and opportunities) posed by the landscape problem and non-perturbative phenomena, such as black holes. On the other hand, the tension between 10 and 11 raised its own questions. Why did supersymmetry allow for 11, while superstrings only 10? If supergravity was the low-energy effective field theory of superstrings, where did that leave D=11 supergravity? Mike vigorously maintained that 11 should be taken seriously. Indeed, various clues that D=11 might yet play a role had been amassing. While there are no superstrings in D=11 there are supermembranes that couple to D=11 supergravity [48]. It turns out that this is one of the key bridges between D=10 string theory and D=11 M-theory. In 1987 Mike, Paul S. Howe, Takeo Inami and Kellogg Stelle showed [49] by compactifying the D=11 space–time manifold on S1 and simultaneously wrapping the supermembrane around the circle ones finds precisely the type IIA superstring in D=10! This result pre-empted7 important facets of the M-theory revolution of 1995 by connecting strings and membranes, along with 10 and 11 dimensions. In the same year, Mike and Miles P. Blencowe, again inspired by the discovery of supermembranes in D=11, conjectured the existence of super p-branes on the S1×Sp boundary of AdSp+2 and presented the corresponding (free) superconformal field theories [51]. The maximal p=2 case corresponded to the supermembrane on AdS4×S7 with superconformal group OSp(8\|4). The maximal p=3 and p=5 cases corresponded to the yet to be discovered D3-brane and M5-brane on AdS5×S5 and AdS7×S4 with superconformal groups SU(2,2\|5) and OSp(8∗\|4), respectively. Further telling clues on the road to M-theory arose in the context of branes and dualities, themselves closely related. By the mid-1980s, five a priori independent consistent superstring theories had been established. However, they were not islands; for instance, the IIA and IIB theories could be connected by T-duality or mirror symmetry. What was to emerge over the next decade or so was a web of dualities, suggesting that each string theory was but a corner of a larger framework. During this period of intense activity (in 10 and 11 dimensions), Mike relocated to Texas A&M, just in time for it to host the inaugural ‘Strings 89’ conference. Aptly, that year Mike addressed the question of manifest T-duality [52]. By considering two dual string theories, he introduced the notion of a doubled space–time with a generalized O(D,D) metric H(g,B), built from the standard metric g and the Kalb–Ramond two-form B. This is, today, a key ingredient in the thriving domain of double field theory. The following year ‘Strings’ would return to Texas A&M and this time around Mike and his then PhD student, Jian Xin Lu, generalized these notions to membranes, where B is replaced by the three-form C of D=11 supergravity [53]. The goal here was to make manifest, from the membrane’s perspective, the global symmetries of D=11 supergravity compactified on an n-torus, which would later be recognized as shadows of the U-dualities of M-theory. This time the space–time is not merely doubled, but extended by C2n coordinates corresponding to the possible ways one can wrap a membrane on an n-torus. There is a generalized metric H(g,C) manifesting the appropriate symmetry group; for example, SL(5,R) for n=4. It is interesting to note that Mike and Lu puzzled over the cases n>4, which do not naively work out as expected. They resolved this question, quite naturally, by introducing additional coordinates corresponding to the Hodge dual of C and so recovered the symmetries of D=11 supergravity on an n-torus, for 1≤n≤8. Of course, we now understand these coordinates as corresponding to the possible wrappings of the M5-brane that kick in at n=5. The extended space–times and their generalized metrics H(g,C) are, today, central to the developments of exceptional field theory. Another central theme of Mike’s time as a Texan was the role of solitonic supersymmetric p-brane solutions that carry topological magnetic charge, and their dual relationship to elementary singular (D−p−4)-brane solutions carrying electric Noether charge [54–57]. For example, in 1991 Mike and Stelle [58] discovered the elementary multiple membrane solutions of D=11 supergravity, shortly followed by the dual solitonic superfivebrane solution of Gueven [59]. An other idea introduced by Mike, with Ramzi R. Khuri, Ruben Minasian and Joachim Rahmfeld, during this period was the identification of solitonic magnetic string states as extremal black holes [60]. Then applying S-duality led Mike and Rahmfeld to relate supersymmetric massive string states with elementary black holes [61]. These ideas generalize to the black and super p-branes solutions in various dimensions [56] and have become a key concept in the understanding of black holes in string/M-theory. The profound contributions unravelling this web of ideas, by Mike and many others, are far too numerous to do justice to here. Fortunately, Mike, Lu and Khuri put together an influential review [62] of these developments up to 1994 that we can defer to. An important consequence of the p/(D−p−4)-brane dualities [63] is the implied equivalences among string compactifications; for example, the D=10 heterotic string compactified on a 4-torus is quantum mechanically equivalent to the D=10 type IIA string on K3. Another related idea introduced by Mike and his colleagues at Texas A&M, including Lu, Khuri, Minasian as well as the newer arrival James T. Liu, was that p-brane dualities could be used to explain electromagnetic duality in lower dimensions [64], as described by Witten [65]: Mike Duff and Ramzi Khuri in 1993 had written a paper on what they called string/string duality. They had said there should be a self-dual string theory in six dimensions that, looked at in two different ways, would give electric-magnetic duality of gauge theory in four dimensions. It was actually a brilliant idea. The only trouble was they didn’t have an example in which it worked. Mike and his colleagues rapidly developed an intricate web of dualities among strings and p-branes, and their implications for strong/weak coupling dualities, over the following years [66,67]. Note, the particular case of the self-dual string in D=6 relates to the role of the (2,0) theory in the geometric Langlands programme. In particular, Mike, Liu and Minasian gave evidence that membrane/fivebrane duality provides an 11-dimensional origin of string/string duality, which in turn bolsters the S-duality conjecture [63]. The original hope of Mike and Khuri was also realized together with Minasian and Witten in the context of a heterotic/heterotic duality [68]. These observations contributed (along with crucial insights of a great many others that we are shamefully unable to pay due homage to here) to the 1995 M-theory revolution led by Witten, which marked a new phase in the development of strings and branes. The supermembrane and fivebrane were duly promoted to the M2- and M5-brane and D=11 found its place, after all, as the low-energy limit of M-theory. Mike’s conviction that D=11 should be canon was vindicated. This period was followed by an explosion of ideas in string/M-theory: the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence (AdS/CFT) and Randall–Sundrum brane world models to name but two examples. Mike’s past work, such as the AdS compactifications and brane-scans [69], fed into many aspects of the renewed research avenues. In fact, jumping ahead a little, his 1973 work on loop corrections to the Schwarzschild solution proved important to (AdS/CFT)/Randall–Sundrum complementarity, as shown by Mike & Liu [70]. Who in 1973 saw that one coming? In particular, Mike and colleagues developed asymptotically flat and AdS black hole and p-brane solutions to M-theory [71–74], crucial to the applications of AdS/CFT and the question of Bekenstein–Hawking entropy. During this period, Mike left the Texas triangle to, fittingly, take up the Oskar Klein Professorship at the University of Michigan, where he would be elected as the first director of the newly created Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics. Again, Mike arrived just in time for Michigan to host Strings, this time the millennial edition, ‘Strings 2000’ ( ). To a degree it was time to take stock. Mike, David Gross and Witten solicited ‘big questions’ from the attendees and selected the 10 best. Some transcended any particular approach to physics beyond the standard model or quantum gravity, for example ‘Why does the universe appear to have one time and three space dimensions?’ But one was squarely in the domain of M-theory: What are the fundamental degrees of freedom of M-theory (the theory whose low-energy limit is eleven-dimensional supergravity and which subsumes the five consistent superstring theories) and does the theory describe Nature? This is perhaps the question with which Mike himself has since been most preoccupied: elucidating what M-theory is. Although we have collectively uncovered a patchwork understanding, its ultimate formulation requires new ideas and insights, an endeavour Mike has constantly championed. In 2005 Mike would come full circle, returning to Imperial College London, now as the Abdus Salam Professor of Theoretical Physics. Here he would embark on several new research journeys (but always touching on M-theory), such as black holes and qubits [75], quantum optics and Hawking radiation [76] and gravity as the ‘square’ of Yang–Mills theory [77]. For instance, not long after arriving, Mike and Sergio Ferrara, with various of their colleagues and students, would build a dictionary between string/M-theory black holes and various concepts from quantum information theory, qubits and entanglement measures [75,78–83]. This programme grew out of the observation that the entropy of the STU black hole8 and the entanglement shared by three qubits are both described by Cayley’s hyperdeterminant [78]. One can only assume that Cayley had anticipated both M-theory and quantum computing.
1098	dbpedia	1	33	https://alchetron.com/Dennis-W-Sciama	en	Dennis W Sciama	https://alchetron.com/cd…-resize-750.jpeg	https://alchetron.com/cd…-resize-750.jpeg	[ "https://alchetron.com/cdn/private_file_1517239952900eaa7af56-1e91-4a1f-99a7-83a80c00bac.jpg", "https://alchetron.com/cdn/dennis-w-sciama-769316b7-1c6a-475c-baec-7344c953150-resize-750.jpeg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2017-08-18T08:30:48+00:00	Dennis William Siahou Sciama, FRS ( 18 November 1926 1819 December 1999) was a British physicist who, through his own work and that of his students, played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War. He is considered one of the fathers of modern cosmology. Sciama was b	en	/favicon.ico	Alchetron.com	https://alchetron.com/Dennis-W-Sciama	Life and career Sciama was born in Manchester, England, the son of Nelly Ades and Abraham Sciama. He was of Syrian Jewish ancestry—his father born in Manchester and his mother born in Egypt both traced their roots back to Aleppo, Syria. Sciama earned his PhD in 1953 at Cambridge University under the supervision of Paul Dirac, with a dissertation on Mach's principle and inertia. His work later influenced the formulation of scalar-tensor theories of gravity. He taught at Cornell, King's College London, Harvard and the University of Texas at Austin, but spent most of his career at Cambridge (1950s and 1960s) and the University of Oxford as a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College (1970s and early 1980s). In 1983, he moved from Oxford to Trieste, becoming Professor of Astrophysics at the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA), and a consultant with the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. During the 1990s, he divided his time between Trieste (and a residence in nearby Venice) and Oxford, where he was a visiting professor until the end of his life. His main home remained in his house in Park Town, Oxford. Sciama made connections among some topics in astronomy and astrophysics. He wrote on radio astronomy, X-ray astronomy, quasars, the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave radiation, the interstellar and intergalactic medium, astroparticle physics and the nature of dark matter. Most significant was his work in general relativity, with and without quantum theory, and black holes. He helped revitalize the classical relativistic alternative to general relativity known as Einstein-Cartan gravity. Early in his career, he supported Fred Hoyle's steady state cosmology, and interacted with Hoyle, Hermann Bondi, and Thomas Gold. When evidence against the steady state theory, e.g., the cosmic microwave radiation, mounted in the 1960s, Sciama abandoned it. During his last years, Sciama became interested in the issue of Dark Matter in galaxies. Among other aspects he pursued a theory of dark matter that consists of a heavy neutrino, certainly disfavored in his realization, but still possible in a more complicated scenario. A number of the leading astrophysicists and cosmologists of the modern era completed their doctorates under Sciama's supervision, notably: George Ellis (1964) Stephen Hawking (1966) Brandon Carter (1967) Martin Rees (1967) Gary Gibbons (1973) James Binney (1975) John D. Barrow (1977) David Deutsch Adrian Melott (1981) Paolo Molaro (1987) Paolo Salucci (1989) Antony Valentini (1992) Sciama also strongly influenced Roger Penrose, who dedicated his The Road to Reality to Sciama's memory. The 1960s group he led in Cambridge (which included Ellis, Hawking, Rees, and Carter), has proved of lasting influence. Sciama was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982. He was also an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Academia Lincei of Rome. He served as president of the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation, 1980–84. In 1959, Sciama married Lidia Dina, a social anthropologist, who survived him, along with their two daughters. His work at SISSA and the University of Oxford led to the creation of a lecture series in his honour, the Dennis Sciama Memorial Lectures. In 2009, the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth elected to name their new building, and their supercomputer in 2011, in his honour. He was an atheist. In popular culture Sciama has been portrayed in a number of biographical projects about his most famous student, Stephen Hawking: In the 2004 BBC TV movie Hawking, Sciama was played by John Sessions.
1098	dbpedia	2	66	https://plus.maths.org/content/comment/reply/node/7409/comment_node_article	en	Add new comment	https://plus.maths.org/content/themes/custom/bootplus5/favicon.ico	https://plus.maths.org/content/themes/custom/bootplus5/favicon.ico	[ "https://plus.maths.org/content/themes/custom/bootplus5/pluslogo.svg", "https://plus.maths.org/content/sites/plus.maths.org/files/styles/small_square/public/abstractpics/%5Buid%5D/%5Bsite-date%5D/icon_22_3.jpg?itok=3TJYQ9Pl", "https://plus.maths.org/content/sites/plus.maths.org/files/news/2018/Hawking/hawking_cms.jpg", "https://plus.maths.org/content/sites/plus.maths.org/files/news/2018/Hawking/hawking_party-1.jpg", "https://plus.maths.org/content/sites/plus.maths.org/files/articles/2023/writingguide/adobe_homeworkdog_web.jpg", "https://plus.maths.org/content/themes/custom/bootplus5/cam-logo-small-trans.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2020-12-22T09:29:53+00:00		en	/content/themes/custom/bootplus5/favicon.ico		https://plus.maths.org/content/comment/reply/node/7409/comment_node_article	Stephen Hawking was a towering figure in the field of cosmology, who inspired not only through his intellectual prowess, but also his immense strength in the face of adversity. We were lucky enough to work in the same department as Hawking for many years, so when he sadly passed away we asked his colleagues what it was like to work with him. Here's the article we put together as a result (originally published in March 2018). Stephen Hawking was a larger than life presence in and around his academic home, the Department for Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), which is also the home of Plus. His death on 14 March at the age of 76 has been an occasion to share memories of day to day life with someone who was far more than an icon: he was a colleague and a friend. As Anne-Christine Davis, Professor of Mathematical Physics, says: "We have lost not just a great scientist but a wonderful human being." Stephen Hawking at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. The impact of Hawking's work can be measured both by the scientific contributions he has made, and also in the effect he has had on generations of young physicists. "[As for] many of us, Stephen is the reason I became a physicist," says David Tong, Professor of Theoretical Physics at DAMTP. "Hawking has inspired generations of scientists," agrees Ulrich Sperhake, Lecturer at DAMTP on the occasion of Hawking's 75th birthday celebrations last year. "When Brief History of Time came out many of us were at the beginning of our careers. I still can't believe that my office is just a few doors down from the great man." Seeing Hawking in the Department every day, hearing his voice drift down the stairs, was part of daily life for staff, students and Hawking's colleagues. His presence will be sadly missed by all. DAMTP was Hawking's home for most of his career. He came to Cambridge in 1962 as a PhD student, and rose to become the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1979, a chair previously held by scientists including Isaac Newton, Charles Babbage and Paul Dirac. In 2009, he retired from this position and was the Dennis Stanton Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery Director of Research in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics until his death. "Stephen was one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century and the natural successor to Newton and Einstein in the field of gravitational physics," says Davis. Perhaps most striking was that Hawking never, ever, seemed to stop working. Physics was a huge part of his life. Although he lived with motor neurone disease for most of his adult life it never seemed to intrude on his desire to work. Even hospital stays when he was extremely ill didn't stop him, as Fernando Quevedo, Professor of Theoretical High Energy Physics, remembers from one hospital visit: "I brought him a signed letter by many colleagues to wish him a good recovery and instead of saying the expected, 'thanks', he said 'I have a new idea'. And together with Martin Bucher we spent a couple of hours in the hospital trying to understand his argument." (This particular idea was the one that convinced him to pay the bet about the loss of information debate, mentioned below.) Hawking continued to come into his office and attend seminars even in the last months of his life. Stephen Hawking at his 75th birthday party. (Image: Tobias Baldauf.) Of course, it is impossible to ignore Hawking's status as the most famous scientist in the world. But Hawking seamlessly balanced his work ethic and his love of physics with his celebrity. The department became used to constant filming with various film and TV crews in the Potter room, and celebrities visiting him or attending his lectures. Professor Tim Pedley remembers when the Queen came to open the new Centre for Mathematical Sciences in 2005. Pedley was then Head of Department and was escorting the Queen into the building and introducing her to people. But when they came to Hawking's office no introduction was needed: "She said, 'Oh I know him!'. It's sad to lose somebody who has meant so much to the department by being himself and being here at DAMTP," says Pedley. Hawking was a sociable and gregarious member of the department, who placed huge importance on interacting with his colleagues. "Stephen was a former student of Dennis Sciama, and Sciama always used to say that it was more important to go to coffee than to go to seminars – it's where you'll meet everyone that you need to talk to," says John D. Barrow, Professor of Mathematical Sciences (who was also supervised by Sciama). Hawking regarded informal interaction as such an important part of the life – and work – of the department that he sponsored the daily communal coffee break for members of his research group and others. When he was awarded the Milner Foundation's Fundamental Physics Prize in 2013, Hawking invited the whole department for impromptu champagne and cake in the common room. Throughout his career, whenever Hawking was in Cambridge he would be in the department, and he was a constant presence in the central common room, in seminars and at coffee time. Hawking is remembered fondly by colleagues for his wit, humour and enjoyment of life. He was always keen to attend, and give, parties and was well known for joining the dance floor. "There was a disco, and us (then young) postdocs were dancing, and Stephen had the bike lights on his wheelchair fixed to 'flash' and came and danced with us," remembers Ben Allanach, Professor of Theoretical Physics. "Stephen really enjoyed being the centre of attention, and had a wonderful way of doing that," said Pedley. His sense of humour and fun also extended into Hawking's work life. He was famous for making bets about various cosmological phenomena, such as his bet in 1997 with Kip Thorne against John Preskill that information was lost in black holes. Hawking conceded the bet in 2004 and duly presented Preskill with the prize of an encyclopaedia of his choice, from which information could be retrieved at will. But Hawking's resolution of the information paradox showed that, while information was not lost, it was returned in a mangled state that was not easily recognised. "I gave John an encyclopaedia of baseball, but maybe I should have just given him the ashes," Hawking wrote in his paper Information loss in black holes. Finally, as well as being a colleague and inspiring intellect, Hawking is remembered as a dear friend. "[I remember] an extremely lively, amusing, interesting and overwhelmingly sharp and intelligent person," says Gary Gibbons, Professor of Theoretical Physics, who was a student of Hawking's in the early 1970s. "He enjoyed life and was absolutely determined not to let his physical condition prevent his enjoyment, both of science and of life in general."
1098	dbpedia	2	89	https://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/activities/hawking79/speakers.php	en	Speakers			[ "https://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/images/ctc_header.png", "https://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/images/contentpics/cp_komatsu.jpg", "https://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/images/contentpics/cp_penrose.jpg", "https://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/images/ctc_unilogo.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null	Professor Eiichiro Komatsu Eichiro Komatsu is a theoretical and observational cosmologist and Director of the Physical Cosmology division at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany. He studies cosmic inflation, the cosmic microwave background, the large-scale structure of the Universe, and why its expansion is accelerating. Professor Komatsu became fascinated by astronomy while at school and went on to study astronomy at the Tohoku University in Japan, graduating with his PhD thesis on “The Pursuit of Non-Gaussian Fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background” in 2001. While working on his thesis, he joined the WMAP science team at Princeton, and then became an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Texas. In 2010 he became director of the Texas Cosmology Center, an interdisciplinary centre to study the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the origin of matter in the universe and how structures formed and evolved. He moved to the Max Planck Institute in 2012. He has received many awards, particularly recognising his leading work on the WMAP satellite project. From the Astronomical Society of Japan, he received the Young Astronomers Award in 2004 and the Chushiro Hayashi Prize in 2014. He received the Nishinomiya-Yukawa Memorial Prize for physics for his studies of the early universe in 2010 and he was awarded the American Astronomical Society Berkeley Prize in 2013. Together with the WMAP team, he shared the Gruber Prize in 2012 and the Breakthrough Prize in 2017. Professor Sir Roger Penrose FRS OM After achieving a first-class degree in mathematics from University College London, Roger Penrose undertook a PhD at Cambridge, while at St John’s College, finishing in 1958. He subsequently became a Research Fellow at St John’s. His work in algebraic geometry led him to positions at Princeton, Syracuse, King's College London and, in 1964, to a Readership at Birkbeck College. Two years later he became Professor of Applied Mathematics there. In 1973 he was appointed Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. After making outstanding achievements in pure mathematics, in the 1960s he started applying his ideas to astrophysics, influenced by Denis Sciama. In 1964, he was the first person to show that the formation of black holes was unavoidable in Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In 1969, with Stephen Hawking, he proved that all matter within a black hole collapses to a singularity, a point of infinite density and zero volume. He went on to postulate the cosmic censorship conjecture and the theory of twistors.
1098	dbpedia	1	64	https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1981JBAA...91..158L	en	1981JBAA...91..158L Page 158			[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null					null
1098	dbpedia	1	72	https://hyperspace.uni-frankfurt.de/2011/10/31/sciama-research-fellowship-in-theoretical-cosmology-at-icg-portsmouth/	en	Sciama Research Fellowship in Theoretical Cosmology at ICG, Portsmouth	https://i0.wp.com/hypers…=512%2C512&ssl=1	https://i0.wp.com/hypers…=512%2C512&ssl=1	[ "https://i0.wp.com/hyperspace.uni-frankfurt.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/gu-itp-logo.png?resize=102%2C55&ssl=1", "https://i0.wp.com/hyperspace.uni-frankfurt.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/640px-Logo-Goethe-University-Frankfurt-am-Main.svg.png?resize=100%2C55&ssl=1" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "David Wands" ]	2011-10-31T00:00:00	The Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) invites applications for a postdoctoral research fellowship in theoretical cosmology named in honour of the pioneering British cosmologist Dennis Sc…	en	https://i0.wp.com/hypers…it=32%2C32&ssl=1	Hyperspace@gu	https://hyperspace.uni-frankfurt.de/2011/10/31/sciama-research-fellowship-in-theoretical-cosmology-at-icg-portsmouth/	More info:&nbsp external linkContact:&nbsp David WandsLocation:&nbsp Portsmouth, UK The Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) invites applications for a postdoctoral research fellowship in theoretical cosmology named in honour of the pioneering British cosmologist Dennis Sciama (1926-1999). We seek an outstanding postdoctoral scientist to work in collaboration with existing staff in the ICG. Applicants should have a record of high-quality research in theoretical cosmology and propose an original programme of research, complementary to existing research expertise in the ICG. A PhD and relevant research expertise is required. The post is for three years, starting on 1st October 2012. The ICG consists of 12 academic staff, 13 postdoctoral researchers and 18 PhD students, and is a member of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), the Dark Energy Survey, and the UK Low Frequency Array Consortium (LOFAR:UK). ICG researchers have access to the new 1000-core SCIAMA supercomputer at Portsmouth, as well as the UK National Cosmology Supercomputer Consortium (COSMOS). Many staff are also involved in many other on-going and planned astrophysical surveys. More information is available at http://www.icg.port.ac.uk/ Applications (Application Form, CV, 3-page research proposal, names of 3 referees) should be sent by email to jobs[AT]port.ac.uk and copied to icg-admin[AT]port.ac.uk. Applicants should also arrange for up to three letters of reference to be sent by email to icg-admin[AT]port.ac.uk, to arrive by the closing date, 30th December 2011. Late applications may be considered until the post has been filled. Informal enquiries about this post can be made to david.wands[AT]port.ac.uk To find out more about the University of Portsmouth and this role, visit www.port.ac.uk/vacancies and apply on-line. Alternatively telephone 023 9284 3421 for an application pack.
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"https://tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/cropped-tritonstation.png?w=50", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[ "https://www.youtube.com/embed/h-p5dLQ4Fy8?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent" ]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2024-01-08T00:00:00	To start the new year, I provide a link to a discussion I had with Simon White on Phil Halper's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-p5dLQ4Fy8 In this post I'll say little that we don't talk about, but will add some background and mildly amusing anecdotes. I'll also try addressing the one point of factual disagreement. For the…	en	https://tritonstation.co…station.png?w=32	Triton Station	https://tritonstation.com/2024/01/08/discussion-of-dark-matter-and-modified-gravity/	To start the new year, I provide a link to a discussion I had with Simon White on Phil Halper’s YouTube channel: In this post I’ll say little that we don’t talk about, but will add some background and mildly amusing anecdotes. I’ll also try addressing the one point of factual disagreement. For the most part, Simon & I entirely agree about the relevant facts; what we’re discussing is the interpretation of those facts. It was a perfectly civil conversation, and I hope it can provide an example for how it is possible to have a positive discussion about a controversial topic+ without personal animus. First, I’ll comment on the title, in particular the “vs.” This is not really Simon vs. me. This is a discussion between two scientists who are trying to understand how the universe works (no small ask!). We’ve been asked to advocate for different viewpoints, so one might call it “Dark Matter vs. MOND.” I expect Simon and I could swap sides and have an equally interesting discussion. One needs to be able to do that in order to not simply be a partisan hack. It’s not like MOND is my theory – I falsified my own hypothesis long ago, and got dragged reluctantly into this business for honestly reporting that Milgrom got right what I got wrong. For those who don’t know, Simon White is one of the preeminent scholars working on cosmological computer simulations, having done important work on galaxy formation and structure formation, the baryon fraction in clusters, and the structure of dark matter halos (Simon is the W in NFW halos). He was a Reader at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge where we overlapped (it was my first postdoc) before he moved on to become the director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics where he was mentor to many people now working in the field. That’s a very short summary of a long and distinguished career; Simon has done lots of other things. I highlight these works because they came up at some point in our discussion. Davis, Efstathiou, Frenk, & White are the “gang of four” that was mentioned; around Cambridge I also occasionally heard them referred to as the Cold Dark Mafia. The baryon fraction of clusters was one of the key observations that led from SCDM to LCDM. The subject of galaxy formation runs throughout our discussion. It is always a fraught issue how things form in astronomy. It is one thing to understand how stars evolve, once made; making them in the first place is another matter. Hard as that is to do in simulations, galaxy formation involves the extra element of dark matter in an expanding universe. Understanding how galaxies come to be is essential to predicting anything about what they are now, at least in the context of LCDM. Both Simon and I have worked on this subject our entire careers, in very much the same framework if from different perspectives – by which I mean he is a theorist who does some observational work while I’m an observer who does some theory, not LCDM vs. MOND. When Simon moved to Max Planck, the center of galaxy formation work moved as well – it seemed like he took half of Cambridge astronomy with him. This included my then-office mate, Houjun Mo. At one point I refer to the paper Mo & I wrote on the clustering of low surface brightness galaxies and how I expected them to reside in late-forming dark matter halos. I often cite Mo, Mao, & White as a touchstone of galaxy formation theory in LCDM; they subsequently wrote an entire textbook about it. (I was already warning them then that I didn’t think their explanations of the Tully-Fisher relation were viable, at least not when combined with the effect we have subsequently named the diversity of rotation curve shapes.) When I first began to worry that we were barking up the wrong tree with dark matter, I asked myself what could falsify it. It was hard to come up with good answers, and I worried it wasn’t falsifiable. So I started asking other people what would falsify cold dark matter. Most did not answer. They often had a shocked look like they’d never thought about it, and would rather not*. It’s a bind: no one wants it to be false, but most everyone accepts that for it to qualify as physical science it should be falsifiable. So it was a question that always provoked a record-scratch moment in which most scientists simply freeze up. Simon was one of the first to give a straight answer to this question without hesitation, circa 1999. At that point it was clear that dark matter halos formed central density cusps in simulations; so those “cusps had to exist” in the centers of galaxies. At that point, we believed that to mean all galaxies. The question was complicated by the large dynamical contribution of stars in high surface brightness galaxies, but low surface brightness galaxies were dark matter dominated down to small radii. So we thought these were the ideal place to test the cusp hypothesis. We no longer believe that. After many attempts at evasion, cold dark matter failed this test; feedback was invoked, and the goalposts started to move. There is now a consensus among simulators that feedback in intermediate mass galaxies can alter the inner mass distribution of dark matter halos. Exactly how this happens depends on who you ask, but it is at least possible to explain the absence of the predicted cusps. This goes in the right direction to explain some data, but by itself does not suffice to address the thornier question of why the distribution of baryons is predictive of the kinematics even when the mass is dominated by dark matter. This is why the discussion focused on the lowest mass galaxies where there hasn’t been enough star formation to drive the feedback necessary to alter cusps. Some of these galaxies can be described as having cusps, but probably not all. Thinking only in those terms elides the fact that MOND has a better record of predictive success. I want to know why this happens; it must surely be telling us something important about how the universe works. The one point of factual disagreement we encountered had to do with the mass profile of galaxies at large radii as traced by gravitational lensing. It is always necessary to agree on the facts before debating their interpretation, so we didn’t press this far. Afterwards, Simon sent a citation to what he was talking about: this paper by Wang et al. (2016). In particular, look at their Fig. 4: This plot quantifies the mass distribution around isolated galaxies to very large scales. There is good agreement between the lensing observations and the mock observations made within a simulation. Indeed, one can see an initial downward bend corresponding to the outer part of an NFW halo (the “one-halo term”), then an inflection to different behavior due to the presence of surrounding dark matter halos (the “two-halo term”). This is what Simon was talking about when he said gravitational lensing was in good agreement with LCDM. I was thinking of a different, closely related result. I had in mind the work of Brouwer et al. (2021), which I discussed previously. Very recently, Dr. Tobias Mistele has made a revised analysis of these data. That’s worthy its own post, so I’ll leave out the details, which can be found in this preprint. The bottom line is in Fig. 2, which shows the radial acceleration relation derived from gravitational lensing around isolated galaxies: This plot quantifies the radial acceleration due to the gravitational potential of isolated galaxies to very low accelerations. There is good agreement between the lensing observations and the extrapolation of the radial acceleration relation predicted by MOND. There are no features until extremely low acceleration where there may be a hint of the external field effect. This is what I was talking about when I said gravitational lensing was in good agreement with MOND, and that the data indicated a single halo with an r-2 density profile that extends far out where we ought to see the r-3 behavior of NFW. The two plots above use the same method applied to the same kind of data. They should be consistent, yet they seem to tell a different story. This is the point of factual disagreement Simon and I had, so we let it be. No point in arguing about the interpretation when you can’t agree on the facts. I do not know why these results differ, and I’m not going to attempt to solve it here. I suspect it has something to do with sample selection. Both studies rely on isolated galaxies, but how do we define that? How well do we achieve the goal of identifying isolated galaxies? No galaxy is an island; at some level, there is always a neighbor. But is it massive enough to perturb the lensing signal, or can we successfully define samples of galaxies that are effectively isolated, so that we’re only looking at the gravitational potential of that galaxy and not that of it plus some neighbors? Looks like there is some work left to do to sort this out. Stepping back from that, we agreed on pretty much everything else. MOND as a fundamental theory remains incomplete. LCDM requires us to believe that 95% of the mass-energy content of the universe is something unknown and perhaps unknowable. Dark matter has become familiar as a term but remains a mystery so long as it goes undetected in the laboratory. Perhaps it exists and cannot be detected – this is a logical possibility – but that would be the least satisfactory result possible: we might as well resume counting angels on the head of a pin. The community has been working on these issues for a long time. I have been working on this for a long time. It is a big problem. There is lots left to do. +I get a lot of kill the messenger from people who are not capable of discussing controversial topics without personal animus. A lot – inevitably from people who know assume they know more about the subject than I do but actually know much less. It is really amazing how many scientists equate me as a person with MOND as a theory without bothering to do any fact-checking. This is logical fallacy 101. The predictions of MOND are insensitive to the details of galaxy formation. Though of course an interesting question, we don’t need that in order to make predictions. All we need is the mass distribution that the kinematics respond to – we don’t need to know how it got that way. This is like the solar system, where it suffices to know Newton’s laws to compute orbits; we don’t need to know how the sun and planets formed. In contrast, one needs to know how a galaxy was assembled in LCDM to have any hope of predicting what its distribution of dark matter is and then using that to predict kinematics. **The ideas Mo & I discussed thirty years ago have reappeared in the literature under the designation “assembly bias.”
1098	dbpedia	2	27	https://whatelseisonnow.com/2014/11/20/a-look-at-the-theory-of-everything/	en	A Look at The Theory of Everything	https://whatelseisonnow.…ing-spinning.jpg	https://whatelseisonnow.…ing-spinning.jpg	[ "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/cropped-alex-ross.jpg", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-poster.jpg?w=202&h=300", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-biking.jpg?w=300&h=200", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-jane-and-stephen-talk-at-party.jpg?w=300&h=199", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-with-professor-dennis-sciama-played-by-david-thewlis.jpg?w=300&h=157", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-gala.jpg?w=300&h=212", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-and-jane-play-croquet.jpg?w=300&h=199", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-first-child.jpg?w=300&h=168", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-plays-with-kids.jpg?w=300&h=168", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-marriage.jpg?w=300&h=210", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-spinning.jpg?w=300&h=167", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-speaks-through-device.jpg?w=300&h=177", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-works-on-his-theory.jpg?w=300&h=199", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-eddie-redmayne-as-stephen-hawking.jpg?w=300&h=199", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-felicity-jones-as-jane-wilde.jpg?w=300&h=152", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-stephen-and-jane-in-bed.jpg?w=300&h=193", "https://whatelseisonnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/the-theory-of-everything-wedding.jpg?w=300&h=154", "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2014-11-20T00:00:00	The Theory of Everything looks at the lives and relationship of Jane and Stephen Hawking. It spans years after the two year death sentence that Hawking had been given after his accident that would eventually confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Based off of a book written by Jane Wilde…	en	https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico	What Else is on Now?	https://whatelseisonnow.com/2014/11/20/a-look-at-the-theory-of-everything/	The Theory of Everything looks at the lives and relationship of Jane and Stephen Hawking. It spans years after the two year death sentence that Hawking had been given after his accident that would eventually confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Based off of a book written by Jane Wilde Hawking herself, the film takes care with its subjects and gives us a close at how their relationship developed as Stephen’s condition worsened. The film focuses more time on the family man as opposed to the physicist and shows how, despite not feeling whole, we still find hope in our lives. The film begins in Cambridge, England, 1963. We’re introduced to two pals biking to a party: Brian, played by Harry Lloyd, and our protagonist, Stephen Hawking, played by Eddie Redmayne. Also at the party is Jane Wilde, played by Felicity Jones. From a friend, she learns that this Hawking is strange, but very clever. Jane and Stephen talk. He tells her that she’s a cosmologist and is looking for that one equation that explains everything in the universe. Sounds like a simple enough task. We get a look at the busy life of Mr. Hawking. The next day, he and his colleagues are given a 10 question exam by professor and advisor, Dennis Sciama, played by David Thewlis. Stephen is also a member of the university’s rowing club as well. At a pub that night, Stephen considers calling Jane, but no need for that since she’s just a few seats over. He plucks up the courage to talk to her and asks if she plays croquet. Typical pick-up lines. When Brian returns to their dorm, he finds that Stephen hasn’t been working on the exam. Stephen has bigger things in mind: he’s applied for a PhD in Physics. He soon gets to work on the questions. He soon returns to class, but was only able to get through nine of the questions. Professor Sciama takes Stephen into a room once occupied by greats like J.J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. It’s a room full of possibility and Stephen looks on in wonder at what he sees. Professor Sciama has a great opportunity for Stephen: travel with him to see Roger Penrose speak. Elsewhere, Jane leaves church and finds Stephen waiting for her. It’s time to meet Stephen’s parents: Isobel, played by Abigail Cruttenden, and Frank, played by Simon McBurney. The parents ask about Jane’s passion- she loves art. More than that, she’s studying Spanish poetry. Jane and Stephen are also very different. After all, she goes to church, but Stephen doesn’t believe in that sort of higher authority. A physicist cannot allow his belief to be molded in the supernatural. Later that evening, they attend a gala. Stephen is not a dancer, but he is very observant. For example, he tells Jane to take a good look at the men’s shirts. They’re glowing in the light. The reason for that is due to Tide. As the two discuss their lives, Jane tells Stephen that she chose to major in Spanish poetry because she loves to travel. Soon, she refers to the creation of the Heaven and the Earth by quoting the first few scriptures of Genesis. The two join hands and dance. Professor Sciama and Stephen attend Roger Penrose’s lecture on black holes. Penrose, played by Christian McKay, tells his audience that black holes are created when stars collapse. There’s no light whatsoever in a black hole and the stars become denser and denser. The end result is a space-time singularity. When he returns, Stephen then relays this lecture to Jane, but with one change: what if you applied the theory of singularity to the entire universe? What if you reversed the process to see the beginning of time? It would be like winding back a clock. Stephen gets to work on his equation, with Professor Sciama advising him on the mathematics. Stephen is flying high right now, but as he leaves class and makes his way across campus, he trips and hits his head hard on the pavement. Stephen is brought to a doctor for examination. The impact is immediate: Stephen has little to no movement in his legs and is unable to push in when the doctor asks him to. Then Stephen learns: he has a motor-neuron disease that destroys the cells that control the muscles, breathing and anything related to movement. In time, his muscles will begin to decay and he’ll have no voluntary movement. His life expectancy is two years and the doctor, unfortunately, cannot help. Stephen asks if his brain will be affected, and it won’t be, but soon, no one will know his thoughts. Brian learns of Stephen’s disease when he returns to their dorm and Stephen tells him about Lou Gherig’s disease, though Brian isn’t up to date on baseball. Since Stephen isn’t taking Jane’s calls, she first learns about it when she runs into Brian at a pub. She comes to his dorm again- as he’d hidden from her the first time she stopped by- and tells him how much she missed him. He doesn’t discuss his condition, though. In fact, he wants her gone. Jane doesn’t leave that easily, though. She still owes him a game of croquet. If he doesn’t come, she’ll never come back. The two play, though Stephen’s movement is inhibited due to the fall. His feet drag and he’s not as mobile as he had been. Croquet comes to a quick end. Stephen returns to his dorm and begins to wreck it. He still wants Jane gone, as he needs to work. Stephen is still able to attend class, but now with the assistance of a cane. Stephen’s father tells Jane that she doesn’t realize what lies ahead. She has the weight of science against her and this is a huge defeat for everyone. Jane is defiant. Everyone thinks that she doesn’t look strong, but if there’s still love, she and Stephen can and will fight this. They do. The two are soon married following this, have a child and even move in together. Stephen now uses two canes to get around and must shuffle himself down the stairs at home. However, some good news comes when he comes before Professor Sciama and two other professors who have been looking over his theory. There are holes and unanswered questions in a few chapters. But the section regarding black holes is just brilliant. Well done, Dr. Stephen Hawking. So what’s next for Dr. Hawking? Prove that time has a meaning. At a celebratory dinner, everyone is ecstatic at Stephen being the first in his family to receive a doctorate. More problems arise. It’s hard enough for Stephen to eat, but now his hearing begins to go. Not feeling so hungry anymore, he excuses himself and struggles to make his way up the stairs. The next day, Jane presents Stephen with a wheelchair. He makes his way into the chair and it does make moving around a lot smoother. That evening, as Jane is helping him with his sweater, he finds inspiration as he stares into the fireplace. Following this, Stephen speaks with Professor Sciama about his revelation: what if a black hole wasn’t black at all, but just heat radiation. Once a star becomes a black hole, the hole itself will soon vanish. Jane and Stephen eventually move up too an electric wheelchair, but the care begins to take its toll on Jane as she must contend with Stephen and not one, but now two children. Despite Stephen’s occasional issues, he wants no doctors. Frustration is clear in her tone, but she doesn’t let it consume her. Jane’s mother suggests that she return to church since she used to love singing. She does and begins a friendship with the choir director, Jonathan Jones, played by Charlie Cox. Stephen’s work continues. He has a new project: disprove his own PhD and show that the Earth itself has no boundaries or beginning. Therefore, God must die. And on that note, we’ll stop. Telling a story based on a real life figure can be challenging. You want to be respectful of the original source and people, but also not just tell what could be explained in a documentary. You also want to stay as close to the person’s life and not add in unnecessary drama for the same of tension. That’s the big problem I had with Jimi: All is By My Side. In concept, it sounds like an interesting film, but on-screen, the history was far from flawless. Stephen Hawking has been around for a long time and is still alive. There have been films made about his life already- none of which I have seen- and if The Theory of Everything just told us the same story, there’d be no point to trying to tell us a story we’ve already seen before. We know Stephen Hawking is a physicist. We know that he had been diagnosed with a motor neuron disease and confined to a wheelchair. However, there’s a lot more in-between that. What was his personal life like, before and after his accident? What drives him? The film doesn’t answer all of these questions, but it does give us a look at how Hawking and his family dealt with the disease that took more and more control of his body. Some folks say that the movie comes off too much like a melodrama instead of a close examination of Stephen Hawking, the physicist. Others say too little time is spent on Hawking’s life before his accident. I understand these perspectives, but I feel this movie is less about Hawking the physicist and more about his relationship with Jane Wilde. Screenwriter Anthony McCarter and director James Marsh based this film primarily off of Jane Wilde Hawking’s book: Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking himself has called the film “broadly true” and while there are some changes between fact and fiction, most of them don’t change my opinion of the movie. I repeat, most of them. For example, Jane first met Jonathan while caroling, not at a church. She felt that any wrong move could impact her marriage with Stephen. In the book, Jane and Stephen’s differences over religion and science started off as not a major problem, as was the case in the film, but over time, they became contentious. These changes aren’t too big of a deal to me personally. A lot of the film’s messages and themes are handled very well. The movie examines how we overcome massive obstacles in our lives- obstacles that completely change us. It deals with the pain of loss, both physically and mentally, as seen through Stephen’s deteriorating condition and Jane’s growing frustration at having to be there for him while putting her life on hold. Though Stephen worsens over time, I never felt that the film treated him like a victim. We see a glimpse of his rage early on when he initially doesn’t want to see Jane anymore after he receives his diagnosis, but even as his condition worsens, he trudges on with his work. Much of what he wants and desires must be conveyed through facial expressions, which is where Eddie Redmayne’s performance shines. It also comes through in the direction, where some scenes are even set up and filmed like math equations- this comes at the hands of cinematographer Benoit Delhomme, who also worked on A Most Wanted Man earlier this year. Faith is also another central theme. Hawking believes in science and not, as he puts it, in a celestial dictatorial premise. He acknowledges that we are all different and, at one point, dose mention God in one of his works, but for the most part, he is a man of science, not religion. His helps come from those around him, but also through his own willpower. For example, during a family outing, Jane and Stephen’s father insist that he seek medical attention, but Stephen wants no doctors. Sure, I found it odd for a moment that a man of science wouldn’t trust modern medicine, but this is all a part of his struggle. He has challenges, but he never lets them deter him. The same applies to Jane, who does believe in a higher authority. Her faith pushes her, but also because she wants to prove, as she stated early on, that love and marriage could persevere, despite Stephen’s condition. So while I agree with the criticism that the movie doesn’t spend a lot of time on the actual science and mathematics behind Stephen’s theory, I find that this movie is more about his personal life. If people come into this expecting a deep look at Hawking’s philosophies and theories, this movie is not for them. But if they’re looking for a film in which an actor transforms himself into Stephen Hawking with such an uncanny resemblance, look no further than the fantastic job done by Eddie Redmayne. It’s scary how Redmayne embodies Hawking. When Hawking is confined to a wheelchair and must army crawl his way up stairs, you can tell what he’s feeling and going through just by watching Redmayne’s facial expressions. Whether it’s the slightest twitch of his lip or the way his lead limps to the side when in a wheelchair, Redmayne isn’t just playing Stephen Hawking- he becomes him. Even before the accident, Redmayne’s eyes are full of wonder and possibility when he explains and works on his black hole theory. When he and Professor Sciama walk through a laboratory, Redmayne looks like a kid in a candy store, but instead of wanting to play with everything, he wants to pull it all apart to see what makes it work. There’s so much wonder and fascination when he talks about the universe that I felt Hawking would be fine spending the rest of his days exploring the wonders of the universe. Having never seen the other films about Stephen Hawking, I won’t try to compare Redmayne’s performance to them, but this was a very strong portrayal. And just as powerful in her performance is Felicity Jones as Jane Hawking. She’s not reduced to being a common housewife and she doesn’t have any sort of unnecessary angst or anger toward Hawking after having to help him so much. Jones shows a lot through her facial expressions and I could feel Jane’s growing frustration at having to put her life on hold. There’s a great scene near the middle where Jane is doing housework while Stephen and the kids play around. It’s brief, but she has a look on a face that defines what her life has become: a life put on hold. Jane has aspirations and wants to make something in her life, but she has to put that on hold and go at a slower pace because she has to be there for Stephen. Stephen, though his movement is limited, doesn’t stop with his studies and theories. By contrast, Jane has to care for him, meaning she must devote less time to her own life and needs. But what’s great about Jones’ performance is that she never lets Jane be consumed by the growing dissatisfaction in her life. When we first meet Jane, she’s fully confident about who she is and what she believes. She maintains her devotion to her faith and to Stephen, despite his illness, and never feels like she’s made the wrong choice in marrying him. This is both a strike for and against the film, but I’ll address that in a bit. I like the fact that Jane doesn’t see Stephen as the typical nerd because he’s into physics and she never looks down upon or thinks differently of him because of his devotion to science. In fact, it’s their differences that make them such a good fit for one another. Yes, their dance under the fireworks feels a bit cheesy and Hallmark for my taste, especially since they had not known each other for that long, but for the purpose of getting them together before Stephen’s accident, I’m fine with it. Once the two are married, however, Jane almost becomes a background character, only there to help Stephen when he needs it. He doesn’t treat her like a servant and we know that he didn’t want any doctors, so it’s up to her to be there for him. She’s struggling, but I never got the sense that she was overwhelmed. As burdensome as it may be, Jane never treats Stephen like a burden. She made a choice to marry him and she’s going to stick with him…for as long as the narrative allows. Now I don’t have too many issues with the film, but I do want to address a few qualms. I do agree that this film kind of skips over a lot of events too fast. Whether that’s for the sake of moving the plot along or the film just wanted to focus more on Jane and Stephen’s relationship, I don’t know. Yes, this is based off of a book written by Jane Hawking, but we never really get that much into Stephen’s head. Where did his interest in physics come from and how did he become so intelligent? That’s probably asking the film to start a lot earlier than it did, and that’s not necessary, but I do wish we got to learn more about Stephen Hawking: the physicist alongside Stephen Hawking: the married man. A lot of his theories and the discussions on black holes are limited to a few scenes, but we never spend an extensive amount of time with him developing his theories. When Professor Sciama and his colleagues review Stephen’s theory, they tell him that parts of it are full of holes and unanswered questions. Okay, so what happened? As soon as we learn that they think his black hole theory is brilliant, the scene moves on and the story continues. The point I’m trying to make is that I wish the film had a bit more focus on his passion for physics. As is, we only get glimpses of it. Now I argue against this because the film’s focus seems to be on Jane and Stephen’s relationship, but given how impactful Stephen’s research became throughout the course of the film, I wish we saw he came to came up with these theories and what the public thought of them. The few times we see Stephen discussing his work, it’s during a group presentation. Smaller scenes of Stephen just working would have been nice. I also feel that the filmmakers chose to take the safe route when it came to Jane and Stephen’s relationship. Again, to go back to Wilde’s book, Jane and Stephen’s relationship sometimes became a power struggle. Those sorts of struggles were toned down for the film and anything that could have been serious or damaging to their marriage is handled like a delicate glass sculpture. Jane develops feelings for Jonathan, but the most we see her do is approach his tent during an outdoors trip while Stephen is elsewhere. Stephen also develops a friendship with a caretaker, Elaine Mason, played by Maxine Peake, but this happens so late in the film that any fallout feels inconsequential. Having to put your life on hold while taking care of your significant other is sure to cause tension at some point, but the film doesn’t touch on that. In fact, Jane and Stephen seem to weather their relationship almost too much like a fairy tale. During their wedding, the ceremony is filmed like a home movie, for example. The two rarely argue or go to bed angry at one another. At most, Jane blows off some steam, but she doesn’t explode. I’m not saying the two needed to be at each other’s throats, but a little tension would have been nice because I can’t imagine Jane enduring all of this without the slightest issue. As I mentioned, Jane never feels like she made the wrong choice. I’m glad she’s showed commitment, a bit of friction would have made this marriage a bit more interesting. What we got is still good, but their love is far from perfect and I wanted the film to explore both the positives and negatives in more detail. These strikes do not detract from my enjoyment of the film. The biggest strength of The Theory of Everything comes through the amazing chemistry and believability of Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones as Stephen and Jane Hawking. Redmayne in particular becomes Hawking and instead of just playing the man, he embodies him. Despite Stephen’s accident and Jane having to sidetrack her life, their devotion to one another exemplifies what Hawking meant when he tells an audience that there is no boundary to human endeavors. A minor setback is not the end of the world. We adjust and keep on moving forward.
1098	dbpedia	1	25	https://www.geni.com/surnames/sciama	en	Sciama Genealogy, Sciama Family History	https://www.geni.com/ima…ects/surname.jpg	https://www.geni.com/ima…ects/surname.jpg	[ "https://www.geni.com/images/rotating_world.gif?1723492262", "https://www.geni.com/images/transparent.gif?1723492262", "https://www.geni.com/images/transparent.gif?1723492262", "https://www.geni.com/images/transparent.gif?1723492262", "https://www.geni.com/images/transparent.gif?1723492262", "https://www.geni.com/images/external/x_com_black.svg?1723492262", "https://www.geni.com/images/transparent.gif?1723492262", "https://www.geni.com/images/transparent.gif?1723492262", "https://www.geni.com/images/march_mini_tree.png?1723492262", "https://www.geni.com/images/transparent.gif?1723492262", "https://www.geni.com/images/transparent.gif?1723492262", "https://www.geni.com/images/transparent.gif?1723492262", "https://media.geni.com/p13/76/05/53/0b/5344485a25d9e94d/sciama2_t2.jpg?hash=36a3cc8abcecd1aaacdbe00b8090d09997ee66e6a508ee74f6659e95c38547f2.1724741999", "https://assets10.geni.com/images/photo_silhouette_m_thumb2.gif", "https://assets10.geni.com/images/photo_silhouette_m_thumb2.gif", "https://assets10.geni.com/images/photo_silhouette_f_thumb2.gif", "https://assets10.geni.com/images/photo_silhouette_f_thumb2.gif", "https://www.geni.com/images/external/x_com_black_16.png?1723492262", "https://www.geni.com/images/facebook_white_small_short.gif?1723492262" ]	[]	[]	[ "family tree", "genealogy", "trace your ancestry", "family tree maker", "family tree search", "family tree charts", "family statistics", "ancestors", "research" ]	null	[]	null	There are 94 profiles for the Sciama family on Geni.com. Explore Sciama genealogy and family history in the World's Largest Family Tree.	en	/touch-icon-iphone.png	geni_family_tree	https://www.geni.com/surnames/sciama	This section is a placeholder for information about the Sciama surname. Surname information is crowd-sourced; the Geni community would be grateful if you helped update this page with information about the Sciama surname. Share some things about the Sciama name.
1098	dbpedia	0	86	https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/page3	en	Mach's Principle			[ "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/custom/CosmoQuest-OnLight-01.png", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/core/images/default/default_avatar_medium.png", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/core/image.php?userid=1262&thumb=1&dateline=1640891827", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/core/images/default/default_avatar_medium.png", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/core/image.php?userid=1077&thumb=1&dateline=1127057465", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/core/image.php?userid=1262&thumb=1&dateline=1640891827", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/core/images/default/default_avatar_medium.png", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/core/images/default/default_avatar_medium.png", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/core/image.php?userid=1262&thumb=1&dateline=1640891827", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/core/images/default/default_avatar_medium.png", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/core/image.php?userid=1262&thumb=1&dateline=1640891827", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/core/images/smilies/smile.png", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/core/image.php?userid=1077&thumb=1&dateline=1127057465", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/core/image.php?userid=1077&thumb=1&dateline=1127057465", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/core/image.php?userid=1262&thumb=1&dateline=1640891827", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/core/images/default/default_avatar_medium.png", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/core/images/smilies/smile.png", "https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/core/image.php?userid=1077&thumb=1&dateline=1127057465" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2003-04-21T17:00:22	Have a beef with relativity, heliocentrism, the Big Bang? If you have a hypothesis currently outside the scientific mainstream that you want critiqued - and you're prepared to defend it - this is the place.	en	favicon.ico	Cosmoquest Forum	https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/the-proving-grounds/against-the-mainstream/4420-mach-s-principle/page3
1098	dbpedia	0	69	https://www.changhai.org/articles/science/physics/nobel2020AE.php	en	Roger Penrose and Black Holes			[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Changhai Lu" ]	null					null	▷▷▷▷▷▷ Follow My Threads Account ◁◁◁◁◁◁ 手机版 Roger Penrose and Black Holes - by Changhai Lu - ABSTRACT: Black holes have been a hot topic in recent years partly due to the successful detections of gravitational waves from pair merges mostly involving black holes. It is therefore not too great a surprise that the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics went to black hole researchers: the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on October 6 2020 that English mathematician and mathematical physicist Roger Penrose had been awarded half of the prize "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity"; the other half of the prize was shared by German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel and American astronomer Andrea Ghez "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy". In this article, we will give a brief introduction to Penrose's research which, as we will see, has a certain unique peculiarity among the achievements that have won Nobel Prizes in Physics. 1. INTRODUCTION Let's start, as background, with a quick review of the early history of black holes. The origin of the concept of black holes is often attributed to English natural philosopher John Michell. In 1783, Michell deduced from Newtonian gravity that a star with same density as the sun but hundreds of times bigger in diameter will have a gravity so strong that even light cannot escape. Such a star will therefore look "black" or "dark" to observers far away, and was quite appropriately called a "dark star" by Michell. Michell's "dark star" is fairly simple in terms of both theory and concept. Nowadays, even a high school student should be able to deduce without much effort that for a star with mass M to become a "dark star" in terms of Newtonian gravity, its radius must be no greater than 2GM/c2. An impressive fact about this result is that 2GM/c2 happens to be the so-called Schwarzschild radius of the simplest (i.e. non-rotating and not charged) black hole in the modern sense (namely, according to general relativity). But despite this impressive equality in radius, the modern black holes have little in common with Michell's "dark star". In fact, even the equality in radius is nothing but a misleading coincidence, since its meaning in modern black hole theory is not the measurable distance from its center to its surface as in Michell's "dark star". To quote Penrose himself, "the notion of a black hole really only arises from the particular features of general relativity, and it does not occur in Newtonian theory". One might ask: how exactly a black hole "arises from the particular features of general relativity"? The answer goes back to a German physicist named Karl Schwarzschild. In January 1916, shortly before his premature death, and less than two months after Einstein published his field equation of general relativity, Schwarzschild found an exact solution now called Schwarzschild's solution. General relativity is, in a sense, a theory about spacetime. Schwarzschild's solution, as a particular solution of such a theory, thus describes a particular spacetime. This spacetime is spherically symmetric, and had two striking features both of which led to certain breakdown of mathematics: one occurred at the center of the spherical symmetry, and the other occurred on a sphere now named the "event horizon", whose radius is the Schwarzschild radius that we have mentioned above. It took physicists many years, not without trouble and hesitation, to gradually gain an understanding of these two features. It turned out that the feature at the center of the spherical symmetry is a truly nasty one, now called a "singularity", and is associated with pathological properties such as the divergence of spacetime curvature. The feature on event horizon, however, reflects nothing but a defective choice of coordinate system, and does not pose any essential problem. The singularity and the event horizon are the two major features of black holes. The discovery, therefore, of Schwarzschild's solution in which both features are present (and collectively called a Schwarzschild black hole) can be more or less treated as a prediction of black holes by general relativity ‒ not a robust one though, since what is really "predicted" is only the fact that general relativity is capable of describing a black hole. But Schwarzschild's solution alone cannot tell us whether there exists any real physical process that can lead to actual black hole formation ‒ without such a process, black hole will remain a bizarre theoretical concept without physical relevance. 2. FORMATION OF BLACK HOLE So the question now becomes: is there any real physical process that can actually produce a black hole? American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his student Hartland Snyder made some progress towards answering this question in 1939. Oppenheimer and Snyder studied the collapse that will inevitably happen when a star runs out of its nuclear fuel and no longer has sufficient radiative pressure to balance gravity. What they found was: assuming no force exists to stop collapse (which is simplistic but turned out to be correct for sufficiently large stars), then when observed by a static observer outside the star, the collapse will slow down owing to relativistic effects and eventually freeze when approaching the event horizon. Whoever "abhors" black holes might be tempted into thinking that black holes cannot form because of the freeze. But such a freeze tells us no more about whether a black hole can form than a video tape broken in the middle tells us what can happen afterwards ‒ it limits what a particular observer can see, but not what can actually happen. In fact, Oppenheimer and Snyder explicitly showed that when you switch to an observer that collapses with the star (the so-called comoving observer), the star will collapse into a singularity in finite time and the event horizon causes no delay. Does it mean that black hole formation can now be considered a robust prediction of general relativity? Not yet, for both Schwarzschild's solution and Oppenheimer and Snyder's study relied on a symmetry that cannot be strictly realized in the physical world: spherical symmetry. In fact, since general relativity is mathematically a highly complicated theory, almost all early efforts to find solutions relied on certain types of symmetry. For instance, the Kerr solution which was found by New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr in 1963 and is much more "realistic" than Schwarzschild's solution, relied on axial symmetry ‒ a symmetry not as restricted as spherical symmetry but, nevertheless, still ideal enough to evade physical reality. Usually, physicists are quite at ease with the fact that symmetries cannot be strictly realized in the physical world, not only because they rely on symmetry too much to dismiss, but also because it is commonly believed and widely validated that minor deviation from strict symmetry will only lead to minor discrepancy. But black hole formation became an exception, at least to some physicists, since it involves a singularity which will cause breakdown of physical laws on which the very careers of physicists depend. No stake is higher than that, which makes no concept ‒ not even symmetry ‒ not sacrificable in order to save the stake. Some physicists, who blamed symmetry, therefore decided to tackle the problem by abandoning symmetry, in the hope of eliminating the singularity. Prominent Soviet physicists Evgeny Lifshitz and Isaak Markovich Khalatnikov were the main proponents of such effort, and at a certain point in the 1960s, they believed a proof had been obtained showing that singularity would not arise once symmetry had been abandoned. There are also numerous other doubts regarding singularity and black holes (for which singularity is a main feature), one of which came from the very person who established general relativity: Albert Einstein. But those other doubts are much less eloquent. For instance, the doubt Einstein himself cast is this: any circular motion around a Schwarzschild black hole at radius less than 1.5 times the Schwarzschild radius will require a speed greater than the speed of light. Since nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, black holes ‒ Einstein so concluded ‒ must not exist. This argument is surprisingly defective since the obvious and correct conclusion of this analysis should be: circular motion is not possible at such radius around a Schwarzschild black hole rather than black holes must not exist, just like, for example, if one cannot swim circularly (without been sucked in) near the center of a whirlpool, it doesn't mean whirlpools cannot exist. Eloquent or not, it is in such an atmosphere of numerous doubts, that in the autumn of 1964, thirty-three year old Roger Penrose became deeply involved in black hole research. 3. PENROSE AND BLACK HOLES Penrose completed a mathematics major and then obtained a Ph.D. in the field of geometry from St John's College, Cambridge University in 1957. But even when he was still a mathematics student, Penrose developed interests in physics and astronomy under the influence of English astronomer Fred Hoyle and physicist Dennis Sciama. In fact, Hoyle and Sciama's influence is much more than a mere generic influence on interests. Hoyle attracted Penrose into his earliest research in astronomy; and it is in Sciama's circle that Penrose eventually met an excellent collaborator: Stephen Hawking, whose Ph.D. research was under Sciama's guidance and whose fame would skyrocket. Both of these influences contributed to the achievement that eventually resulted in Penrose's Nobel Prize. Hoyle was a major advocate of the so-called steady-state model which is a cosmological model that was abandoned by most astronomers in the 1960s when it was strongly disfavored by observations. In the 1950s when Penrose was influenced by Hoyle, however, the steady-state model still enjoyed certain popularity. But even then, while observational judgement was still lacking, an issue that Penrose called "an apparent contradiction between the steady-state model and standard general relativity" had already surfaced. One possible way out of the issue, as some advocates proposed, was to use a strategy quite similar to the one that singularity "deniers" would use, namely, to assume that the issue was caused by symmetry, and therefore abandoning symmetry would save the day. Penrose was attracted to the steady-state model and was serious enough to pursue this proposal. The pursuit failed, as recalled in Penrose's book Fashion Faith and Fantasy: I had wanted to see whether an apparent contradiction between the steady-state model and standard general relativity ... might be averted by the presence of deviations from the complete symmetry that is employed in the usual steady-state picture. By the use of a geometrical/topological argument, I had convinced myself that such deviations from symmetry could not remove this contradiction. But the good thing about scientific research is: the value of it is not always measured by the success or failure of its direct target. In many cases, valuable lessons that led to great success came out of research for which the direct target failed. Penrose's study of the steady-state model turned out to be one of them, out of which two lessons had been learned: one lesson is generic and strategic, namely abandoning symmetry may not always make a difference dramatic enough to save the day; the other lesson is more specific and tactical and showed that the geometrical/topological argument that was rather novel in general relativity research at the time had the power to achieve something traditional methods could hardly reach. These lessons paved a road for Penrose when his interest switched to black hole research, and the road drastically differed from that of Lifshitz and Khalatnikov's in both its goal and method. What attracted Penrose into the area of black hole research, however, was not his research on the steady-state model, but related to something called quasars (quasi-stellar objects) which were discovered in 1963. These novel astronomical objects shine a hundred times brighter than a typical galaxy but their size is only a millionth of that of the latter (which makes it "quasi-stellar", hence its name), and therefore must be very compact. Preliminary analysis indicated that a giant black hole swallowing matter (including stars) was the most probable mechanism that could fuel so compact and energetic an object. This therefore provided indirect but strong support for the existence of black holes. Since everyone knows that symmetry cannot be exact, therefore if black holes exist, we must show they exist under generic conditions. This, together with the lessons learned from the study of the steady-state model, attracted Penrose into the area of black hole research with the goal of exploring the formation of singularity under generic conditions. This goal is opposite to that of Lifshitz and Khalatnikov, and the best method to pursue it is to use the "geometrical/topological argument" which was the second lesson Penrose learned from the study of the steady-state model. The reason for this is simple: since the goal is to explore the formation of singularity under generic conditions ‒ especially when there is no symmetry so that properties such as shape and size become pretty much irrelevant. Furthermore, since general relativity is a highly geometric theory, the formation of singularity is a highly geometric problem about spacetime structure, and we all know that if properties such as shape and size are irrelevant in a geometric problem, what remains to be relevant will be topological properties, which thus justifies the use of the "geometrical/topological argument". But even with the goal set, and the method well within the technical expertise of Penrose, whose Ph.D. research was in the field of geometry, reaching the goal is still highly challenging, and requires certain inspiration. Although the coming and going of inspiration is often difficult to trace, in the particular case of Penrose's black hole research, we are lucky enough to have the master's own reminiscences which he described in his popular book The Emperor's New Mind and on other occasions. According to these reminiscences, Penrose got his inspiration late in the autumn of 1964, shortly after he started his black hole research. One day in that autumn, Penrose and mathematical physicist Ivor Robinson were walking along the street, chatting about something completely unrelated to black hole research, and were stopped by a red signal while crossing a side road. It was at that moment that an idea emerged in Penrose's mind. Later that day, after Robinson left, Penrose returned to his office, combed through all thoughts in his mind, and (to quote his own words) "finally brought to mind the thought that I had had while crossing the street ‒ a thought which had momentarily elated me by providing the solution to the problem that had been milling around at the back of my head!" The thought that he so elaborately brought to mind and provided "the solution to the problem" is related to a concept called "closed trapped surface" whose fundamental property is: all light-like geodesics orthogonal to it ‒ regardless of inward or outward propagation ‒ are converging. To put it in layman's terms, it is a two dimensional closed surface from which light cannot escape. Equipped with this inspiration, and after several months' diligent work, Penrose proved an important result in 1965 that we will call the Penrose singularity theorem, and which is the earliest version of a class of theorems now called "singularity theorems". 4. SINGULARITY THEOREMS What are singularity theorems? Or, to be more specific, what is the Penrose singularity theorem? Briefly speaking, the Penrose singularity theorem is a theorem that leads to the formation of a singularity by assuming three types of premises ‒ a logical structure shared by all singularity theorems. Among the three types of premises, the first asserts certain generic properties of matter; the second imposes certain restrictions on spacetime itself; and the third assumes certain conditions of matter distribution. With these premises, Penrose proved that the formation of a singularity is generic and inevitable, and does not rely on symmetry. In that same year (i.e. 1965) when Penrose proved his singularity theorem, the world's leading general relativity experts ‒ including Lifshitz and Khalatnikov for whom permission to travel outside the Soviet Union was obtained not without trouble ‒ gathered in London for the Third Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation. This is the stage on which Penrose's affirmative result and Lifshitz and Khalatnikov's negative result on the formation of singularities collided for the first time. The "collision" didn't yield any immediate outcome, but Penrose's novel "geometrical/topological argument" attracted several young researchers who ‒ in a manner similar to Penrose ‒ also had technical expertise in geometry and topology. Among them were the American theoretical physicist Robert Geroch and Sciama's graduate student Hawking who we mentioned before, both were only twenty-three years old at the time. In the next several years, Penrose, Hawking, Geroch and others proposed and proved more versions of the singularity theorem, which differed from each other mainly in the details of the premises. Through the blooming of these singularity theorems, the existence of singularities and black holes gained more and more theoretical acceptance. This trend finally shook Lifshitz and Khalatnikov. In September 1969, American physicist Kip Thorne visited the Soviet Union. Lifshitz took the opportunity to hand a manuscript to him, and asked him to submit it to Physical Review Letters which Soviet scientists could not do themselves at that time without first going through a lengthy security clearance process. In the manuscript, Lifshitz acknolwdged the error of his and Khalatnikov's earlier work that let them to believe that singularities could not exist without symmetry. This concession by Lifshitz and Khalatnikov removed the main objection among physicists regarding the existence of singularities and black holes in general relativity (careful readers might have noticed, in the domain of existence, we sometimes used singularity and black hole in a somewhat exchangeable way, as if a result about one can automatically extend to the other. The relation between the two is actually a quite subtle one, interested readers may consult, for instance, Ref. 3). But the Penrose singularity theorem itself still has a weak point that needs to be ‒ and can be ‒ addressed. As we mentioned before, singularity theorems all assumed three types of premises. Among them, the generic properties of matter basically asserts that the energy density must be non-negative, which is widely considered valid in classical physics; the conditions of matter distribution are known to be realizable in physical processes such as the collapse of sufficiently large stars. But the restriction imposed on spacetime itself by the Penrose singularity theorem turns out to be too theoretical and too strong. In fact, this restriction, which requires the existence of a so-called Cauchy hypersurface, is so theoretical that it is hard to think of any observational evidence that can possibly verify it, and it is so strong that it was actually violated by a counter-example posted by Penrose himself in a paper published in the same year (i.e. 1965) as his singularity theorem paper. This weak point in the Penrose singularity theorem was no secret to researchers in that area. Hawking, for instance, commented in his autobiography My Brief History that it is possible that early singularity theorems "simply proved that the universe didn’t have a Cauchy surface" rather than proved the existence of singularities and black holes. Penrose himself later, in a collaborative work with Hawking, also admitted that "the assumption of the existence of a global Cauchy hypersurface is hard to justify from the standpoint of general relativity". Trying to improve on the Penrose singularity theorem by eliminating this weak point was actually a major motivation behind the multiple versions of singularity theorems proposed and proved in those years. In the end, Penrose and Hawking collaborated on a paper titled "The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology", that laid down a theorem now called the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorem, and published in 1970. In this theorem, which covers both black hole singularity and cosmological singularity, premises are made much more realizable. We all know from basic logic that for a simple logical deduction to draw a correct conclusion, not only the deduction itself must be valid, but the premises must also be valid. Similarly, for a theorem that was intended to describe the physical world, a physically relevant conclusion relies not only on the mathematical correctness of the theorem, but also the physical realizability of the premises. In this sense, the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorem is physically much more relevant than earlier versions of the singularity theorems due to its much more realizable premises. Among all singularity theorems, if we are to select one that best deserves the praise of "the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity" which won half of the Nobel Prize in Physics this year, it should be the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorem. And it is a pity that Stephen Hawking has already passed away ‒ a pity both for Hawking and for the history of the Nobel Prize. 5. EPILOGUE Let me end this introduction by pointing out a very unique peculiarity that distinguishes Penrose's black hole research from not only the other achievements that have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, but most other physics research in general, namely the singularity theorems Penrose and others proved are very similar to pure mathematical theorems, except that these theorems are theorems in the framework of general relativity rather than in an ordinary mathematical axiomatic system. A singularity theorem merely draws "a robust prediction" for general relativity, in the sense that even if its prediction is invalidated by observation, it is most likely general relativity rather than the singularity theorem that will be in trouble. A singularity theorem might become physically irrelevant in such cases, but its correctness as a mathematical theorem may well remain. Black holes are astronomical objects, and for this reason many have considered this year's Nobel Prize in Physics as yet another case when astronomical research won a physics prize. But at least for the half prize that goes to Penrose, it is perhaps better considered as a case of mathematical research winning a physics prize, which is much rarer ‒ perhaps completely unique so far, and therefore adds a far more colorful chapter in the history of the Nobel Prize. References S. Hawking, Hawking on the Big Bang and Black Holes, (World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., 1993). S. Hawking, My Brief History, (Bantam Books, 2013). C. Lu, From Singularities to Wormholes: Selected Topics in General Relativity, (Tsinghua University Press, 2013). R. Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics, (Penguin Books, 1991). R. Penrose, Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe, (Vintage Books, 2012). R. Penrose, Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe, (Princeton University Press, 2016). J. M. M. Senovilla and D. Garfinkle, arXiv:1410.5226 [gr-qc]. K. S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy, (W. W. Norton & Company, 1995). Appendix PDF version (356 KB). Archived User Discussions 卢昌海 (发表于 2020-12-22) 这是我首次替英文杂志撰稿，也是毕业 20 年以来首次在英文杂志发表文章。
1098	dbpedia	2	71	https://digestknowledge.com/knowledgebase/a-historical-film-the-theory-of-everything	en	A Historical Film: The Theory of Everything	http://static1.squarespace.com/static/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/6150b4b1410bec70471fd7e7/6159ff2edb7ff53972a22c0c/1715089817036/The+theory+of+everything+Cover+Page.jpg?format=1500w	http://static1.squarespace.com/static/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/6150b4b1410bec70471fd7e7/6159ff2edb7ff53972a22c0c/1715089817036/The+theory+of+everything+Cover+Page.jpg?format=1500w	[ "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/5674a857-3475-4c85-bba2-79671fbc96f5/DK+logo+...presentedd+%281%29+%281%29.png?format=1500w", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/dfda1c4b-b966-4270-a673-88d118550913/DK+logo+...presentedd+%281%29+%281%29.png?format=1500w", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/5674a857-3475-4c85-bba2-79671fbc96f5/DK+logo+...presentedd+%281%29+%281%29.png?format=1500w", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/dfda1c4b-b966-4270-a673-88d118550913/DK+logo+...presentedd+%281%29+%281%29.png?format=1500w", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/38a1eaf7-4702-4310-ad34-cbf385728400/The+Theory+Of+Everything+Poster.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/39500fa1-2fee-4529-9509-3e9e509256f4/The+Theory+of+Everything+quote.gif", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1655110995479-VT91IBXPHF6X77AGP64Y/Belaseshe+In+the+Autumn+of+My+Life.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1651056657159-L8PXVKEPNJZZE7RAK4JR/Did+the+character+surprise+me_.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1640024735371-L8TM3Z0NOBGS7GSPFLUO/I+am+Sam+Cover.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1640026830587-P2QZ6H8LFP1Q03VAR93J/Me+Before+You+Cover.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1638936789371-FSFGWHQ2KCP0BANJPW2A/MEGAMIND+cover.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1642439682347-9E7IF0YGJMRJTSE7DXLB/A+Mystery+Movie+Sherlock+Holmes+%28Part+II%29.png", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1640027454694-WURNQS722MSRNYJCCS55/A+Quiet+Place+cover.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1640024951377-VDV0O1NL1J2U9OBYWIU9/The+theory+of+everything+Cover+Page.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1640027178371-A7M0IBKONUBJNRU6IT23/The+Intouchables+Cover.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1640027008283-T8VR32NNE477ANSVY1YN/Ironman+Cover.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1640027116262-749532HE3LYRGHLUKOYF/Up+Cover.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1638991455944-DJUEEMNX729WXPX9JQRU/The+Pursuit+of+Happiness+cover.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1640026606068-D1N5C7MN5U212HCE72VL/My+Left+Foot+cover.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1640027285551-H9BICIPY6DOQ4OS94XFN/The+Hunger+Games+cover.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1640025312127-TPT9CAOI0UL1XE8U5H8A/Harry+Potter+and+the+Philosopher%E2%80%99s+Stone+Thumb+nail-min.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/1640027678461-DER47GJQVCJ2CUNE2HZD/The+Grave+Of+fireflies+cover.jpg", "https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v2/namespaces/memberAccountAvatars/libraries/615882b09da73c2f410ff727/06592ea2c141497a99af4c5b3e703c14/06592ea2c141497a99af4c5b3e703c14.jpg?format=300w" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Jannatul Ferdous Nawrin" ]	2021-11-12T01:06:00+06:00	"The Theory of Everything" perfectly portrays the unique relationship between Stephen and Jane. Another portion of the movie shows Stephen's strong personality. Stephen was so cheerful and robust that despite having such disabilities, he never gave up. He had a strong desire to live and wo	en	https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6102abeba9fd55174a180768/6aa1e052-3a9e-49c4-a294-3c948ff50e0c/favicon.ico?format=100w	Digest Knowledge	https://digestknowledge.com/knowledgebase/a-historical-film-the-theory-of-everything	Stephen and Jane met each other for the first time at a May ball in Cambridge. Stephen was initially timid and awkward, but he gradually overcame his shyness and became comfortable around Jane. They both fell in love with each other after their first meeting. However, after some days, Stephen was diagnosed with a deadly motor neuron disease, which reduced his life span. He only had two years to live. Stephen was shattered when he learned about his disease. Nonetheless, during those tough times, Stephen found Jane beside him. Jane was so in love with Stephen that she married him despite being aware of his illness. However, after the marriage, Stephen’s health started to deteriorate. Over time, he loses his ability to walk, speak, and write. These struggles and hardships affected their relationship. Despite all the difficulties, Jane was always there for Stephen. She never left his side. She went above and beyond to help Stephen. “The Theory of Everything” perfectly portrays the unique relationship between Stephen and Jane. Another portion of the movie shows Stephen’s strong personality. Stephen was so cheerful and robust that despite having such disabilities, he never gave up. He had a strong desire to live and work. He faced all the challenging situations bravely. He gradually learned to communicate with the help of a speech-generating device. He had such a strong passion for science that he never stopped his research. He continued to explore the universe at the beginning of time and researched spacetime singularities. Jane and his Ph.D. supervisor, Dennis, strongly supported him. After days of hard work, he proved his theory regarding black holes. After that, he penned a book called “A Brief History of Time,” where many exciting topics such as the Big Bang, black holes, and light cones were discussed. The topic and theme of the book were so interesting that the book became famous worldwide, and since then, everybody has recognized him as one of the greatest physicists for his theory. This film is about life, hopes, love, and science. This film’s graphics and message are both enthralling. The film is even more interesting because actual physicist Stephen Hawking saw it. He also offered his voice in it, which gave the movie a lift. Therefore, because of the mesmerizing plot, fantastic cinematography, and beautiful messages, I highly recommend this movie. “There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. While there is life, there is hope.” - Stephen Hawking (The Theory of Everything) Film Credit
1098	dbpedia	0	87	http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-are-modern-scientists-so-dull-and.html	en	Sabine Hossenfelder: Backreaction: Why are modern scientists so dull? And why that question is nonsense.	http://backreaction.blogspot.com/favicon.ico	http://backreaction.blogspot.com/favicon.ico	[ "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N9QDX9zz1aE/XGuq12-EKSI/AAAAAAAAEgE/EuyipZCfAW8vKpgNLc1fh744VXTtai6ZQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/br_banner_new06.jpg", "https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_edit_allbkg.gif", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqjQc2SWljWauF-0klteX_FqMnGZC5yNHHkF9UEbM9KTuUfxhjLmdkwb0KK769qOzomNj6qNjozR2rJTiNUMFPvrUZYGzOZGfD-bYVfSr94Oi_MV_fu6ePJM1oRuQd2w/s45-c/unnamed.jpg", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", 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Science		http://backreaction.blogspot.com/favicon.ico		http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-are-modern-scientists-so-dull-and.html
1098	dbpedia	1	24	https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/743188/observational-status-of-sciamas-hypothesis	en	Observational status of Sciama's hypothesis	https://cdn.sstatic.net/…g?v=f58801408228	https://cdn.sstatic.net/…g?v=f58801408228	[ "https://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/physics/Img/logo.svg?v=6eb7d730c013", "https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/e1f812069a573c4685c26114aaaf2ca6?s=64&d=identicon&r=PG&f=y&so-version=2", "https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b8b02aeec1ef26bb34e4d477d11d8446?s=64&d=identicon&r=PG&f=y&so-version=2", "https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/743188/ivc/5239?prg=73172c52-4a5b-45a5-b5bd-d092a2aef77c" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Martin C" ]	2022-12-30T10:41:17	I have always taken the existence of inertia more or less for granted, as an observational fact that does not require explanation. But on reflection this is an unscientific attitude, and perhaps th...	en	https://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/physics/Img/favicon.ico?v=e8ea30e2eacd	Physics Stack Exchange	https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/743188/observational-status-of-sciamas-hypothesis	I have always taken the existence of inertia more or less for granted, as an observational fact that does not require explanation. But on reflection this is an unscientific attitude, and perhaps there exists a deeper reason for the existence of inertial mass. Of course, in the absence of an explanatory theory of inertia that makes testable predictions we should be wary of ascribing importance to an observation that seems to stand by itself, but that does not mean the question is somehow beyond the realm of scientific inquiry. Happily, in (1) Sciama put forth the bold hypothesis that the inertia of a single object is due to the action of the mass of the rest of the universe (since becoming aware of this I have found various other theories of inertia of greater or lesser cogency, but many of them seem to veer into quackery). Sciama also worked out a prediction of his theory - that is, his theory is falsifiable. Specifically, the gravitational constant becomes a function of the distribution of matter in the (presumably observable) universe, so that a precise value of G predicts a value for the mean density of the universe. The value provided in the original paper of 1953 is $\rho \approx 5\times 10^{-27}g cm^{-3} $ , which Sciama argued was not incompatible with the observational estimates of the time ($\rho \approx \times 10^{-30}g cm^{-3}$). A quick google search (e.g. https://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_matter.html) suggests current estimates are around $9.9 \times 10^{-30}gcm^{-3}$, i.e. still of the same order of magnitude as in the 1950s(!). Is this sufficient to definitively falsify Sciama's theory (which made numerous simplifications), or are there reasons to doubt this quantity?
1098	dbpedia	2	26	https://medium.com/%40krishnamohan-parattu/mentors-in-science-77b42abb3a42	en	Mentors in science	https://miro.medium.com/…jr1YbyOIJY2w.png	https://miro.medium.com/…jr1YbyOIJY2w.png	[ "https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fill:64:64/1dmbNkD5D-u45r44go_cf0g.png", "https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fill:88:88/11IB1q6KeO6AdpPWIAoLSEw.jpeg", "https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fill:144:144/1*1IB1q6KeO6AdpPWIAoLSEw.jpeg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Krishna Mohan Parattu", "krishnamohan-parattu.medium.com" ]	2022-01-08T13:34:50.672000+00:00	Sir Roger Penrose finally won the Nobel prize in 2020, at the ripe old age of 89 after an illustrious and varied research career. Given his phenomenal accomplishments, it may come as a surprise to…	en	https://miro.medium.com/…jr1YbyOIJY2w.png	Medium	https://krishnamohan-parattu.medium.com/mentors-in-science-77b42abb3a42	Sir Roger Penrose finally won the Nobel prize in 2020, at the ripe old age of 89 after an illustrious and varied research career. Given his phenomenal accomplishments, it may come as a surprise to many to know that this brilliant mathematician and physicist had difficulty with math classes in school. A math teacher in a lower grade had even decided to demote him because he was having trouble with mental arithmetic. Penrose says that it was not that he was bad at math; he just had trouble memorizing the tables. But he could do multiplications in other ways that invariably took more time. Later, an insightful teacher figured out that Penrose was bright but slow. So then he started giving him as much time as he needed in his exams and Penrose did really well. Later in his life, Penrose ran into another great mentor who changed the course of his life. Dennis Sciama, a physicist at Cambridge and a friend of his elder brother, encouraged him to shift from mathematics to physics: “What are you doing with this pure mathematics nonsense. Come and work on physics and cosmology.”. The name Sciama might not sound familiar, but you must have heard of a student who completed his PhD under him: Stephen Hawking. Penrose himself completed his PhD under mathematician John Todd, but it was his interactions with Sciama that set him up for a future Nobel prize. Sciama was one of the three great mentors of the golden age of black hole research, as described by Kip Thorne in his book Black Holes and Time Warps. The three mentors were Dennis Sciama from Cambridge, UK; John Wheeler from Princeton, USA and Yakov Zeldovich from Moscow, USSR. Thorne, Nobel laureate for his work on the LIGO gravitational detectors and the scientific brain behind the blockbuster Interstellar, calls them “master teachers”. But they were teachers with three very different styles: “Wheeler was a charismatic, inspirational visionary. Zel’dovich was the hard-driving player/coach of a tightly knit team. Sciama was a self-sacrificing catalyst.” Sciama proved to be a very effective catalyst. Penrose says, “Sciama seemed to know everything that was going on in physics at the time, especially in cosmology, and he conveyed an infectious excitement to all who encountered him. He was also very effective in bringing together people who might have things of significance to communicate with one another.” According to Thorne, Sciama “had exquisitely good sense about what ideas were interesting, what issues were worth pursuing, what one should read in order to get started on any research project, and whom one should go to for technical advice.” He also notes how Sciama devoted two decades to developing an optimal research environment in his Cambridge research group, during which time his personal research was of second concern. As a result, Sciama never became a full Professor. But two of his students, Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees (Lord Martin Rees, the current Astronomer Royal of England), had become full Professors at Cambridge by the end of that period. The second great mentor of the era was John Wheeler of Princeton, Thorne’s own PhD advisor. The name Wheeler might be familiar to physics students for his role in developing the liquid drop model of the nucleus. But not many know that he was the PhD advisor of celebrated physicist Richard Feynman. Later, during the golden age of black hole physics, he supervised many students who comprise the who’s who of the experts in general relativity and black hole thermodynamics of that generation. Wheeler was an inspirational teacher and a courageous explorer of outlandish ideas. He encouraged ideas that other scientists thought were pure nonsense, and many of these ideas have since become very fruitful. The prime example is the whole area of black hole thermodynamics. Wheeler posed the question of the fate of a cup of tea thrown down a black hole to Jacob Bekenstein, which led to Bekenstein developing the idea of black hole entropy. This was at a time when talking about the entropy and temperature of black holes was considered meaningless because nothing comes out of black holes. But Hawking proved within a couple of years that black holes could radiate, and the field of black hole thermodynamics was established. Thorne writes on Wheeler’s style of mentoring his students, “Wheeler offered his fledglings a philosophical ambience, a sense that there were exciting ideas all around, ready for the plucking; but he rarely pressed an idea, in concrete form, onto a student, and he absolutely never joined his students in exploiting their ideas. Wheeler’s paramount goal was the education of his fledglings, even if that slowed the pace of discovery… Wheeler seemed to us, his fledglings, the busiest man in the world; far too busy with his own projects to demand our attention. Yet he was always available at our request, to give advice, wisdom, encouragement.” The third great mentor, Yakov Zeldovich, had wide interests and worked in a surprising variety of fields. As Varun Sahni, an Indian cosmologist who had been trained in Zeldovich’s group, notes, his career included “major contributions in fields as diverse as chemical physics (adsorption & catalysis), the theory of shock waves, thermal explosions, the theory of flame propagation, the theory of combustion & detonation, nuclear & particle physics, and, during the latter part of his life: gravitation, astrophysics and cosmology.” The story goes that Hawking, on meeting Zeldovich for the first time, is supposed to have remarked, “Now I know that you are a real person and not a group of scientists like the Bourbaki.” Perhaps Zeldovich is best known in the scientific community for his contributions in the area of astrophysics and cosmology, with his name immortalized through the Harrison-Zeldovich spectrum, the Sunyaev–Zeldovich effect, etc. The scientists Zeldovich mentored may not be familiar to the average science enthusiast, partly due to the difficulty in their earlier work permeating through to the west due to the iron curtain and the difference in language. Notable names are Igor Novikov, whom Thorne mentions extensively in his book, Rashid Sunyaev of the Sunyaev–Zeldovich effect and Alexei Starobinsky, who may yet win a Nobel for his work on the theory of inflation in cosmology. Zeldovich had a mentoring style that differed from the patient pedagogy of the previous two, probably a natural style for someone who worked extensively on military projects in the Soviet system. Thorne contrasts his style with that of Wheeler, “Zeldovich whipped his team into shape with a firm hand, a constant barrage of his own ideas, and joint exploitation of his team’s ideas… [he] was on the telephone at ungodly hours of the morning, demanding attention, demanding interaction, demanding progress.” Lest Zeldovich be mistaken for an authoritarian, let me also provide here the first-hand view provided by Sahni. While Zeldovich often demolished silly ideas of senior scientists in a matter of minutes, Sahni remembers the many times he had blundered in Zeldovich’s presence only for Zeldovich to smile and patiently explain the mistakes. Sahni also notes how the students of Zeldovich developed varying styles, ranging from the rigorously mathematical to the highly intuitive. Zeldovich’s influence on his students is perhaps best captured by the statement of Andrei Sakharov, another great Russian physicist, that Zeldovich’s “effect on his pupils was remarkable; he often discovered in them a capacity for scientific creativity which without him would not have been realized or could have been realized only in part...” . As in any other field, mentorship is a valuable resource in the field of science. It is a soft skill that is not easily measured. Further, the effects of mentorship may not be immediate and may be felt only years later. Thus, it is a challenge to not neglect this aspect of science in today’s world of impact factors and citation counts. On the other hand, the strength of mentorship lies in the fact that its effect can have a significant and persistent effect over long timescales and at large distances. As Claudio Bunster (Teitelboim), a protégé of Wheeler and the ‘T’ in BTZ black holes, writes about the institute he founded in Chile, “At latitude 40S there is a science institute where one can find the footprints of Wheeler in every corner.”
1098	dbpedia	3	85	https://www.tiktok.com/discover/dennis-sciama-lecture-theatre-oxford	en	Make Your Day			[]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null		en			null
1098	dbpedia	2	30	https://archive.org/details/unityofuniverse00scia	en	The unity of the universe : Sciama, D. W. (Dennis William), 1926	https://archive.org/services/img/unityofuniverse00scia	https://archive.org/services/img/unityofuniverse00scia	[ "https://archive.org/services/img/etree", "https://archive.org/services/img/librivoxaudio", "https://archive.org/services/img/metropolitanmuseumofart-gallery", "https://archive.org/services/img/clevelandart", "https://archive.org/services/img/internetarcade", "https://archive.org/services/img/consolelivingroom", "https://archive.org/images/book-lend.png", "https://archive.org/images/widgetOL.png", "https://archive.org/services/img/tv", "https://archive.org/services/img/911", "https://archive.org/images/worldcat-small.png", "https://archive.org/services/img/internetarchivebooks", "https://archive.org/services/img/americana", "https://archive.org/services/img/inlibrary", "https://archive.org/services/img/printdisabled", "https://athena.archive.org/0.gif?kind=track_js&track_js_case=control&cache_bust=2074224565", "https://athena.archive.org/0.gif?kind=track_js&track_js_case=disabled&cache_bust=100601100" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	228 p. : 22 cm	en	https://archive.org/images/glogo.jpg	Internet Archive	https://archive.org/details/unityofuniverse00scia	Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet. Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Save Page Now Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future. Please enter a valid web address
1098	dbpedia	0	29	https://tritonstation.com/2024/01/08/discussion-of-dark-matter-and-modified-gravity/	en	Discussion of Dark Matter and Modified Gravity	https://tritonstation.co…ing2016fig4.jpeg	https://tritonstation.co…ing2016fig4.jpeg	[ "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/191bdbc2466e72a533fd37843a1fc7b3?s=100&d=identicon&r=g", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/c1f7303cd6dc32e5187bd9e66c669cf27cdf0df3737e6d975598724df047ad47?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/7015495fb88d0aaf0be24806798ca981dbc735d925c177c6796ffa0fe114e8e7?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/43da052dad0da5905f19dcaabe14ef080c887244de553ce4284d414ae16eb026?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/7c59df6c9feecaaeab6219c0d306f5bf37ec6f04b0d6b64050250787cfbfb7fe?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/7c59df6c9feecaaeab6219c0d306f5bf37ec6f04b0d6b64050250787cfbfb7fe?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", 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"https://tritonstation.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/cropped-tritonstation.png?w=50", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[ "https://www.youtube.com/embed/h-p5dLQ4Fy8?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent" ]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2024-01-08T00:00:00	To start the new year, I provide a link to a discussion I had with Simon White on Phil Halper's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-p5dLQ4Fy8 In this post I'll say little that we don't talk about, but will add some background and mildly amusing anecdotes. I'll also try addressing the one point of factual disagreement. For the…	en	https://tritonstation.co…station.png?w=32	Triton Station	https://tritonstation.com/2024/01/08/discussion-of-dark-matter-and-modified-gravity/	To start the new year, I provide a link to a discussion I had with Simon White on Phil Halper’s YouTube channel: In this post I’ll say little that we don’t talk about, but will add some background and mildly amusing anecdotes. I’ll also try addressing the one point of factual disagreement. For the most part, Simon & I entirely agree about the relevant facts; what we’re discussing is the interpretation of those facts. It was a perfectly civil conversation, and I hope it can provide an example for how it is possible to have a positive discussion about a controversial topic+ without personal animus. First, I’ll comment on the title, in particular the “vs.” This is not really Simon vs. me. This is a discussion between two scientists who are trying to understand how the universe works (no small ask!). We’ve been asked to advocate for different viewpoints, so one might call it “Dark Matter vs. MOND.” I expect Simon and I could swap sides and have an equally interesting discussion. One needs to be able to do that in order to not simply be a partisan hack. It’s not like MOND is my theory – I falsified my own hypothesis long ago, and got dragged reluctantly into this business for honestly reporting that Milgrom got right what I got wrong. For those who don’t know, Simon White is one of the preeminent scholars working on cosmological computer simulations, having done important work on galaxy formation and structure formation, the baryon fraction in clusters, and the structure of dark matter halos (Simon is the W in NFW halos). He was a Reader at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge where we overlapped (it was my first postdoc) before he moved on to become the director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics where he was mentor to many people now working in the field. That’s a very short summary of a long and distinguished career; Simon has done lots of other things. I highlight these works because they came up at some point in our discussion. Davis, Efstathiou, Frenk, & White are the “gang of four” that was mentioned; around Cambridge I also occasionally heard them referred to as the Cold Dark Mafia. The baryon fraction of clusters was one of the key observations that led from SCDM to LCDM. The subject of galaxy formation runs throughout our discussion. It is always a fraught issue how things form in astronomy. It is one thing to understand how stars evolve, once made; making them in the first place is another matter. Hard as that is to do in simulations, galaxy formation involves the extra element of dark matter in an expanding universe. Understanding how galaxies come to be is essential to predicting anything about what they are now, at least in the context of LCDM. Both Simon and I have worked on this subject our entire careers, in very much the same framework if from different perspectives – by which I mean he is a theorist who does some observational work while I’m an observer who does some theory, not LCDM vs. MOND. When Simon moved to Max Planck, the center of galaxy formation work moved as well – it seemed like he took half of Cambridge astronomy with him. This included my then-office mate, Houjun Mo. At one point I refer to the paper Mo & I wrote on the clustering of low surface brightness galaxies and how I expected them to reside in late-forming dark matter halos. I often cite Mo, Mao, & White as a touchstone of galaxy formation theory in LCDM; they subsequently wrote an entire textbook about it. (I was already warning them then that I didn’t think their explanations of the Tully-Fisher relation were viable, at least not when combined with the effect we have subsequently named the diversity of rotation curve shapes.) When I first began to worry that we were barking up the wrong tree with dark matter, I asked myself what could falsify it. It was hard to come up with good answers, and I worried it wasn’t falsifiable. So I started asking other people what would falsify cold dark matter. Most did not answer. They often had a shocked look like they’d never thought about it, and would rather not*. It’s a bind: no one wants it to be false, but most everyone accepts that for it to qualify as physical science it should be falsifiable. So it was a question that always provoked a record-scratch moment in which most scientists simply freeze up. Simon was one of the first to give a straight answer to this question without hesitation, circa 1999. At that point it was clear that dark matter halos formed central density cusps in simulations; so those “cusps had to exist” in the centers of galaxies. At that point, we believed that to mean all galaxies. The question was complicated by the large dynamical contribution of stars in high surface brightness galaxies, but low surface brightness galaxies were dark matter dominated down to small radii. So we thought these were the ideal place to test the cusp hypothesis. We no longer believe that. After many attempts at evasion, cold dark matter failed this test; feedback was invoked, and the goalposts started to move. There is now a consensus among simulators that feedback in intermediate mass galaxies can alter the inner mass distribution of dark matter halos. Exactly how this happens depends on who you ask, but it is at least possible to explain the absence of the predicted cusps. This goes in the right direction to explain some data, but by itself does not suffice to address the thornier question of why the distribution of baryons is predictive of the kinematics even when the mass is dominated by dark matter. This is why the discussion focused on the lowest mass galaxies where there hasn’t been enough star formation to drive the feedback necessary to alter cusps. Some of these galaxies can be described as having cusps, but probably not all. Thinking only in those terms elides the fact that MOND has a better record of predictive success. I want to know why this happens; it must surely be telling us something important about how the universe works. The one point of factual disagreement we encountered had to do with the mass profile of galaxies at large radii as traced by gravitational lensing. It is always necessary to agree on the facts before debating their interpretation, so we didn’t press this far. Afterwards, Simon sent a citation to what he was talking about: this paper by Wang et al. (2016). In particular, look at their Fig. 4: This plot quantifies the mass distribution around isolated galaxies to very large scales. There is good agreement between the lensing observations and the mock observations made within a simulation. Indeed, one can see an initial downward bend corresponding to the outer part of an NFW halo (the “one-halo term”), then an inflection to different behavior due to the presence of surrounding dark matter halos (the “two-halo term”). This is what Simon was talking about when he said gravitational lensing was in good agreement with LCDM. I was thinking of a different, closely related result. I had in mind the work of Brouwer et al. (2021), which I discussed previously. Very recently, Dr. Tobias Mistele has made a revised analysis of these data. That’s worthy its own post, so I’ll leave out the details, which can be found in this preprint. The bottom line is in Fig. 2, which shows the radial acceleration relation derived from gravitational lensing around isolated galaxies: This plot quantifies the radial acceleration due to the gravitational potential of isolated galaxies to very low accelerations. There is good agreement between the lensing observations and the extrapolation of the radial acceleration relation predicted by MOND. There are no features until extremely low acceleration where there may be a hint of the external field effect. This is what I was talking about when I said gravitational lensing was in good agreement with MOND, and that the data indicated a single halo with an r-2 density profile that extends far out where we ought to see the r-3 behavior of NFW. The two plots above use the same method applied to the same kind of data. They should be consistent, yet they seem to tell a different story. This is the point of factual disagreement Simon and I had, so we let it be. No point in arguing about the interpretation when you can’t agree on the facts. I do not know why these results differ, and I’m not going to attempt to solve it here. I suspect it has something to do with sample selection. Both studies rely on isolated galaxies, but how do we define that? How well do we achieve the goal of identifying isolated galaxies? No galaxy is an island; at some level, there is always a neighbor. But is it massive enough to perturb the lensing signal, or can we successfully define samples of galaxies that are effectively isolated, so that we’re only looking at the gravitational potential of that galaxy and not that of it plus some neighbors? Looks like there is some work left to do to sort this out. Stepping back from that, we agreed on pretty much everything else. MOND as a fundamental theory remains incomplete. LCDM requires us to believe that 95% of the mass-energy content of the universe is something unknown and perhaps unknowable. Dark matter has become familiar as a term but remains a mystery so long as it goes undetected in the laboratory. Perhaps it exists and cannot be detected – this is a logical possibility – but that would be the least satisfactory result possible: we might as well resume counting angels on the head of a pin. The community has been working on these issues for a long time. I have been working on this for a long time. It is a big problem. There is lots left to do. +I get a lot of kill the messenger from people who are not capable of discussing controversial topics without personal animus. A lot – inevitably from people who know assume they know more about the subject than I do but actually know much less. It is really amazing how many scientists equate me as a person with MOND as a theory without bothering to do any fact-checking. This is logical fallacy 101. The predictions of MOND are insensitive to the details of galaxy formation. Though of course an interesting question, we don’t need that in order to make predictions. All we need is the mass distribution that the kinematics respond to – we don’t need to know how it got that way. This is like the solar system, where it suffices to know Newton’s laws to compute orbits; we don’t need to know how the sun and planets formed. In contrast, one needs to know how a galaxy was assembled in LCDM to have any hope of predicting what its distribution of dark matter is and then using that to predict kinematics. **The ideas Mo & I discussed thirty years ago have reappeared in the literature under the designation “assembly bias.”
1098	dbpedia	3	9	https://latticelabyrinths.wordpress.com/tag/dennis-sciama/	en	LatticeLabyrinths	https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1cc1a62dba1212c99f22d0863925191bc3d586ab977452def866fae069417571?s=200&ts=1723324401	https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1cc1a62dba1212c99f22d0863925191bc3d586ab977452def866fae069417571?s=200&ts=1723324401	[ "https://latticelabyrinths.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/cropped-giftwrapdiamnond131.jpg", "https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1cc1a62dba1212c99f22d0863925191bc3d586ab977452def866fae069417571?s=48", "https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1cc1a62dba1212c99f22d0863925191bc3d586ab977452def866fae069417571?s=48", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/ecbbed5ae696c248b03ad3cf51139132f7981b4719e338a5dfe905ee88b478d8?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1cc1a62dba1212c99f22d0863925191bc3d586ab977452def866fae069417571?s=50&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Flogo%2Fwpcom-gray-white.png", "https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1cc1a62dba1212c99f22d0863925191bc3d586ab977452def866fae069417571?s=50&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Flogo%2Fwpcom-gray-white.png", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Posts about Dennis Sciama written by davescarthin	en	https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1cc1a62dba1212c99f22d0863925191bc3d586ab977452def866fae069417571?s=32	LatticeLabyrinths	https://latticelabyrinths.wordpress.com/tag/dennis-sciama/	While The Theory of Everything , the Stephen Hawking biopic film, is topical, I interrupt this blog, which is the outcome of one Eureka Moment, to tell you the tale of another such experience. This Eureka Moment was concerned with … Continue reading →
1098	dbpedia	1	65	https://vhistory.wordpress.com/2022/12/27/hawking-dvd-486/	en	Hawking – dvd 486	https://vhistory.wordpre…king-dvd-486.jpg	https://vhistory.wordpre…king-dvd-486.jpg	[ "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/hawking-dvd-486.jpg?w=620", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/fred-hoyle-2.jpg?w=620&h=373", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/benedict-cumberbatch.jpg?w=620&h=373", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/michael-brandon-3.jpg?w=620&h=373", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/st-albans.jpg?w=620&h=373", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/phoebe-nicholls.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/jane-and-stephen.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/tests.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/stephen-gets-the-news.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/frank-hawking.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/john-sessions-19.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/fred-hoyle-3.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/bertie-carvel.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/tom-ward.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/alice-eve.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/peter-firth-3.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/penzias-and-wilson-and-pigeons.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/working-it-out.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/hotle-lectures.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/penrose-lectures.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/relative-trains.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/the-past-is-pear-shaped.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/hawking-proposes.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/dissertation.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/mozart.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/hes-going-to-be-my-husband.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/hoyle-is-still-a-skeptic.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/the-fossil.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/penzias-and-wilson-received-the-nobel.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/fred-hoyle-never-accepted-the-theory.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/roger-penrose-was-knighted.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/stephen-and-jane.jpg?w=620&h=376", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/6a5b0881d0f4abe4915d69bb7cf36df153187f6dcb68234bffe3c1af11c2339d?s=40&d=identicon&r=G", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/f76c58d3cc54928a409335bf268fbf0891eac2b156e368f6b7da25f17ac091f0?s=40&d=identicon&r=G", "https://vhistory.wordpress.com/i/rss/red-small.png?m=1391188133i", "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://s2.wp.com/i/logo/wpcom-gray-white.png", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2022-12-27T00:00:00	We're still finishing up our small cache of rediscovered DVDs, and on today's disc there's one programme - Hawking. It's a BBC film made quite a while before the movie The Theory of Everything and stars young Benedict Cumberbatch as Stephen Hawking. The film does a nice fake-out at the start. We first see a young Hawking…	en	https://s1.wp.com/i/favicon.ico	VHiStory	https://vhistory.wordpress.com/2022/12/27/hawking-dvd-486/	We’re still finishing up our small cache of rediscovered DVDs, and on today’s disc there’s one programme – Hawking. It’s a BBC film made quite a while before the movie The Theory of Everything and stars young Benedict Cumberbatch as Stephen Hawking. The film does a nice fake-out at the start. We first see a young Hawking sitting watching television – he’s actually watching Professor Fred Hoyle on TV saying that the universe has no beginning – that it always existed. This is the Steady State theory, of which Hoyle was the main promoter. I thought perhaps that this was a bit of Archive footage, but Hoyle is played here by Peter Firth. Hawking is watching the TV, sitting in his characteristic slumped pose. But when Hoyle’s broadcast ends, he stands up and switches the TV off. This is young Stephen Hawking, before his motor neurone disease took hold. Intercut with these scenes are scenes from later – 1978 to be exact – as scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson are being interviewed before their Nobel Prize ceremony. Penzias plays a recording for the reporter – it sounds like white noise – and tells him “This is the most profound thing you will hear in your entire life.” The earlier scene with Hawking is actually in St Albans – which just a few miles from where I live. That’s Lisa Dillon who plays Jane Wilde. Phoebe Nicholls plays Hawking’s mother Isobel. It’s Hawking’s 21st birthday, and he had invited Jane to his party. They’re in the garden, looking up at the stars, vaguely flirting. She suggests they should go back to the party. But he finds he can’t get up. In hospital, he undergoes some unpleasant tests. Eventually, the doctor tells him he has motor neurone disease. The neurones that send signals to his muscles are dying. Eventually, his muscles will waste through lack of use. And he will die. But he still embarks on his PhD. His father Frank takes him to Cambridge, and without Stephen knowing, he finds his PhD supervisor, and asks him for his help. “Physics means everything to him. I want him to be happy, Mr Sciama.” Sciama replies “What can I do?” “I want you to set him a question that he can finish. Something easy enough for him to finish. Before he dies.” Dennis Sciama is played by John Sessions. He tells Frank that he can’t do what he asks. Stephen briefly meets Fred Hoyle. There’s some famous faces among Stephen’s college friends. Bertie Carvel plays George Ellis. Tom Ward off of Silent Witness plays Roger Penrose. Alice Eve plays Martha Guthrie, whom Hawking chats up in the bar using Einstein’s theory of relativity. It almost works until she asks him what his star sign is. He has another encounter with Hoyle. “The thing about a big bang is that it’s wrong. Irrational and wrong. It’s my term, “big bang”. Do you know why I called it that? Because it sounds like a cartoon. Big-bang theory is cartoon physics.” Penzias and Wilson are still telling the story of the noise. It’s more radio noise than can be accounted for by the energy of all the galaxies. One theory is that pigeons pooping in their antenna horn was causing the extra noise. “We had the pigeons shot.” They cleaned out all the poop. “The pigeons were innocent. The noise was still there.” Hawking visits Hoyle’s lab again. He talks to Hoyle’s assistant, who shows him Hoyle’s new paper. Hawking reads it, and spends the whole night working out the equations. At Hoyle’s lecture, Hawking stands up at the end and tells him he’s got his maths wrong. Dennis Sciama tells him he should work on something original rather than just demolishing other people’s work. He sits in on one of Roger Penrose’s lectures, where he talks about the work he’s doing on singularities – stars collapsing. This is quite radical at the time. Penrose: “It’s what frightened Einstein.” Hawking: “Singularities can’t exist – the laws of science don’t allow for them.” Penrose persists. “Wrong. Singularities do exist.” He takes a train. When the train next to them starts moving, the woman opposite him starts talking about how strange things happen on the Cambridge platform. “Backwards, now. We are having a time of it.” Hawking has an insight, and gets out of the train, looking for Penrose who had seen him onto the train. He starts drawing a diagram on the ground to explain his idea. “What if the whole of the universe were trapped in a region whose boundary shrinks to zero?” Penrose: “A singularity? Nothingness.” “Your theorem works for collapsing, dying stars. It proves that a singularity must exist. What if it works for this? Could it work? Roger, what would it mean if it did?” “A collapse in reverse.” “Which is?” “An explosion.” “Bang.” Hawking proposes to Jane, but she has to take some time to think about it. He throws himself into his dissertation based on this idea. Dennis Sciama and Penrose have read his dissertation. Sciama: “The first three chapters – nothing special. The fourth…” Penrose finished the thought: “Mozart.” Jane visits him at his rooms (despite women not being allowed). He has to go and see the bursar at Caius college, as he’s been given a fellowship. Hawking tries to explain his specific needs, but the bursar isn’t being helpful. Jane takes over. “You listen to me, and you listen very carefully. This man cannot walk up stairs. His illness won’t allow it, and his illness will get worse. He needs housing with easy access. And YOU are going to find it for him because if you don’t, all the newspapers will hear about how the bursar of this college treats a man of huge courage, brilliant mind and the capacity to imagine faith like a piece of nothing. Do you understand me? And he’s going to be my husband.” Curmudgeonly old Fred Hoyle is still skeptical. “If you’re right, which you’re not, there should be some left-over radiation from the big bang. And somebody should have heard it. But they haven’t, have they? I wonder why that could be? Could it be because it isn’t there? Where’s the fossil, Hawking? Where’s the fossil?” Cut To Arno Penzias’s tape of the 3 degrees of excess heat noise they couldn’t explain. “This noise, this goddam beautiful hiss… It connects. It’s the sound of the beginning of time. The leftover heat from the big bang. The three degrees that hasn’t cooled yet. It’s everywhere. It’s all around us. It’s 15 billion years old. And we found it.” I really enjoyed that. It was interesting, and surprisingly emotional.
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"https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3d6f525fad5f9c92275aef3cc1c4087d?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3d6f525fad5f9c92275aef3cc1c4087d?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/?s=42&d=identicon&r=g", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/b542cfed81f1fd2c11a650841d9e2bb1?s=42&d=identicon&r=g" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Jimmy Akin", "Author Jimmy Akin" ]	2009-04-26T17:20:36-08:00		en			https://jimmyakin.com/2009/04/remember-this-post-10-years-from-now.html
1098	dbpedia	1	32	https://www.sissa.it/news/sciama-sissa-colloquium-gravitation-and-quantum-vacuum-theodore-jacobson	en	Sciama SISSA Colloquium - Gravitation and the Quantum Vacuum - Theodore A. Jacobson	https://www.sissa.it/sit…leEntropy820.png	https://www.sissa.it/sit…leEntropy820.png	[ "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/logo-sissa-mobile.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/logo-type.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/logo-icona.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/logo-sissa-mobile.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-fb.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-tw.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-li.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-fl.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-yt.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/news/BlackHoleEntropy820.png?itok=ajtl-zTv", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-footer-w.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-fb.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-tw.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-li.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-fl.svg", "https://www.sissa.it/themes/custom/sissa/images/icon-yt.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2022-10-06T12:00:00	The traditional Sciama SISSA Colloquium returns later this month, October 19th, at 5 p.m. in room 128-129, with a seminar by Theodore A. Jacobson of the University of Maryland. Gravitation and the quantum vacuum Abstract: 50 years ago Bekenstein introduced the strange notion of black hole entropy to save the second law of thermodynamics, and Hawking's discovery of black hole radiation revealed that this entropy arises from the quantum vacuum. In this talk I'll explain the entropy of the vacuum, and how vacuum thermodynamics leads to Einstein's law of gravitation governing the curvature of the spacetime metric, as well as why the ultimate melding of gravity and the quantum vacuum is not yet fully understood. Ted Jacobson has had numerous research interests, including quantum gravity, Hawking radiation, analog condensed matter models of Hawking radiation, black hole entropy and Lorentz symmetry violation in particle physics and gravitation. He has been awarded the University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada. In 2018 he was appointed Distinguished University Professor of UMD. The Sciama SISSA colloquium is named in memory of Dennis Sciama, one of the most important cosmologists of the 20th century, and for many years a pillar of the astrophysics field at SISSA. A reception outside room 128 will follow the event. Image: AI (Stable Diffusion) generated painting of a supermassive black hole in the style of Leonid Afremov	en	/themes/custom/sissa/favicon.ico	Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati	https://www.sissa.it/news/sciama-sissa-colloquium-gravitation-and-quantum-vacuum-theodore-jacobson	The traditional Sciama SISSA Colloquium returns later this month, October 19th, at 5 p.m. in room 128-129, with a seminar by Theodore A. Jacobson of the University of Maryland. Gravitation and the quantum vacuum Abstract: 50 years ago Bekenstein introduced the strange notion of black hole entropy to save the second law of thermodynamics, and Hawking's discovery of black hole radiation revealed that this entropy arises from the quantum vacuum. In this talk I'll explain the entropy of the vacuum, and how vacuum thermodynamics leads to Einstein's law of gravitation governing the curvature of the spacetime metric, as well as why the ultimate melding of gravity and the quantum vacuum is not yet fully understood. Ted Jacobson has had numerous research interests, including quantum gravity, Hawking radiation, analog condensed matter models of Hawking radiation, black hole entropy and Lorentz symmetry violation in particle physics and gravitation. He has been awarded the University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada. In 2018 he was appointed Distinguished University Professor of UMD. The Sciama SISSA colloquium is named in memory of Dennis Sciama, one of the most important cosmologists of the 20th century, and for many years a pillar of the astrophysics field at SISSA. A reception outside room 128 will follow the event. Image: AI (Stable Diffusion) generated painting of a supermassive black hole in the style of Leonid Afremov
1098	dbpedia	3	50	https://www.port.ac.uk/research/institute-of-cosmology-and-gravitation	en	Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation	https://www.port.ac.uk/themes/custom/portsmouth/favicon.ico	https://www.port.ac.uk/themes/custom/portsmouth/favicon.ico	[ "https://www.port.ac.uk/themes/custom/portsmouth/logo.svg", "https://www.port.ac.uk/themes/custom/portsmouth//images/logo-mobile.png", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/hero_mobile/public/media/images/shutterstock_1608969370.jpeg?h=6b4d5f6d&itok=mOWUJt2n", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/card_mobile/public/media/images/webimage-CF928527-C27C-4C31-9BA1EE1EE4D753BA.jpg?itok=1ro_r1NZ", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/card_mobile/public/media/images/webimage-6A2D832F-C241-4646-80E0E81F2AB58396.jpg?itok=N582-ybg", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/card_mobile/public/media/images/shutterstock_1608969370.jpeg?h=6b4d5f6d&itok=yTQ5bB6m", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/card_mobile/public/media/images/webimage-7F7F849F-60D7-4503-85E86907C62221F8.jpg?itok=rfcDWbu2", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/statement_mobile/public/media/images/webimage-0330AE65-19D6-4D72-94E05A4E3872D202.jpg?itok=UJ5EJgqQ", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/mini_listing_desktop/public/media/images/Enrique%20Gaztanaga.jpg?itok=i7EnkMjf", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/mini_listing_desktop/public/media/images/Untitled%203%20%281%29.png?itok=4c-bpAVN", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/mini_listing_desktop/public/media/images/earth-1756274_1280.jpg?itok=zJMD2BA8", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/mini_listing_desktop/public/media/images/albert-einstein-1933340_1280.jpg?itok=9zNj6zhW", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/mini_listing_desktop/public/media/images/M100_u_asinh.png?itok=2NszFQSX", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/mini_listing_desktop/public/media/images/webimage-C1EF6E7A-EE4A-4802-A194861675B9B820.jpg?itok=f3O9TXaj", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/mini_listing_desktop/public/media/images/moon-1859616_1280_0.jpg?itok=18JjMhVP", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/mini_listing_desktop/public/media/images/black%20hole_0.jpg?itok=DARUNWlD", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/mini_listing_desktop/public/media/images/Nut_Wallis1904_0.jpg?itok=zKLxJSkD", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/mini_listing_desktop/public/media/images/planet-volumes-awYEQyYdHVE-unsplash.jpg?itok=pNiqdY5T", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/people_profile_small/public/person-header-image/4eb14f58-8664-4807-90b6-c99025262fe3-DavidBacon.jpg?itok=fcmuXr-Y", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/embedded_image_part_width_mobile/public/media/images/footer_map_0.png?itok=Y8EmpEti" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2024-08-05T12:00:00+00:00	Explore the University of Portsmouth's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, advancing understanding of cosmic phenomena and gravitational waves.	en	/themes/custom/portsmouth/favicon.ico	University of Portsmouth	https://www.port.ac.uk/research/institute-of-cosmology-and-gravitation	Isaac Physics In 2016 – 2018, the ICG hosted an Isaac Physics Fellow (Dr Nic Bonne) who ran physics problem solving sessions for students and CPD sessions for teachers. While the Isaac Physics Fellow scheme is no longer running you can still access the free online resources that Isaac Physics offer. Cosmic Stroll See the official Cosmic Stroll website for the app that allows you to take a virtual reality stroll through the cosmos. Galaxy Zoo Here is a custom version of Galaxy Zoo for Year 5 designed specifically for outreach sessions as part of our “A Visit from Space” offering to Primary Schools. Please note that clicks collected on that site are not used for research. To contribute to research you need to visit the real version of Galaxy Zoo. Build your own Universe The ‘Build your own Universe’ kit was provided by SEPnet and developed at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). Alternatively you can download the instruction booklet from the link below. ‘Build your own Universe’ instruction booklet (pdf) Spectroscope You may have looked through a CD spectroscope at one of our public events and seen how sources of light split up into different colours. It is easy to make your own spectroscope at home using a CD and a cardboard container, the ones that we have on our stands tend to be made using cereal boxes or kitchen roll tubes. There are lots of websites with instructions for making a CD spectroscope. This video from Dr Andrew Steele shows you how to make a CD spectroscope that is similar to the ones that we have on display and this website shows lots of examples of the different types of spectra that you can see by looking at different types of light. In 2017, the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation introduced a new strategic schools outreach programme, focusing our schools outreach (key stage 2–4) on working with three partner secondary schools in Portsmouth and their feeder primary/junior schools. The idea behind this change is to provide a coherent programme of events and activities that school pupils will participate in throughout their school career, with the goal of moving away from one-off interactions to a sustained programme of repeat engagements with the same pupils. This unfortunately means that we have limited capacity to work with other schools. Events that are open to schools outside of the schools outreach programme will be advertised and booked through the University of Portsmouth Recruitment and Outreach Team. However, if you have any questions about the schools outreach programme, or the ICG’s outreach and public engagement strategy, then please contact the ICG Public Engagement and Outreach Manager, Dr Jen Gupta (jennifer.gupta@port.ac.uk). ICG outreach activities are delivered both on campus at the university and on site at schools, by fully-trained members of the ICG and physics undergraduate students, and are free for the school. The ICG schools outreach programme is supported by the South East Physics Network (SEPnet) and The Ogden Trust.
1098	dbpedia	3	11	https://telescoper.blog/tag/dennis-sciama/	en	In the Dark	https://telescoper.blog/…778407.jpg?w=200	https://telescoper.blog/…778407.jpg?w=200	[ "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/vicent_perugia.jpg?w=450", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/perugia_1.jpg?w=1024", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/perugia_2.jpg?w=685", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/perugia_3.jpg?w=678", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/perugia_4.jpg?w=1024", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/feyndir2.jpg", "https://scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/455751830_3788740474673849_2517385078211900487_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=102&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=H13ooVEThFMQ7kNvgG8PY9q&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYCxxBN9VxOX2LR3DBsInM09UC1-8JdGDEE8HaGEud5aMA&oe=66D265EC", "https://scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/455601929_703916555232586_3192798860048504019_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=p_GPGPK8hgEQ7kNvgGTI5-1&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYBwZzhH_TAXpU35aMoruUrsspFARGA1w0BBxJu172ATuQ&oe=66D27913", "https://scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/455036061_526142259978409_7984350659286158773_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=lH-4Ixj0xIMQ7kNvgFAitG7&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYAeXVvFQSH8B1p5isr52XfJP4yWGRzUegQT0JfhPdY_bg&oe=66D28497", "https://scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/454664445_1201032747757515_4430264853523774306_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=102&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=juFvozK3eQ0Q7kNvgEO17Df&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYDKwg8ClGDduWvNBpj0FmoN2wOxc_yKhDL-puIOLy0qiA&oe=66D267BC", "https://scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/451372901_1162934428330504_4884463404001156311_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=102&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=elVAANf6fm8Q7kNvgHkj_Z9&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYCD4qbSgsOw-NeVKKf70xLHAajzQ4w8NGTeuyEdYdoqxQ&oe=66D28413", "https://scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/454515997_810296821286098_54569585294950364_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=110&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=cLXclYJCBLwQ7kNvgGN_Qf0&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYASomp8MVoZ0qDt4iqh7RAJnOB1ZFHAxcDhofz-WpdC2w&oe=66D27DCF", "https://scontent-iad3-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/454422268_862369822618930_2608265698863365936_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=106&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=yuxCJc9jzIQQ7kNvgE4zjNd&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-2.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYAPzrN6FczZRW5H16pVQ7lTQIKSQILW8l-Ehk42N5xcvA&oe=66D27CE8", "https://scontent-iad3-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/453778332_866553968140966_8013045187197453299_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=105&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=nhJMOhyAfOEQ7kNvgFE_VjR&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-2.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYANopRHbospDlbd2PzvCtLFD-uCgWzZ-kEwDA_SgklGyg&oe=66D26201", "https://scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/451624383_403128782737101_3254072712187938000_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=_KLHL4u3648Q7kNvgGbblGl&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYB_rAoVvX_VI6OZ1gOu7kb1jJEorGbPUKsJtQo6dJwmCg&oe=66D27B9B", "https://telescoper.blog/i/rss/orange-medium.png", "https://telescoper.blog/i/rss/orange-medium.png", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/wp-1590846778407.jpg?w=50", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/wp-1590846778407.jpg?w=50", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Posts about Dennis Sciama written by telescoper	en	https://telescoper.blog/…6778407.jpg?w=32	In the Dark	https://telescoper.blog/tag/dennis-sciama/	My friend and colleague Vicent Martínez sent me this picture which dates from the spring of 1988. It took me a while to figure out where it was taken but I finally came to the conclusion that it was in Perugia (the University thereof) in Italy at a small workshop organized there by Silvio Bonometto. If memory serves that room was called the Aula Mussolini… I am on the far left (looking deranged) and talking to Alain Blanchard (with the long black hair). In between us is Vincent Icke. Further along the same row you can see Dennis Sciama, who is sadly no longer with us, and John Miller. In the middle looking at the camera is Rien van de Weijgaert. Just behind me is Bernard Jones. I guess Vicent must have taken the picture! You can find this and other pictures from this bygone era here. Yes, I know it’s very white and very male. Meetings tended to be like that in those days. Incidentally 1988 was the year that I finished my DPhil thesis so I was still a graduate student at the time of this meeting. I think I gave a talk but can’t remember what it was about! In fact I don’t remember much about that meeting except for the splendid lunch that happened at the end. We took a coach trip to a magnificent Castello in the country and were treated to a lavish banquet of many courses. As luck would have it I sat next to Dennis Sciama at the meal, which I enjoyed greatly. Dennis was my academic grandfather (i.e. he supervised my supervisor). He was a lovely gracious man as well as hugely knowledgeable about a wide range of things, wonderful to talk to, and very generous with his time. He was also teetotal, so when they came to fill up his glass he gave it to me so I had a double wine ration, and a single ration would have been a lot! If I recall correctly the coach trip also took in quick visits to the towns of Cortona and Arezzo. Anyway, seeing that picture sent me a bit down memory lane during which I opened up a box of old photographs to find some more of Perugia. That meeting in 1988 was the first time I’d visited that ancient and beautiful place but I’ve been back a few times since then and on one occasion took a few snaps as I wandered round. I thought black-and-white would capture the atmosphere of the place. You can decide whether I was right! The first picture is of the main square (Piazza IV Novembre) and the second the famous Etruscan Arch, which dates from pre-Roman times, emphasizing how ancient this place is! The town is perched on top of a steep-sided hill so it’s quite hard work getting around on foot but well worth exploring. Follow @telescoper Since getting rid of my telly a few weeks ago I’ve reverted to a previous incarnation as a bookworm, and have been tackling the backlog of unread volumes sitting on my coffee table at home. Over the last couple of days I’ve spent the evenings reading The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo, a biography of the great theoretical physicist Paul Dirac. I’m actually quite ashamed that it has taken me so long to get around to reading this. I’ve had it for two years or more and really should have found time to do it before now. Dirac has long been one of my intellectual heroes, for his unique combination of imagination and mathematical rigour; the Dirac equation is one of the topics I most enjoy lecturing about to physics students. I am also immensely flattered to be one of his academic descendants: Paul Dirac was the PhD supervisor of Dennis Sciama, who supervised my supervisor John Barrow, making me (in a sense) his great-grandson. Not that I’ll ever achieve anything of the magnitude he did. The book is pretty long, and I suppose one of the factors putting me off reading it was that I thought it might be heavy going. That turned out to be far from the case. It’s wonderfully well written, never getting bogged down in details, and cleverly interweaving Dirac’s life and scientific career together against a vivid historical backdrop dominated by the rise of Nazism in Germany and the tragedy of World War 2. It also beautifully conveys the breathless sense of excitement as the new theory of quantum mechanics gradually fell into place. Altogether it’s a gripping story that had me hooked from the start, and I devoured the 400+ pages in just a couple of evenings (which is quick by my standards). I’ve never read a scientific biography so pacey and engaging before, so it’s definitely hats off to Graham Farmelo! Among the book’s highlights for me were the little thumbnail sketches of famous physicists I knew beforehand mostly only as names. Niels Bohr comes across as a splendidly warm and avuncular fellow, Werner Heisenberg as a very slippery customer of questionable political allegiance (likewise Erwin Schrödinger), Ernest Rutherford as blunt and irascible. I was already aware of the reputation of Wolfgang Pauli had for being an absolute git; this book does nothing to dispel that opinion. We tend to forget that the names we came to know through their association with physics also belonged to real people, with all that entails. I was also interested to learn that Dirac and his wife Manci spent their honeymoon in 1937, as the clouds of war gathered on the horizon, in Brighton, which Farmelo describes as ..a peculiarly raffish town., famous for its two Victorian piers jutting imperiously out to sea, for the pale green domes of its faux-oriential pavilions, its future-robot and a host of other tacky attractions. So in most respects it hasn’t changed much, although one of the two piers has since gone for a Burton. So what of Dirac himself? Most of what you’re likely to hear about him concerns his apparently cold and notoriously uncommunicative nature. I never met Dirac. He died in 1984. I was an undergraduate at Cambridge at the time, but he had moved to Florida many years before that. I have, however, over the years had occasion to talk to quite a few people who knew Dirac personally, including Dennis Sciama. All of them told me that he wasn’t really anything like the caricature that is usually drawn of him. While it’s true that he had no time for small talk and was deeply uncomfortable in many social settings, especially formal college occasions and the like, he very much enjoyed the company of people more extrovert than himself and was more than willing to talk if he felt he had anything to contribute. He got on rather well with Richard Feynman, for example, although they couldn’t have had more different personalities. This gives me the excuse to include this wonderful picture of Dirac and Feynman together, taken in 1962 – the body language tells you everything there is to know about these two remarkable characters: Feynman is also an intellectual hero of mine, because he was outrageously gifted not only at doing science but also at communicating it. On the other hand, I suspect (although I’ll obviously never know) that I might not have liked him very much at a personal level. He strikes me as the sort of chap who’s a lot of fun in small doses, but by all accounts he could be prickly and wearingly egotistical. On the other hand, the more I read The Strangest Man the more I came to think that I would have liked Dirac. He may have been taciturn, but at least that meant he was free from guile and artifice. It’s not true that he lacked empathy for other people, either. Perhaps he didn’t show it outwardly very much, but he held a great many people in very deep affection. It’s also clear from the quotations peppered throughout the book that people who worked closely with him didn’t just admire him for his scientific work; they also loved him as a person. A strange person, perhaps, but also a rather wonderful one. In the last Chapter, Farmelo touches on the question of whether Dirac may have displayed the symptoms of autism. I don’t know enough about autism to comment usefully on this possibility. I don’t even know whether the term autistic is defined with sufficient precision to be useful. There is such a wide and multidimensional spectrum of human personality that it’s inevitable that there will be some individuals who appear to be extreme in some aspect or other. Must everyone who is a bit different from the norm be labelled as having some form of disorder? The book opens with the following quote from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which says it all. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. Another thought occurred to me after I’d finished reading the book. Dirac’s heyday as a theoretical physicist was the period 1928-1932 or thereabouts. Comparatively speaking, his productivity declined significantly in later years; he produced fewer original results and became increasingly isolated from the mainstream. Eddington’s career followed a similar pattern: he did brilliant work when young, but subsequently retreated into the cul-de-sac of his Fundamental Theory. Fred Hoyle is another example – touched by greatness early in his career, but cantankerous and blinded by his own dogma later on. Even Albert Einstein, genius-of-geniuses, spent his later scientific life chasing shadows. I think there’s a tragic inevitability about the mid-life decline of these geniuses of theoretical physics, because the very same determination and intellectual courage that allowed them to break new ground also rendered them unwilling to be deflected by subsequent innovations elsewhere. And break new ground Dirac certainly did. The word genius is perhaps over-used, but it certainly applies to Paul Dirac. We need more like him. Follow @telescoper
1098	dbpedia	2	0	https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0778400/bio/	en	Dennis Sciama	https://m.media-amazon.c…al/imdb_logo.png	https://m.media-amazon.c…al/imdb_logo.png	[ "https://fls-na.amazon.com/1/batch/1/OP/A1EVAM02EL8SFB:147-6111610-0351132:3A88JHKF43XTZVF7CXA3$uedata=s:%2Fuedata%2Fuedata%3Fstaticb%26id%3D3A88JHKF43XTZVF7CXA3:0", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/IMDb/Mobile/DesktopQRCode-png.png", "https://fls-na.amazon.com/1/batch/1/OP/A1EVAM02EL8SFB:147-6111610-0351132:3A88JHKF43XTZVF7CXA3$uedata=s:%2Fuedata%2Fuedata%3Fnoscript%26id%3D3A88JHKF43XTZVF7CXA3:0" ]	[]	[]	[ "Dennis Sciama", "Biography" ]	null	[ "IMDb" ]	null	Dennis Sciama. Self: Einsteins Universum. Dennis Sciama was born on 18 November 1926. He was married to Lydia. He died on 18 December 1999 in Oxford, England, UK.	en	https://m.media-amazon.c…B1582158068_.png	IMDb	https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0778400/bio/	Some sources give his date of death as December 18, 1999, others as December 19, 1999. Astrophysicist and cosmologist who, at Cambridge and Oxford, taught a generation of students that became hugely influential in modern cosmological thought, among them John D. Barrow, George Ellis, David Deutsch, and Stephen Hawking. Since 1983, Director of the astrophysics section of the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy. Recognized for his provocative theories on the role of neutrinos in cosmology and for his many-universes hypothesis.
1098	dbpedia	3	46	https://dd70th.weebly.com/tim-palmer.html	en	Tim Palmer	https://cdn2.editmysite.…holder-blank.png	https://cdn2.editmysite.…holder-blank.png	[ "https://cdn2.editmysite.com/images/site/footer/footer-toast-published-image-1.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Celebrating David Deutsch’s 70th Birthday. In memory of our mutual supervisor Dennis Sciama and our graduate student colleague John Barrow, latterly Professor of Cosmology at DAMTP. For all your...	en		For the 70th birthday of David Deutsch	https://dd70th.weebly.com/tim-palmer.html	Celebrating David Deutsch’s 70th Birthday. In memory of our mutual supervisor Dennis Sciama and our graduate student colleague John Barrow, latterly Professor of Cosmology at DAMTP. For all your incredible achievements, David, I have beaten you to one thing, albeit only by a few months: reaching the ripe old age of 70. I have followed your illustrious career since we first got to know each other as graduate students in the Sciama Hut in the 1970s. It’s amazing to reflect on how many of us in the Hut subsequently became Fellows of the Royal Society - our mutual supervisor Dennis Sciama certainly had a golden touch. Indeed this was also a golden age for black hole physics and it was exiting to see ideas around Hawking evaporation and black-hole thermodynamics take shape in real time. We almost wrote a paper together on transfinite causality conditions in relativistic space-times. I suspect the fact we didn’t quite finish the paper reflects badly on me: in truth, I was getting a little outside my zone of mathematical competence. In the end we both completed our theses in somewhat different fields: you on quantum field theory in curved space- time, me on the use of bitensors (more generally tangent-bundle geometry) to formulate a generic quasi-local solution - maybe the first, I’m not sure - to the gravitational energy momentum problem in general relativity. Whilst Dennis was always a source of inspiration, I suspect his light-touch approach to me was not dissimilar to that for you - he let us follow our own noses. However, I remember one day when he did try and steer me in a certain direction. He came into my office telling me how frustrated he was that Hawking’s paper on black-hole evaporation was so arcane - all those hypergeometric Green’s functions that somehow magically turn out to describe Planckian radiation when evaluated at future null infinity. There must be a simpler way to show this, he said to me, as I am sure he must have said to you. And then one day, Dennis more or less instructed me to find out if the Principle of Maximum Entropy Production was going to provide the route to a more intuitive understanding of Hawking radiation. I didn’t like to tell him I had never heard of said principle, and disappeared into the Radcliffe Science Library to find some dusty old books on non-equilibrium thermodynamics. I got absolutely nowhere with the problem. However, this episode teed me me up for a life-changing experience. Although I had been successful in applying for a postdoc position to work in Hawking’s group at DAMTP, for a number of reasons I had a slight nagging doubt whether this was the path I should be taking. By complete chance I met Raymond Hide, an ex President of both the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Meteorological Society. I asked him what was new in climate science and he told me about a paper which had excited him, showing how properties of Earth’s climate were derivable from the Principle of Maximum Entropy Production. It felt like some higher power was telling me what to do with my life. So, after much angsting, I turned down the Cambridge offer. As it happens the Principle of Maximum Entropy Production has had as much influence on my climate career as it had on my doctoral research in GR – zero. However, what has had an influence is chaos theory, which I came to learn a lot about after my switch to climate physics. I feel very strongly [15] that the key discovery of MIT meteorologist Ed Lorenz in the 1960s was not so much the butterfly effect (which everyone knows about now, even Gwyneth Paltrow), but the notion that simple sets of nonlinear differential equations – ones that Isaac Newton would have readily understood – could generate a state-space geometry, fractal geometry, that would have been utterly alien to Newton. Indeed, the state-space geometry of these chaotic systems is formally uncomputable [4] and undecidable propositions like Hilbert’s Halting Problem can be reformulated as a problem in fractal geometry [6]. Indeed p-adic numbers, so vital in number theory these days, are to fractal geometry as real numbers are to Euclidean geometry [10]. In 1987, the 300th Anniversary of Newton’s Principia, Stephen Hawking and Werner Israel edited a book comprising a series of contributions by relativists including one by our mutual Oxford teacher and mentor Roger Penrose. I remember reading Roger’s chapter in Blackwell’s in Oxford. Although I had left the rarified heights of GR 10 years earlier, Penrose’s article brought back my old world to me in an instant. Roger’s article mentioned Bell’s Theorem, and I remember thinking that that was something I never really got to the bottom of when I was Dennis’s student. I started reading a few pedagogical books and papers on the subject in my spare time, and realised that applying ideas from the fractal geometry of chaos could lead to a completely novel interpretation of Bell’s Theorem. I published a paper in Proc. Roy. Soc. [12] claiming that one could formulate a locally causal model of quantum spin, and got back to my day job. From time to time I would try to discuss my ideas with quantum foundations experts, and to my surprise I found it very difficult to persuade them that my approach to the interpretation of Bell’s Theorem was viable. This difficulty continues to the present day. Since I have been thinking about it for so long now, I have been able to refine the argument down to a few basic points. Let me try my idea out on you. Tell me what you think! So, I claim that quantum physics is underpinned by some deterministic locally causal model. You may respond that if that were so, Bell’s inequality would not be experimentally violated. I will reply that this does not follow because another assumption is needed to derive Bell inequalities. This is usually referred to as Statistical Independence. You might respond (as many do) that violating Statistical Independence would signal into existence some crazy conspiratorial processes (e.g. that the experimenters’ minds are under the control of the particles’ hidden variables) that would effectively signal the end of science as we know it. Well, I’m afraid I have to tell you that I think that argument is complete nonsense and this is why. First off, I think Statistical Independence is is a lousy description of the technical assumption ρ(λ\|XY ) = ρ(λ) in Bell’s Theorem, which I would rather describe as the Counterfactual Definiteness assumption. Here, as you know, λ is a hidden variable and X, Y ∈ {０, １} are Alice and Bob’s nominal measurement settings. To see how Counterfactual Definiteness plays a role in Bell’s Theorem, suppose Alice and Bob estimate experimentally the four individual correlations in (the CHSH version of) Bell’s inequality, on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday respectively. Now consider the question: could Monday’s particles have been measured with Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday’s polariser set- tings? Now manifestly you can’t actually perform these measurements since Monday’s particles were absorbed by the measurement devices on Monday - they aren’t available to be measured on Tuesday or later. That is to say, these are counterfactual measurements, and so the answer to the question depends on whether these counterfactual measurements are consistent with the laws of physics, as encoded in one’s putative deterministic locally causal model of quantum physics. Importantly, it must be that all three of these counterfactual measurements are consistent with the putative deterministic locally causal hidden-variable model, for the model to satisfy the Bell inequality. A traditional classical hidden variable model assumes a formula which, for a given λ, spits out a spin value for any measurement setting input. For such a model, the outcome of these counterfac- tual measurements are indeed necessarily well defined. That’s what most people think must be the case when they consider hidden-variable models. So my concern about the well definedness of coun- terfactuals leaves them puzzled. What sort of deterministic model could deny the well-definedness of such counterfactuals? I don’t want to consider a traditional hidden-variable model. Instead I want to consider a non-classical deterministic hidden-variable model. I call this model non-classical because fractal attractors were discovered long after quantum mechanics. So, let’s imagine that the universe is itself a deterministic dynamical system evolving on some fractal chaotic attractor (for the present purposes, a complicated measure-zero dynamically invariant set) – I don’t think there are any cosmological observations that would flat-out contradict such an assumption. If the universe was evolving on such a measure-zero set, then a counterfactual measurement would be inconsistent with the putative laws of physics if the associated counterfactual state of the universe lay in a fractal gap, off the invariant set. What I was able to show with a plausible model consistent with this type of dynamics (see [13] [14] [8] but I am improving the rigour of the argument considerably in a new paper) is that at least one of the three counterfactual measurement scenarios (Monday’s particles – Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday’s measurement settings) lies off the invariant set and hence is inconsistent with our putative laws of physics. At this point, you may start to worry whether experimenters have the freedom to choose their measurement settings, according to this model. Experimenters hate to be told they are not free to chose how to do their experiments! As mentioned, they bring up all the old arguments that if they are not free, then the world has to be conspiratorial which they (rightly of course) find unacceptable. My response to this is: Whoa, hold your horses – who said you are not free to choose? In my model, the nominal measurement settings X, Y are completely under the control of the experimenters: for example they may have engineered pseudo-random number generators with buttons which they can press to reveal either a 0 or a 1, or they can look at the Dow Jones index to determine what values of X and Y to use. I don’t care how the choices are made. However, in my model, it is super-vital to distinguish between nominal measurement settings and exact measurement settings. Suppose Alice and Bob press their buttons to set up a run with the X = ０, Y = ０ measurement settings. Because they are nominal settings, there is for all practical purposes an infinite set of possible exact settings consistent with each of the nominal settings. For any particular run of the experiment, the exact settings will be sensitive to the phase of the moons of Jupiter [2] or to any gravitational waves that might be passing. In my model, whatever the nominal settings X and Y , the exact settings must satisfy what I call a rationality constraint: specifically that the cosine of the angle between Alice’s exact setting and Bob’s exact setting must be a rational number. Importantly, even though they have control over the nominal settings, Alice and Bob have no control over this rationality constraint; it is an unavoidable consequence of my putative law of quantum physics. This condition is not a manifestation of nonlocality because, since it is intrinsic to the putative geometric laws of physics, the rationality constraint cannot be violated by events which happen in space time. That is to say, despite the rationality condition, the model satisfies the local causality condition in space-time, whereby Bob’s spin up/down measurement outcome never depends on Alice’s measurement setting X (and vice versa). Instead, the rationality condition describes a global geometric constraint in state space rather than space-time. This does have major implications for how we should formulate our laws of physics, which I discuss below. In considering the counterfactual measurements where Alice and Bob selected other than they did (i.e. other than X = ０, Y = ０ in the case above), we keep the particles’ hidden variables fixed and vary X and Y . But what are these hidden variables? In my model, the hidden variables for any one of Alice’s particles correspond to one (from an effectively infinite set of) possible pair of exact settings, relative to the nominal settings X = 0 and X = １. Similarly for Bob’s particles. To repeat, these hidden variables represent degrees of freedom (like the phase of the moons of Jupiter or gravitational waves from from distant black-hole merger) over which the experimenters have no control whatsoever. Just as the phase of the moons of Jupiter do not force Alice and Bob to choose which button to press, neither do the hidden variables. If this sounds like a strange idea, think about a newborn baby. Will this baby, in later life, climb Mount Everest or win the Nobel Prize? Some of the information needed to answer these questions will be encoded in the baby’s DNA – that’s a bit like a traditional hidden-variable model where the hidden variables are somehow localised to the particle. But most of the information needed to determine the baby’s achievements won’t be so encoded; they will depend on chance encounters in life as to whether the baby ends up climbing Mount Everest or winning the Nobel Prize. All one can say (assuming a relativistic deterministic world) is that the information needed to answer these questions about the baby lies in the intersection of a spacelike hypersurface going through the birth event, with the interior of the past light cone of the baby’s death event. Similarly here: the support of a particle’s hidden variables at the time the particle is created lies in the intersection of a spacelike hypersurface going through the creation event with the interior of the past light cone of the particle’s measurement event. Again, all locally causal and hunky dory (and, by the way, not requiring any notion of retrocausality). We now come to a non-trivial pivotal result which is a consequence of number theory, specifically Niven’s Theorem [11] which states that the cosine of a rational (in degrees) angle is almost always irrational. From this and the rationality constraint, we can prove the following: take four points on the sphere which we will call ０A, ０B, １A and １B and join the four pairs (０A,０B), (０A,１B), (１B,０A) and (１A,１B) by four great circles. Here ０A corresponds to the exact setting, consistent with Alice’s nominal measurement setting X = ０ and a given fixed value of λ etc. By Niven’s Theorem, it is impossible for the cosine of the four angular distances to all be rational. Just to be clear, it is easy to find three pairs of points (one actual and two counterfactual) which satisfy the rationality constraint. But not four pairs of points. From this we can deduce that at least one of the three counterfactual pairs of measurements that contribute to the CHSH inequality for a fixed λ is inconsistent with the rationality constraint and hence with our putative deterministic locally causal laws of physics. Because of this, it is impossible for our deterministic locally causal theory to satisfy Bell inequality. Once again, I stress that in this model, the selection of the nominal measurement settings is under the full control of the experimenters. There simply are no weird ‘alien mind control’ conspiracies which prevent them from choosing as they like. Now you may ask, yes this is all very well, but does your model satisfy the Tsirelson bound? I will answer yes it does, and say that the rationality constraint arises when you discretise complex Hilbert Space in a certain way consistent with my invariant set model. That is to say, in my model, the complex Hilbert Space of quantum theory arises as an approximation. Experimentally it is a good approximation, indeed as good as you like by making the descretisation scale sufficiently small. However, theoretically, continuum Hilbert Space is a singular limit [3] – and not a smooth limit – as the discretisation scale does to zero. I won’t dwell on this here as it is something I am trying to write up in the coming weeks. But the bottom line is, yes, my model satisfies the experimentally determined Tsirelson bound. So what’s the big message behind this interpretation of the violation of Bell inequalities? It is not that the world is indeterministic or nonlocal (i.e. not locally causal). And we don’t need wormholes to somehow short-circuit long-distance correlations. The implications are even more astonishing than ‘mere’ indeterminism, nonlocality, retrocausality or wormholes, since they have major implications for how we should be looking for a theory of quantum gravity. The implications are that what I would call ‘spatial reductionism’ – that to get a more fundamental perspective on the laws of physics, we must look at processes on smaller and smaller scales – may actually be wrong, even though this principle has held us in good stead over past centuries of scientific research. For example, there is a belief that once we can probe the Planck scale experimentally, we’ll finally be able to understand quantum gravity. I don’t believe this. It may instead be that the fundamental laws of quantum gravity are as much based on equations for the state-space geometry of the universe as a whole, as at the Planck scale. In some sense the Planck scale may simply be the Yang as the universe as a whole is the Yin. Put another way, the laws of physics may ultimately turn out to be as much top-down as bottom-up [14]. Julian Barbour [1] and George Ellis [7] think similarly about this (even though they may not endorse the details on my invariant set model) – what is it about us old timers?! (Gosh, how I would love to know how these ideas fit into your Constructor framework. From what I have read and heard, I think there must be some links.) Looking back at the rather disparate topics that I have worked on over my scientific career, I think the one thing that they have in common is nonlinearity. Whether working on gravitational energy-momentum in GR, discovering the world’s largest (Rossby) breaking waves in the strato- sphere, developing ensemble-based estimates of weather and climate predictability, or proposing this particular interpretation of Bell’s Theorem, nonlinearity has been central to my research career. I do believe strongly that nonlinearity makes things conceptually simple (even though it may make things more computationally difficult). However, regarding Bell’s Theorem, you and I may disagree. You are a proponent of the Everettian interpretation ([5]), which takes the linear Schr ̈odinger equation quite literally. There are some things about Everett which appeal to me. One area where I agree with you 100% is that the physical resource that quantum computers tap into to get their exponential advantage over classical computers is the physical reality of parallel worlds. However, you may argue that since the Schr ̈odinger equation is linear and is well verified by experiment, how can I claim that the quantum world is nonlinear? I would respond that in classical chaos theory, the Liouville equation for evolution of probability is precisely linear in probability density (as it must be if probability is conserved), even though the probabilities are themselves generated by ensembles of states which individually evolve under nonlinear deterministic dynamics. The close formal similarity between the classical Liouville equation and the Schr ̈odinger equation (for Hamiltonian systems at least) screams out to me that there must be a nonlinear deterministic dynamic underpinning the Schr ̈odinger equation. For that reason, I think that the Everettian interpretation is ultimately wrong: the Schr ̈odinger equation simply cannot be the last word on the subject and should not be taken literally. For example, in invariant set theory, there is no splitting or branching of worlds; they merely diverge exponentially on the invariant set as a result of what we might call decoherence. After our PhDs (D.Phils) our paths diverged. Your pioneering work on quantum algorithms has created a new field of technology. My work in weather and climate physics, whilst not as groundbreaking, has led to a new way of making predictions which is having an influence around the world in the way humanitarian agencies respond to possible extreme weather events . By having ensemble-based quantitative estimates of forecast uncertainty, they can now decide when to take Anticipatory Action, sending food, medicine shelters and finance ahead of a natural event hitting some region. This is so much better than the old days when these agencies would simply wait for the weather event to hit (because single deterministic forecasts were too unreliable). I describe this, along with my interpretation of Bell’s Theorem, in my popular book The Primacy of Doubt [15], which I hope will be successful, but will never rival the run-away success of The Fabric of Reality [5]. But we may be converging again – I seem to be returning to my graduate-student roots as I get older and older. Didn’t Shakespeare have something to say about that in his ages-of-man speech? Since our days in the Sciama Hut, the fields of foundations of quantum physics, and arguably quantum gravity, have advanced only modestly. A few weeks ago I watched a YouTube video made in 1986 where Dennis Sciama and Ed Witten were discussing the then nascent string theory (Witten had just won the Dirac medal at ICTP). Dennis was sceptical that advances in basic physics could be made based purely on mathematical elegance – a theme developed by Sabine Hossenfelder [9] – and reminded Witten that the original basis for GR was not pseudo-Riemannian geometry but thinking about hypothetical elevators in deep space. Ed clearly felt differently and expressed the hope that quantum theory would somehow be emergent from the elegant mathematics of string theory. Well that hasn’t happened! I think Dennis was bang on the money. I’m glad I made the switch to climate science when I did, as I suspect, had I gone to Cambridge, I would have got embroiled in the nitty mathematical gritty of string theory’s predecessor supergravity, or something like that, and I would not have made any significant progress at all. After all, I didn’t know anything about fractal geometry in those days – it took a switch to an applied-science field to learn it. You have been successful by also decoupling yourself from mainstream academia. Good on you! Is there something to learn from this? I’ll leave you with one of my favourite quotes from the always-inspirational Roger Penrose [16] - who, as you well know, became a relativist (and as a result won the Nobel Prize) by meeting Dennis in Cambridge: My own view is that to understand [so-called] quantum non-locality we shall require a radical new theory. This theory will not just be a slight modification of quantum mechanics but something as different from standard quantum mechanics as General Relativity is different from Newtonian gravity. Yep! I agree with that. You? Happy Birthday, David. References [1] J. Barbour. Quantum without Quantum. This Volume, 2023. [2] J.S. Bell. Free variables and local causality. Dialectica, 39:103, 1985. [3] M. V. Berry. Singular limits. Physics Today, 55:10–11, 2002. [4] L. Blum, F.Cucker, M.Shub, and S.Smale. Complexity and Real Computation. Springer, 1997. [5] D. Deutsch. The Fabric of Reality. Penguin Books, 1998. [6] S. Dube. Undecidable problems in fractal geometry. Complex Systems, 7:423–444, 1993. [7] G.F.R. Ellis. Top-down causation and quantum physics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115:11661=11663, 2018. [8] Jonte R. Hance, Sabine Hossenfelder, and Tim N. Palmer. Supermeasured: Violating bell- statistical independence without violating physical statistical independence. Foundations of Physics, 52(4):81, Jul 2022. [9] S. Hossenfelder. Lost in Math. Basic Books, 2018. [10] S. Katok. p-adic Analysis compared with Real. American Mathematical Society, 2007. [11] I. Niven. Irrational Numbers. The Mathematical Association of America, 1956. [12] T.N. Palmer. A local deterministic model of quantum spin measurement. Proc. Roy. Soc., A451:585–608, 1995. [13] T.N. Palmer. Discretization of the Bloch sphere, fractal invariant sets and Bell’s theorem. Proc. Roy. Soc., https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2019.0350, arXiv:1804.01734, 2020. [14] T.N. Palmer. Bell’s theorem, non-computabiity and conformal cyclic cosmology: A top-down approach to quantum gravity. AVS Quantum Sci., https://doi.org/10.1116/5.0060680, 2021. [15] T.N. Palmer. The Primacy of Doubt. Oxford University Press, 2022. [16] R. Penrose. The Large, the Small and the Human Mind. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
1098	dbpedia	1	28	https://latticelabyrinths.wordpress.com/tag/dennis-sciama/	en	LatticeLabyrinths	https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1cc1a62dba1212c99f22d0863925191bc3d586ab977452def866fae069417571?s=200&ts=1724685480	https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1cc1a62dba1212c99f22d0863925191bc3d586ab977452def866fae069417571?s=200&ts=1724685480	[ "https://latticelabyrinths.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/cropped-giftwrapdiamnond131.jpg", "https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1cc1a62dba1212c99f22d0863925191bc3d586ab977452def866fae069417571?s=48", "https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1cc1a62dba1212c99f22d0863925191bc3d586ab977452def866fae069417571?s=48", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/ecbbed5ae696c248b03ad3cf51139132f7981b4719e338a5dfe905ee88b478d8?s=48&d=identicon&r=G", "https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1cc1a62dba1212c99f22d0863925191bc3d586ab977452def866fae069417571?s=50&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Flogo%2Fwpcom-gray-white.png", "https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1cc1a62dba1212c99f22d0863925191bc3d586ab977452def866fae069417571?s=50&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Flogo%2Fwpcom-gray-white.png", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Posts about Dennis Sciama written by davescarthin	en	https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1cc1a62dba1212c99f22d0863925191bc3d586ab977452def866fae069417571?s=32	LatticeLabyrinths	https://latticelabyrinths.wordpress.com/tag/dennis-sciama/	While The Theory of Everything , the Stephen Hawking biopic film, is topical, I interrupt this blog, which is the outcome of one Eureka Moment, to tell you the tale of another such experience. This Eureka Moment was concerned with … Continue reading →
1098	dbpedia	1	90	https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/renaissance-of-general-relativity-and-cosmology/machs-principle-and-isotropic-singularities/318D60563598D3EC75EC07C329A51065	en	Mach's principle and isotropic singularities (Chapter 15)	https://www.cambridge.or…hare_600x600.jpg	https://www.cambridge.or…hare_600x600.jpg	[ "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/icn_circle__btn_close_white.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.png", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/logo_core.svg", "https://assets.cambridge.org/97805210/21081/cover/9780521021081.jpg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/page-component/img/share-icon.cbcfad8.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/page-component/img/close-icon.194b28a.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/page-component/img/cite-icon.44eaaa4.svg", "https://www.cambridge.org/core/cambridge-core/public/images/cambridge_logo.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "George Ellis", "Antonio Lanza", "John Miller" ]	null	The Renaissance of General Relativity and Cosmology - November 1993	en	/core/cambridge-core/public/images/favicon.ico	Cambridge Core	https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/renaissance-of-general-relativity-and-cosmology/machs-principle-and-isotropic-singularities/318D60563598D3EC75EC07C329A51065	In this contribution, I review the work of Dennis Sciama and his collaborators on Mach's Principle, saying both what Mach's Principle is, and more generally what we should expect a ‘Principle’ to be and to do. Then I review the notion of an isotropic singularity, and the evidence for a connection between isotropic singularities and Mach's Principle. I suggest that a reasonable formulation of the cosmological part of Mach's Principle is that the initial singularity of space-time is an isotropic singularity, and that Mach's Principle may become a ‘theorem’ of quantum gravity. WHAT IS MACH'S PRINCIPLE? Mach's Principle is the name usually given to a loose constellation of ideas according to which “the inertia of a body is due to the presence of all the other matter in the universe” (Milne 1952) and “the local inertial frame is determined by some average of the motion of the distant astronomical objects” (Bondi 1952). In Wheeler's aphorism “matter there governs inertia here” (Misner et al. 1973). The aim of Mach's Principle is to explain, without recourse to Absolute Space, the origin of inertia, inertial frames and the standard of non-rotation in Newtonian Mechanics, where the existence of these things is a basic assumption.
1098	dbpedia	3	89	https://the-art-of-autism.com/a-film-review-of-the-theory-of-everything/	en	A Film Review of The Theory of Everything	https://i0.wp.com/the-ar…=638%2C479&ssl=1	https://i0.wp.com/the-ar…=638%2C479&ssl=1	[ "https://the-art-of-autism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/TheArtofAutism.png", "https://i0.wp.com/the-art-of-autism.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/The-Theory-of-Everything.jpg?fit=638%2C479&ssl=1", "https://i0.wp.com/the-art-of-autism.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/NilsSkudra.jpg?resize=169%2C300&ssl=1", "https://i0.wp.com/the-art-of-autism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Austin-Jones.jpg?resize=270%2C180&ssl=1", "https://i0.wp.com/the-art-of-autism.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/thumbnail_image_67235841.jpg?resize=270%2C180&ssl=1", "https://the-art-of-autism.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/TheFacebyDavidS.M.D-300x235.jpeg", "https://i0.wp.com/the-art-of-autism.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Dr.-Lamar-Picture-1.jpg?resize=270%2C180&ssl=1", "https://the-art-of-autism.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Daniel-Antonsson.jpg", "https://i0.wp.com/the-art-of-autism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/FB_IMG_15137019579141145.jpg?resize=270%2C180&ssl=1", "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6336455f5ce6edbc9876eddb06c3aa5b?s=72&d=mm&r=g", "https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif", "https://i0.wp.com/the-art-of-autism.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ChaCha-Frog.png?resize=370%2C247&ssl=1", "https://i0.wp.com/the-art-of-autism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/AoAsmall.png?resize=144%2C140&ssl=1", "https://i0.wp.com/www.healthline.com/hlcmsresource/images/topic_centers/2020-4/Autism-best-blog-2020-badge.png?w=650&ssl=1", "https://the-art-of-autism.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/thumbnail_Beaming-Health-Best-Blog-2023-5.png", "https://i0.wp.com/the-art-of-autism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Applied-Behavior-Analysis-Programs-Guide-Top-Autism-Blogs-01-e1535164856986.jpg?fit=300%2C300&ssl=1", "https://anautismobserver.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/bullhorn-noise-a-color-signal-boost-enhanced-257x200.png?w=1200&resize=257%2C200", "https://i0.wp.com/the-art-of-autism.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/white-logo.png?fit=250%2C250&ssl=1" ]	[ "https://www.youtube.com/embed/Salz7uGp72c" ]	[]	[ "nils skudra", "stephen hawking", "the theory of everything", "physicist with a disability", "eddie redmayne", "felicity jones", "als", "eddie redmayne", "felicity jones", "physicist with a disability", "stephen hawking", "the theory of everything" ]	null	[]	2021-06-22T13:35:25	Nils Skudra reviews the movie about Stephen Hawking The Theory of Everything	en	https://i0.wp.com/the-ar…it=32%2C32&ssl=1	The Art of Autism	https://the-art-of-autism.com/a-film-review-of-the-theory-of-everything/	By Nils Skudra This week I took the opportunity to watch The Theory of Everything, a 2014 biographical film about the renowned cosmologist and physicist Stephen Hawking who struggled with ALS (commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) throughout his life but achieved remarkable success and international fame for his contributions to scientific theory. I felt that this film would be an ideal candidate for a review since it depicts how Hawking’s disability profoundly affected his marriage and his personal life, but in spite of this he did not let the disease become an obstacle to his professional achievements. This is a message that can resonate with people of various disabilities since they have the ability to fulfill their potential if they have the necessary willpower and support from family. The film opens with Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) in a wheelchair at Buckingham Palace with his family, awaiting their meeting with Queen Elizabeth II. As Stephen circles about and watches his children playing, he reminisces about his time at the University of Cambridge in 1962, which the film subsequently flashes back to. As a young PhD student, an able-bodied Stephen is shown bicycling with his friend and roommate Brian to a college party, where he meets Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones), a literature student who is told by her friend that Stephen is “strange but clever.” She quickly takes a liking to him, although they differ in their religious views; while she is a devout Christian, he refers to his field of cosmology as “a kind of religion for intelligent atheists.” A connection quickly develops between them, and she gives him her phone number, indicating that she would be interested in meeting him again. Stephen is currently struggling to determine a thesis topic for his PhD, which is a source of concern for his friends and his professor Dennis Sciama (David Thewlis), who recognizes Stephen’s mathematical brilliance and encourages him to attend an upcoming lecture about black holes in London. Meanwhile, he continues to court Jane, inviting her to his parents’ home for dinner where he announces that he will be taking her to the college dance, much to Jane’s surprise since he had not consulted her about this. During the event, Stephen displays some signs of social awkwardness since he prefers to watch the dancing rather than take part in it, and he makes intriguing scientific observations about the ultraviolet light being reflected off of the dancers. Nonetheless, when they are alone together on the bridge, he finds comfort in dancing with Jane, and they share a kiss. While Stephen works on the research for his thesis, he begins to display signs of a mysterious disease, as his hands experience tremors that cause shaking and difficulty in properly picking up a pen. In addition, as he makes his way up the train platform for his class trip to London, he stumbles and holds onto the railing, momentarily halting before he boards the train. The lecture gives Stephen the inspiration to make black holes the focus of his thesis topic, speculating that they may have played a role in the creation of the universe. He explains this to Jane in terms of “winding back the clock” to the beginning of time, and Prof. Sciama encourages him to develop the mathematics that will support his thesis. However, things take a frightening turn when Stephen’s muscle tremors cause him to trip and hit his head, resulting in his hospitalization. Following his medical examination, Stephen learns that he has been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive neuromuscular disease which kills the brain cells responsible for his motor functions, such as eating, swallowing, speaking, or breathing, and will result in gradual muscle deterioration. This will eventually lead to a complete loss of the ability to control voluntary movement. In addition, he is told that while the disease will not affect his thoughts, the gradual loss of speech means that he will ultimately be unable to articulate them. He is given a grim prognosis for an average life expectancy of two years, a revelation which makes Stephen reclusive and bitter, and he isolates himself from Jane in order to complete his PhD with the time that he has left. When Jane learns about Stephen’s diagnosis, she comes to visit him and insists that he come out to play a game of croquet with her, which he grudgingly agrees to do. During the game, Jane sees firsthand the severity of Stephen’s condition, as he stumbles and hobbles while walking and struggles to pick up the croquet ball. She is heartbroken by this, but instead of abandoning Stephen she confesses her love for him and announces her desire to marry him. Although Stephen protests that his condition will affect everything in their marriage and that he only has two years to live, she states, “I want us to be together for as long as we’ve got, and if that’s not very long, well, then that’s just how it is. It’ll have to do.” She later reaffirms this resolve in a discussion with Stephen’s father in spite of his warning that “the weight of science is against you,” to which she replies, “I know what you all think, that I don’t look like a terribly strong person. But I love him, and he loves me. We’re going to fight this illness, together.” Stephen and Jane subsequently marry, and they soon have their first child Robert. Stephen’s cognizance of his limited life expectancy gives him the conviction to write about the history of time, leading to his PhD thesis on the creation of the universe through a Big Bang, followed by the emission of heat and an eventual end of the universe in a Big Crunch. Prof. Sciama and the other examination board members are deeply impressed by Stephen’s thesis, and he receives his PhD. When asked what his next goal will be, Stephen answers, To prove with a single equation that time had a beginning. Wouldn’t that be nice professor? The one simple elegant equation, to explain everything. Although Stephen’s PhD is a cause for celebration with his friends and family, his condition continues to worsen as he loses the ability to walk, evidenced by his painful effort to crawl up the stairs toward his son. Consequently, he must use a wheelchair, and he is given a bed in the kitchen, which, he jokingly remarks, is “convenient for breakfast.” After the birth of their daughter Lucy, Stephen is inspired to develop a new theory about the visibility of black holes while viewing the fireplace flames through his sweater, and his presentation of this theory leads to international recognition as a physicist. Jane then buys him an electric wheelchair, which makes his mobility more efficient, but the burden of caring for him and their children, with whom he constantly plays and knocks things over in the household, prevents Jane from concentrating on her thesis. Her frustration and depression come to a head when Stephen chokes while visiting his parents, after which she angrily tells him, “I can’t do this on my own,” and rebuffs his reply that they are a normal family, protesting, “No, we are not a normal family! Robbie is missing out on his childhood!” Jane’s mother convinces her to join the local church choir in order to ease some of the pressure from her family life. Upon meeting the choir master Jonathan Jones (Charlie Cox), who is immediately attracted to her, Jane informs him of her need for help in caring for Stephen and invites him to dinner at their home. While Stephen is initially suspicious of Jonathan, he develops a liking for him and tells Jane that he will not object to Jonathan’s support. Jonathan thus becomes a close friend of the family, giving the children piano lessons, helping Stephen with his needs, and going out on vacations with them. In the process, he and Jane develop romantic feelings for each other, although she remains faithful to Stephen. Following the birth of their third child Timothy, suspicion falls upon Jane from Stephen’s mother due to Jonathan’s closeness with the family, prompting him to withdraw from their lives, although he and Jane privately admit their feelings for one another. Nonetheless, Stephen maintains his trust in Jonathan and asks him to accompany Jane and the children on a camping trip while Stephen attends an opera production in Bordeaux, France. Jane is thus left with the opportunity to examine, and possibly act upon, her feelings for Jonathan, but their trip is cut short when they learn that Stephen has fallen ill during the performance and is in hospital. She learns that he has contracted pneumonia and must undergo a tracheotomy in order to survive, although this will deprive him of his voice. While she is warned that Stephen may not survive the surgery, Jane adamantly insists that it must take place and asserts that her husband will live. Following the tracheotomy, Stephen is deeply depressed over losing his ability to speak, and he is unresponsive when Jane uses a spelling board in an effort to make him communicate by blinking his eyes. However, when she hires Elaine Mason (Maxine Peake) as Stephen’s new live-in nurse, he finds her to have a more vibrant and down-to-earth personality, and therefore he eagerly cooperates when Elaine communicates with him. They soon acquire a voice synthesizer for Stephen, enabling him to communicate with a computerized voice and write a best-selling book, entitled A Brief History of Time. Over the course of his time with Elaine, he falls in love with her, as she easily connects with him and understands his prurient interest in pornography. She in turn is impressed by his sharp wit and sense of humor, and Jane is increasingly excluded from their interactions. After he is invited to speak at an award ceremony in America, Stephen confesses to Jane that he has asked Elaine to accompany him, with the expectation that she, rather than Jane, will take care of him. Jane takes this as a devastating betrayal, having spent 25 years supporting Stephen through his illness and having raised a family with him. When Stephen asks “How many years,” Jane tearfully responds, “They said two. We’ve had so many.” Stephen then tries to comfort her, stating, “Everything will be okay,” to which Jane solemnly replies, “I have loved you. I did my best.” This scene is one of the most heartbreaking moments of the film since it effectively signals the end of Stephen’s and Jane’s marriage, in which she has cared for him and stayed by his side at a tremendous emotional and psychological cost, and viewers may feel very unsympathetic toward Stephen for leaving a companion who has shown such immense loyalty to him. Stephen’s divorce from Jane leaves her free to renew her relationship with Jonathan, which quickly leads to their marriage. During the award ceremony in America, Stephen is commended by Prof. Sciama for having “defied every obstacle, both scientific and personal,” and he arrives onstage to accept the award and answer questions from the audience. While being asked about his philosophy of life, Stephen notices a student dropping her pen on the floor, which prompts him to imagine getting up out of his wheelchair to retrieve it, which brings him to the verge of tears since he knows that he cannot. Finally, in response to the question, he answers: There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there’s life, there is hope. This statement is a profound reflection on Stephen’s accomplishments in the face of all the suffering that he has experienced due to his disease. Originally given a prognosis of two years, he has far outlived that prediction and achieved astounding success as a physicist through his intellectual pursuits and the fervent support that Jane has given him. In addition, although most able-bodied women would probably have rejected him because of his illness, he found in Jane a strong and supportive soulmate who accepted his condition and cared for him, even though it was a heavy emotional burden for her. Furthermore, they have raised three children together, a fact which maintains their bond on friendly terms in the aftermath of their divorce. This is beautifully captured in the film’s climactic scene following their meeting with the queen; as they walk through the royal gardens, Stephen writes “Look what we made,” and he and Jane watch their children as they come to join their parents. Finally, the film flashes back through a series of defining moments in Stephen’s life, concluding with the party in which he and Jane first met. Eddie Redmayne delivers a superb, Oscar-winning performance as Stephen Hawking, brilliantly capturing his personality and the successive stages of his disability. In the DVD special features, Redmayne recalls that he studied extensively about ALS, which included meeting the real Stephen Hawking and other individuals who have the disease, in order to understand its symptoms. Some critics may object that the casting of Redmayne in the role of Hawking poses issues of representation since he is an able-bodied actor while a real-life ALS actor would truly convey the challenges of having the disease. However, I believe that Redmayne’s portrayal is highly convincing, and the fact that he carried out in-depth research on ALS and consulted with real-life ALS individuals shows that he brought a deep sensitivity to his performance. In my opinion, Redmayne definitely earned his Oscar award for his performance. Felicity Jones also delivers a compelling, Oscar-nominated performance as Jane Hawking, beautifully conveying her assertiveness and her emotional vulnerability as she struggles to care for Stephen. She and Redmayne have a superb onscreen chemistry, and both of the real Hawkings stated that they felt the actors truly captured them. Furthermore, the film articulates a powerful message about the potential of individuals with severe, often life-threatening disabilities to achieve personal and professional success, as well as the challenges that families can face in supporting them. For disabled viewers, hopefully The Theory of Everything can provide an inspiration for them to pursue their dreams, and while their families may certainly relate to its depiction of the challenges that Jane Hawking struggled with in caring for Stephen, they can still come away with the resolve to support their family members so that they can fulfill those dreams. I am an artist on the autism spectrum. I received an MA specializing in Civil War/Reconstruction history at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and I have been drawing hundreds of Civil War-themed pictures since the age of five and a half. I’m now working on a secondary Master’s in Library Science. As a person with Asperger’s Syndrome, I have a very focused set of interests, and the Civil War is my favorite historical event within that range of interests. It is therefore my fervent desire to become a Civil War historian and have my Civil War artwork published in an art book for children. I am also very involved in the autism community and currently serve as the President/Head Officer of Spectrum at UNCG, an organization I founded for students on the autism spectrum. The goal of the organization is to promote autism awareness and foster an inclusive community for autistic students on the UNCG campus. The group has attracted some local publicity and is steadily gaining new members, and we shall be hosting autism panels for classes on campus in the near future.
1098	dbpedia	1	86	https://www.cam.ac.uk/news/professor-stephen-hawking-1942-2018	en	Professor Stephen Hawking 1942-2018	https://www.cam.ac.uk/si…b-story-crop.jpg	https://www.cam.ac.uk/si…b-story-crop.jpg	[ "https://www.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.cam.ac.uk/files/logo.png", "https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png", "https://www.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.cam.ac.uk/files/logo.png", "https://www.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.cam.ac.uk/modules/contrib/most_viewed/stat.php?entity_type=node&bundle=news&entity_id=194592" ]	[]	[]	[ "Stephen Hawking", "Stephen J Toope Stephen Hawking", "Stephen J Toope Centre for Theoretical Cosmology", "Gonville and Caius College", "School of the Physical Sciences", "-Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics", "Trinity Hall Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics", "Centre for Theoretical Cosmology", "School of the Physical Sciences", "Trinity Hall", "Gonville and Caius College" ]	null	[]	2018-03-14T00:00:00	Widely regarded as one of the world’s most brilliant minds, he was known throughout the world for his contributions to science, his books, his television	en	https://www.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.cam.ac.uk/files/favicon.ico	University of Cambridge	https://www.cam.ac.uk/news/professor-stephen-hawking-1942-2018	Widely regarded as one of the world’s most brilliant minds, he was known throughout the world for his contributions to science, his books, his television appearances, his lectures and through biographical films. He leaves three children and three grandchildren. Professor Hawking broke new ground on the basic laws which govern the universe, including the revelation that black holes have a temperature and produce radiation, now known as Hawking radiation. At the same time, he also sought to explain many of these complex scientific ideas to a wider audience through popular books, most notably his bestseller A Brief History of Time. He was awarded the CBE in 1982, was made a Companion of Honour in 1989, and was awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. He was the recipient of numerous awards, medals and prizes, including the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, the Albert Einstein Award, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Fundamental Physics Prize, and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award for Basic Sciences. He was a Fellow of The Royal Society, a Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He achieved all this despite a decades-long battle motor neurone disease, with which he was diagnosed while a student, and eventually led to him being confined to a wheelchair and to communicating via his instantly recognisable computerised voice. His determination in battling with his condition made him a champion for those with a disability around the world. Professor Hawking came to Cambridge in 1962 as a PhD student and rose to become the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a position once held by Isaac Newton, in 1979. In 2009, he retired from this position and was the Dennis Stanton Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery Director of Research in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics until his death - he was also a member of the University's Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, which he founded in 2007. He was active scientifically and in the media until the end of his life. Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, paid tribute, saying, “Professor Hawking was a unique individual who will be remembered with warmth and affection not only in Cambridge but all over the world. His exceptional contributions to scientific knowledge and the popularisation of science and mathematics have left an indelible legacy. His character was an inspiration to millions. He will be much missed.” Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942 in Oxford although his family was living in north London at the time. In 1959, the family moved to St Albans where he attended St Albans School. Despite the fact that he was always ranked at the lower end of his class by teachers, his school friends nicknamed him ‘Einstein’ and seemed to have encouraged his interest in science. In his own words, “physics and astronomy offered the hope of understanding where we came from and why we are here. I wanted to fathom the depths of the Universe.” His ambition brought him a scholarship to University College Oxford to read Natural Science.There he studied physics and graduated with a first class honours degree. He then moved to Trinity Hall Cambridge and was supervised by Dennis Sciama at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics for his PhD; his thesis was titled ‘Properties of Expanding Universes.’ In 2017, he made his PhD thesis freely available online via the University of Cambridge’s Open Access repository. There have been over a million attempts to download the thesis, demonstrating the enduring popularity of Professor Hawking and his academic legacy. On completion of his PhD, he became a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College where he remained a fellow for the rest of his life. During his early years at Cambridge, he was influenced by Roger Penrose and developed the singularity theorems which show that the Universe began with the Big Bang. An interest in singularities naturally led to an interest in black holes and his subsequent work in this area laid the foundations for the modern understanding of black holes. He proved that when black holes merge, the surface area of the final black hole must exceed the sum of the areas of the initial black holes, and he showed that this places limits on the amount of energy that can be carried away by gravitational waves in such a merger. He found that there were parallels to be drawn between the laws of thermodynamics and the behaviour of black holes. This eventually led, in 1974, to the revelation that black holes have a temperature and produce radiation, now known as Hawking radiation, a discovery which revolutionised theoretical physics. He also realised that black holes must have an entropy – often described as a measure of how much disorder is present in a given system – equal to one quarter of the area of their event horizon: – the ‘point of no return’, where the gravitational pull of a black hole becomes so strong that escape is impossible. Some forty-odd years later, the precise nature of this entropy is still a puzzle. However, these discoveries led to Hawking formulating the ‘information paradox’ which illustrates a fundamental conflict between quantum mechanics and our understanding of gravitational physics. This is probably the greatest mystery facing theoretical physicists today. To understand black holes and cosmology requires one to develop a theory of quantum gravity. Quantum gravity is an unfinished project which is attempting to unify general relativity, the theory of gravitation and of space and time with the ideas of quantum mechanics. Hawking’s work on black holes started a new chapter in this quest and most of his subsequent achievements centred on these ideas. Hawking recognised that quantum mechanical effects in the very early universe might provide the primordial gravitational seeds around which galaxies and other large-scale structures could later form. This theory of inflationary fluctuations, developed along with others in the early 1980’s, is now supported by strong experimental evidence from the COBE, WMAP and Planck satellite observations of the cosmic microwave sky. Another influential idea was Hawking’s ‘no boundary’ proposal which resulted from the application of quantum mechanics to the entire universe. This idea allows one to explain the creation of the universe in a way that is compatible with laws of physics as we currently understand them. Professor Hawking’s influential books included The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime, with G F R Ellis; General Relativity: an Einstein centenary survey, with W Israel; Superspace and Supergravity, with M Rocek (1981); The Very Early Universe, with G Gibbons and S Siklos, and 300 Years of Gravitation, with W Israel. However, it was his popular science books which took Professor Hawking beyond the academic world and made him a household name. The first of these, A Brief History of Time, was published in 1988 and became a surprise bestseller, remaining on the Sunday Times best-seller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. Later popular books included Black Holes and Baby Universes, The Universe in a Nutshell, A Briefer History of Time, and My Brief History. He also collaborated with his daughter Lucy on a series of books for children about a character named George who has adventures in space. In 2014, a film of his life, The Theory of Everything, was released. Based on the book by his first wife Jane, the film follows the story of their life together, from first meeting in Cambridge in 1964, with his subsequent academic successes and his increasing disability. The film was met with worldwide acclaim and Eddie Redmayne, who played Stephen Hawking, won the Academy Award for Best Actor at the 2015 ceremony. Travel was one of Professor Hawking’s pastimes. One of his first adventures was to be caught up in the 7.1 magnitude Bou-in-Zahra earthquake in Iran in 1962. In 1997 he visited the Antarctic. He has plumbed the depths in a submarine and in 2007 he experienced weightlessness during a zero-gravity flight, routine training for astronauts. On his return, he quipped “Space, here I come.” Writing years later on his website, Professor Hawking said: “I have had motor neurone disease for practically all my adult life. Yet it has not prevented me from having a very attractive family and being successful in my work. I have been lucky that my condition has progressed more slowly than is often the case. But it shows that one need not lose hope.” At a conference In Cambridge held in celebration of his 75th birthday in 2017, Professor Hawking said “It has been a glorious time to be alive and doing research into theoretical physics. Our picture of the Universe has changed a great deal in the last 50 years, and I’m happy if I’ve made a small contribution.” And he said he wanted others to feel the passion he has for understanding the universal laws that govern us all. “I want to share my excitement and enthusiasm about this quest. So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious, and however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.”
1098	dbpedia	3	5	https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/743188/observational-status-of-sciamas-hypothesis	en	Observational status of Sciama's hypothesis	https://cdn.sstatic.net/…g?v=f58801408228	https://cdn.sstatic.net/…g?v=f58801408228	[ "https://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/physics/Img/logo.svg?v=6eb7d730c013", "https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/e1f812069a573c4685c26114aaaf2ca6?s=64&d=identicon&r=PG&f=y&so-version=2", "https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b8b02aeec1ef26bb34e4d477d11d8446?s=64&d=identicon&r=PG&f=y&so-version=2", "https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/743188/ivc/5148?prg=3a97b876-2c4d-47e4-8319-5f4808d2c780" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Martin C" ]	2022-12-30T10:41:17	I have always taken the existence of inertia more or less for granted, as an observational fact that does not require explanation. But on reflection this is an unscientific attitude, and perhaps th...	en	https://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/physics/Img/favicon.ico?v=e8ea30e2eacd	Physics Stack Exchange	https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/743188/observational-status-of-sciamas-hypothesis	I have always taken the existence of inertia more or less for granted, as an observational fact that does not require explanation. But on reflection this is an unscientific attitude, and perhaps there exists a deeper reason for the existence of inertial mass. Of course, in the absence of an explanatory theory of inertia that makes testable predictions we should be wary of ascribing importance to an observation that seems to stand by itself, but that does not mean the question is somehow beyond the realm of scientific inquiry. Happily, in (1) Sciama put forth the bold hypothesis that the inertia of a single object is due to the action of the mass of the rest of the universe (since becoming aware of this I have found various other theories of inertia of greater or lesser cogency, but many of them seem to veer into quackery). Sciama also worked out a prediction of his theory - that is, his theory is falsifiable. Specifically, the gravitational constant becomes a function of the distribution of matter in the (presumably observable) universe, so that a precise value of G predicts a value for the mean density of the universe. The value provided in the original paper of 1953 is $\rho \approx 5\times 10^{-27}g cm^{-3} $ , which Sciama argued was not incompatible with the observational estimates of the time ($\rho \approx \times 10^{-30}g cm^{-3}$). A quick google search (e.g. https://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_matter.html) suggests current estimates are around $9.9 \times 10^{-30}gcm^{-3}$, i.e. still of the same order of magnitude as in the 1950s(!). Is this sufficient to definitively falsify Sciama's theory (which made numerous simplifications), or are there reasons to doubt this quantity?
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"https://assets.nautil.us/sites/3/nautilus/mD4J3ssM-Hossenfelder_HERO.png?q=65&auto=format&w=700&ar=16:9&fit=crop", "https://nautil.us/wp-content/themes/nautilus-block-theme/images/logo/light.svg", "https://nautil.us/wp-content/themes/nautilus-block-theme/images/icons/facebook-icon.svg", "https://nautil.us/wp-content/themes/nautilus-block-theme/images/icons/twitter-icon.svg", "https://nautil.us/wp-content/themes/nautilus-block-theme/images/icons/instagram-icon.svg", "https://nautil.us/wp-content/themes/nautilus-block-theme/images/icons/close-icon.svg", "https://assets.nautil.us/sites/3/nautilus/szdBs2Dz-2257253_ScienceNewsletter_1_1080x1080_0423241.png?auto=compress&fm=png&ixlib=php-3.3.1", "https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=361539494488717&ev=PageView&noscript=1" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Tasneem Zehra Husain" ]	2017-01-09T17:37:35+00:00	It’s not the immensity or inscrutability, but that it reduces physical law to happenstance.	en	https://nautil.us/wp-con…ages/favicon.png	Nautilus	https://nautil.us/even-physicists-find-the-multiverse-faintly-disturbing-236365/	How do you feel about the multiverse?” The question was not out of place in our impromptu dinner-table lecture, yet it caught me completely off-guard. It’s not that I’ve never been asked about the multiverse before, but explaining a theoretical construct is quite different to saying how you feel about it. I can put forth all the standard arguments and list the intellectual knots a multiverse would untangle; I can sail through the facts and technicalities, but I stumble over the implications. In physics we’re not supposed to talk about how we feel. We are a hard-nosed, quantitative, and empirical science. But even the best of our dispassionate analysis begins only after we have decided which avenue to pursue. When a field is nascent, there tend to be a range of options to consider, all of which have some merit, and often we are just instinctively drawn to one. This choice is guided by an emotional reasoning that transcends logic. Which position you choose to align yourself with is, as Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind says, “about more than scientific facts and philosophical principles. It is about what constitutes good taste in science. And like all arguments about taste, it involves people’s aesthetic sensibilities.” My own research is in string theory, and one of its features is that there exist many logically consistent versions of the universe other than our own. The same process that created our universe can also bring those other possibilities to life, creating an infinity of other universes where everything that can occur, does. The chain of arguments starts from a place I’m familiar with, and I can follow the flourishes that the equations make as they dance down the page toward this particular conclusion, but, while I understand the multiverse as a mathematical construction, I cannot bring myself to believe it will leap out of the realm of theory and find a manifestation in physical reality. How do I pretend I have no problem accepting the fact that infinite copies of me might be parading around in parallel worlds making choices both identical to, and different from, mine? I am not alone in my ambivalence. The multiverse has been hotly debated and continues to be a source of polarization among some of the most prominent scientists of the day. The debate over the multiverse is not a conversation about the particulars of a theory. It is a fight about identity and consequence, about what constitutes an explanation, what proof consists of, how we define science, and whether there is a point to it all. Whenever I talk about the multiverse, one of the questions that inevitably comes up is one I actually have an answer to. Whether we live in a universe or multiverse, these classifications relate to scales so large they defy imagination. No matter the outcome, life around us isn’t going to change one way or another. Why does it matter? It matters because where we are influences who we are. Different places call forth different reactions, give rise to different possibilities; the same object can look dramatically different against different backgrounds. In more ways than we are perhaps conscious of, we are molded by the spaces we inhabit. The universe is the ultimate expanse. It contains every arena, every context in which we can realize existence. It represents the sum total of possibilities, the complete set of all we can be. A measurement makes sense only within a reference frame. Numbers are clearly abstract until paired with units, but even vague assessments such as “too far,” “too small,” and “too strange” presume a coordinate system. Too far invokes an origin; too small refers to a scale; too strange implies a context. Unlike units, which are always stated, the reference frame of assumptions is seldom specified, and yet the values we assign to things—objects, phenomena, experiences—are calibrated against these invisible axes. If we find out that all we know, and all we can ever know, is just one pocket in the multiverse, the entire foundation upon which we have laid our coordinate grid shifts. Observations don’t change, but implications do. The presence of those other bubble universes out there might not impact the numbers we measure here on our instruments, but could radically impact the way we interpret them. The first thing that strikes you about the multiverse is its immensity. It is larger than anything humankind has ever dealt with before—the aggrandizement is implicit in the name. It would be understandable if the passionate responses provoked by the multiverse came from feeling diminished. Yet the size of the multiverse is perhaps its least controversial feature. The debate over the multiverse is a fight about identity and consequence. Gian Giudice, head of CERN’s theory group, speaks for most physicists when he says that one look at the sky sets us straight. We already know our scale. If the multiverse turns out to be real, he says, “the problem of me versus the vastness of the universe won’t change.” In fact, many find comfort in the cosmic perspective. Framed against the universe, all our troubles, all the drama of daily life, diminishes so dramatically that “anything that happens here is irrelevant,” says physicist and author Lawrence Krauss. “I find great solace in that.” From the stunning photographs the Hubble Space telescope has beamed back to Octavio Paz’s poems of “the enormous night” to Monty Python’s “Galaxy Song” to be sung “whenever life gets you down,” there is Romanticism associated with our Lilliputian magnitude. At some point in our history, we appear to have made peace with the fact we are infinitesimal. If it isn’t because we are terrified of the scale, are we resistant to the notion of the multiverse because it involves worlds that are out of sight and seem doomed to remain so? This is indeed a common complaint I hear from my colleagues. South African physicist George Ellis (who is strongly opposed to the multiverse) and British cosmologist Bernard Carr (an equally strong advocate) have discussed such issues in a series of fascinating conversations. Carr suggests their fundamental point of diversion concerns “which features of science are to be regarded as sacrosanct.” Experimentation is the traditional benchmark. Comparative observations are an acceptable substitute: Astronomers cannot manipulate galaxies, but do observe them by the millions, in various forms and stages. Neither approach fits the multiverse. Does it therefore lie outside the domain of science? Susskind, one of the fathers of string theory, sounds a reassuring note. There is a third approach to empirical science: to infer unseen objects and phenomena from those things we do see. We don’t have to go as far as causally disconnected regions of spacetime to find examples. Subatomic particles will do. Quarks are permanently bound together into protons, neutrons, and other composite particles. “They are, so to speak, hidden behind a … veil,” Susskind says, “but by now, although no single quark has ever been seen in isolation, there is no one who seriously questions the correctness of the quark theory. It is part of the bedrock foundation of modern physics.” Because the universe is now expanding at an accelerating rate, galaxies that currently lie on the horizon of our field of vision will soon be pushed over the edge. We don’t expect them to tumble into oblivion anymore than we expect a ship to disintegrate when it sails over the horizon. If galaxies we know of can exist in some distant region beyond sight, who’s to say other things can’t be there, too? Things we’ve never seen and never will? Once we admit the possibility that there are regions beyond our purview, the implications grow exponentially. The British Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, compares this line of reasoning to aversion therapy. When you admit to there being galaxies beyond our present horizon, you “start out with a little spider a long distance away,” but, before you know it, you unleash the possibility of a multiverse—populated with infinite worlds, perhaps quite different to your own—find “a tarantula crawling all over you.” The lack of ability to directly manipulate objects has never really figured in my personal criteria for a good physical theory, anyway. Whatever bothers me about the multiverse, I’m sure it isn’t this. The multiverse challenges yet another of our most cherished beliefs—that of uniqueness. Could this be the root of our trouble with it? As Tufts cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin explains, no matter how large our observable region is, as long as it is finite, it can only be in a finite number of quantum states; specifying these states uniquely determines the contents of the region. If there are infinitely many such regions, the same configuration will necessarily be replicated elsewhere. Our exact world here—down to the last detail—will be replicated. Since the process continues into infinity, there will eventually be not one, but infinite copies of us. “I did find the presence of all these copies depressing,” Vilenkin says. “Our civilization may have many drawbacks, but at least we could claim it is unique—like a piece of art. And now we can no longer say that.” I know what he means. That bothers me, too, but I’m not sure it quite gets to the root of my discontent. As Vilenkin says, somewhat wistfully: “I am not presumptuous enough to tell reality what it should be.” The crux of the debate, at least for me, lies in a strange irony. Although the multiverse enlarges our concept of physical reality to an almost unimaginable extent, it feels claustrophobic in that it demarcates an outer limit to our knowledge and our capacity to acquire knowledge. We theorists dream of a world without arbitrariness, whose equations are entirely self-contained. Our goal is to find a theory so logically complete, so tightly constrained by self-consistency, that it can only take that one unique form. Then, at least, even if we don’t know where the theory came from or why, the structure will not seem arbitrary. All the fundamental constants of nature would emerge “out of math and π and 2’s,” as Berkeley physicist Raphael Bousso puts it. This is the lure of Einstein’s general theory of relativity—the reason physicists all over the world exclaim at its extraordinary, enduring beauty. Considerations of symmetry dictate the equations so clearly that the theory seems inevitable. That is what we have wanted to replicate in other domains of physics. And so far we have failed. An infinity of universes is simpler than a single universe would be—there is less to explain. For decades, scientists have looked for a physical reason why the fundamental constants should take on the values they do, but none has thus far been found. In fact, when we use our current theories to guess at the probable value at some of these parameters, the answers are so far from what is measured that it is laughable. But then how do we explain these parameters? If there is just this one unique universe, the parameters governing its design are invested with a special significance. Either the process governing them is completely random or there must be some logic, perhaps even some design, behind the selection. Neither option seems particularly appealing. As scientists, we spend our lives looking for laws because we believe there are reasons why things happen, even when we don’t understand them; we look for patterns because we think there is some order to the universe even if we don’t see it. Pure, random chance is not something that fits in with that worldview. But to invoke design isn’t very popular either, because it entails an agency that supersedes natural law. That agency must exercise choice and judgment, which—in the absence of a rigid, perfectly balanced, and tightly constrained structure, like that of general relativity—is necessarily arbitrary. There is something distinctly unsatisfying about the idea of there being several logically possible universes, of which only one is realized. If that were the case, as cosmologist Dennis Sciama said, you would have to think “there’s [someone] who looks at this list and says ‘well we’re not going to have that that one, and we won’t have that one. We’ll have that one, only that one.’ ” Personally speaking, that scenario, with all its connotations of what could have been, makes me sad. Floating in my mind is a faint collage of images: forlorn children in an orphanage in some forgotten movie when one from the group is adopted; the faces of people who feverishly chased a dream, but didn’t make it; thoughts of first-trimester miscarriages. All these things that almost came to life, but didn’t, rankle. Unless there’s a theoretical constraint ruling out all possibilities but one, the choice seems harsh and unfair. In such a carefully calibrated creation, how are we to explain needless suffering? Since such philosophical, ethical, and moral concerns are not the province of physics, most scientists avoid commenting on them, but Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg spelled it out: “Whether our lives show evidence for a benevolent designer … is a question you will all have to answer for yourselves. My life has been remarkably happy … but even so, I have seen a mother painfully die of cancer, a father’s personality destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease and scores of second and third cousins murdered in the Holocaust. Signs of a benevolent designer are pretty well hidden.” In the face of pain, an element of randomness is far easier to accept than either the callous negligence or the deliberate malevolence of an otherwise meticulously planned universe. The multiverse promised to extricate us from these awful thoughts, to provide a third option that overcame the dilemma of explanation. To be sure, physicists didn’t invent it for that purpose. The multiverse emerged out of other lines of thought. The theory of cosmic inflation was intended to explain the broad-scale smoothness and flatness of the universe we see. “We were looking for a simple explanation of why the universe looks like a big balloon,” says Stanford physicist Andrei Linde. “We didn’t know we had bought something else.” This something else was the realization that our big bang was not unique, and that there should in fact be an infinite number of them, each creating a disconnected domain of spacetime. Then string theory came along. String theory is currently the best contender we have for a unified theory of everything. It not only achieves the impossible—reconciling gravity and quantum mechanics—but insists upon it. But for a scheme which reduces the enormous variety of our universe to a minimalist set of building blocks, string theory suffers from a singularly embarrassing problem: We don’t know how to determine the precise values of the fundamental constants of nature. Current estimates say there are about 10500 potential options—a number so unfathomably large we don’t even have a name for it. String theory lists all the possible forms physical laws can take, and inflation creates a way for them to be realized. With the birth of each new universe, an imaginary deck of cards is shuffled. The hand that is dealt determines the laws that govern that universe. The multiverse explains how the constants in our equations acquire the values they do, without invoking either randomness or conscious design. If there are vast numbers of universes, embodying all possible laws of physics, we measure the values we do because that’s where our universe lies on the landscape. There’s no deeper explanation. That’s it. That’s the answer. But as much as the multiverse frees us from the old dichotomy, it leaves a profound unease. The questions we have spent so long pondering might have no deeper answer than just this: that it is the way it is. That might be the best we can do, but it’s not the kind of answer we’re used to. It doesn’t pull back the covers and explain how something works. What’s more, it dashes the theorists’ dream, with the claim that no unique solution will ever be found because no unique solution exists. There are some who don’t like that answer, others who don’t think it even qualifies to be called an answer, and some who accept it. To Nobel laureate David Gross, the multiverse “smells of angels.” Accepting the multiverse, he says, is tantamount to throwing up your hands and accepting that you’ll never really understand anything, because whatever you see can be chalked up to a “historical accident.” His fellow Nobelist Gerard ’t Hooft complains he cannot accept a scenario where you are supposed to “try all of these solutions until you find a universe that looks like the world we live in.” He says: “This is not the way physics has worked for us in the past, and it is not too late to hope that we will be able to find better arguments in the future.” Princeton cosmologist Paul Steinhardt refers to the multiverse as the “Theory of Anything,” because it allows everything but explains nothing. “A scientific theory ought to be selective,” he says. “Its power is determined by the number of possibilities it excludes. If it includes every possibility, then it excludes nothing, then it has zero power.” Steinhardt was one of the early champions of inflation until he realized that it generically gave rise to the multiverse, carving out a space of possibilities rather than making specific predictions. He has since become one of inflation’s most vocal critics. On a recent episode of Star Talk, he introduced himself as a proponent of alternatives to the multiverse. “What did the multiverse ever do to you?” the host joked. “It destroyed one of my favorite ideas,” Steinhardt replied. Physics was supposed to be the province of truth, of absolutes, of predictions. Things either are, or aren’t. Theories aren’t meant to be elastic or inclusive, but instead restrictive, rigid, dismissive. Given a situation, you want to be able to predict the likely—ideally, the unique and inevitable—outcome. The multiverse gives us none of that. The debate over the multiverse sometimes gets vociferous, with skeptics accusing proponents of betraying science. But it’s important to realize that nobody chose this. We all wanted a universe that flowed organically from some beautiful deep principles. But from what we can tell so far, that’s not the universe we got. It is what it is. Must the argument for the multiverse be negative? Must it be a distant second-best option? Many of my colleagues are trying to put the multiverse in a more hopeful light. Logically speaking, an infinity of universes is simpler than a single universe would be—there is less to explain. As Sciama said, the multiverse “in a sense satisfies Occam’s razor, because you want to minimize the arbitrary constraints you place on the universe.” Weinberg says that a theory that is free of arbitrary assumptions and hasn’t been “carefully tinkered with to make it match observations” is beautiful in its own way. It might turn out, he says, that the beauty we find here is similar to that of thermodynamics, a statistical kind of beauty, which explains the state of the macroscopic system, but not of its every individual constituent. “You search for beauty, but you can’t be too sure in advance where you’ll find it, or what kind of beauty you’ll have,” Weinberg says. At some point in our history, we appear to have made peace with the fact we are infinitesimal. Several times, while contemplating these weighty intellectual issues, my thoughts circled back to the simple, beautiful wisdom of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince who, having considered his beloved rose unique in all the worlds, finds himself in a rose garden. Bewildered by this betrayal and saddened by the loss of consequence—his rose’s and his own—he breaks down in tears. Eventually he comes to realize that his rose is “more important than all the hundreds of others” because she is his. There may well be nothing special about our entire universe, except for the fact that it is ours. But isn’t that enough? Even if our entire lives, the sum of all we can ever know, turn out to be cosmically insignificant, they are still ours. There is something distinguished about here, now, mine. Meaning is something we confer. Several times over these past few months, I found myself replaying my conversation with Gian Giudice. I found it reassuring how unperturbed he was by the vast range of possible universes and the seemingly arbitrary choices made by our own. Perhaps the multiverse is just telling us that we’re focusing on the wrong questions, he says. Maybe, as Kepler did with the orbits of the planets, we’re trying to read a deeper meaning into these numbers than is there. Since the solar system was all Kepler knew, he thought the shapes of the planetary orbits and the specific values of their various distances from the sun must carry important information, but that turned out to not be the case. These quantities were not fundamental; they were merely environmental parameters. That may have seemed lamentable at the time, but looking back now from the vantage point of general relativity, we no longer feel any sense of loss. We have a beautiful description of gravity; it just happens to be one in which these values of the planetary orbits are not fundamental constants. Perhaps, says Giudice, the multiverse implies something similar. Perhaps we need to let go of something we’re holding onto too tightly. Maybe we need to think bigger, refocus, regroup, reframe our questions to nature. The multiverse, he says, could open up “extremely satisfying, gratifying, and mind-opening possibilities.” Of all the pro-multiverse arguments I heard, this is the one that appeals to me the most. In every scenario, for every physical system, we can pose infinitely many questions. We try to strip a problem back to the essentials and ask the most basic questions, but our intuition is built upon what came before, and it is entirely possible that we are drawing upon paradigms that are no longer relevant for the new realms we are trying to probe. The multiverse is less like a closed door and more like a key. To me, the word is now tinged with promise and fraught with possibility. It seems no more wasteful than a bower full of roses. Tasneem Zehra Husain is a theoretical physicist and the author of Only The Longest Threads. She is the first Pakistani woman string theorist. Lead image: A Tate Modern employee views The Passing Winter 2005 by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Credit: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images.
1098	dbpedia	1	69	http://www.tkpw.net/tcr/volume-03/number-02/node4.html	en	Author Information			[ "http://www.tkpw.net/tcr/volume-03/number-02/l2h-icns/next.gif", "http://www.tkpw.net/tcr/volume-03/number-02/l2h-icns/previous.gif", "http://www.tkpw.net/tcr/volume-03/number-02/l2h-icns/next.gif", "http://www.tkpw.net/tcr/volume-03/number-02/l2h-icns/previous.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "v03n02" ]	null	[]	null	Author Information				null	The Critical Rationalist Vol. 03 No. 02 ISSN: 1393-3809 23-Sep-1998 Copyright Bibliography Author Information Frank J. Tipler is Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University in New Orleans. He is the co-author of the acclaimed book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, about the relationship between cosmology and intelligent life. He does research in two areas of physics: global general relativity, and the physics of computation. Global general relativity deals with the structure of the cosmos on the largest scales, and computation physics is concerned with the limits on computers imposed by the laws of physics. Tipler's conclusion that there are no ultimate limits to computation (or to the biosphere) is discussed in his recent book The Physics of Immortality, which was on the German best seller list for 15 weeks. Selected by the New York Times as one of the Notable Books of 1994, The Physics of Immortality has been translated into four languages in addition to English, and more than 200,000 copies are in print world wide. Tipler was the post-doctoral student of four scholars: Abraham Taub, Ranier Sachs, Dennis Sciama, and John Wheeler. Taub was the post-doc of John von Neumann, who made the first American digital computer. Sachs was the Ph.D. student of P.G. Bergmann, who was the post-doc of Albert Einstein. Sciama's Ph.D. students include Stephen Hawking, and also Sir Martin Rees, the current Astronomer Royal of England. Wheeler, the man who named the "black hole", was the post-doc of Niels Bohr (Nobel Prize for the Bohr model of the atom), who was the post-doc of Ernest Rutherford (Nobel Prize for discovering the atomic nucleus), who was the student of J.J. Thompson (Nobel Prize for discovering the electron), who was the student of Lord Rayleigh (Nobel Prize for discovering Argon), who was the student of James Clerk Maxwell (Maxwell's equations). Wheeler's other students include Richard Feynman (Nobel Prize for quantum electrodynamics). Tipler's web site, selected by USA Today as a Hot Web Site for the week of May 11, 1998, is: http://www.math.tulane.edu/faculty_html/tipler.html Address: Frank J. Tipler Professor of Mathematical Physics Tulane University New Orleans, Louisiana 70118 USA E-mail: tipler@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu Web: http://www.math.tulane.edu/faculty_html/tipler.html Copyright Bibliography The Critical Rationalist Vol. 03 No. 02 ISSN: 1393-3809 23-Sep-1998 Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved. TCR Issue Timestamp: 1998-09-23
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"https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/uploads/mt-import/COBE_cmb_fluctuations.jpg", "https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/uploads/mt-import/Science-Fictions-square.gif", "https://www.discovery.org/m/2023/06/Denyse-OLeary-2023-03-09-smaller-600x600.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Denyse O'Leary", "Denyse O'Leary" ]	2013-10-20T16:21:41+00:00	What help has materialism been in understanding the universe’s beginnings?	en	https://evolutionnews.org/wp-content/themes/evolutionary/bases/images/favicon/favicon.ico	Evolution News	https://evolutionnews.org/2013/10/big_bang_exterm/	What help has materialism been in understanding the universe’s beginnings? Many in cosmology have never made any secret of their dislike of the Big Bang, the generally accepted start to our universe first suggested by Belgian priest Georges Lemaître (1894-1966). On the face of it, that is odd. The theory accounts well enough for the evidence. Nothing ever completely accounts for all the evidence, of course, because evidence is always changing a bit. But the Big Bang has enabled accurate prediction. In which case, its hostile reception might surprise you. British astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) gave the theory its name in one of his papers — as a joke. Another noted astronomer, Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), exclaimed in 1933, “I feel almost an indignation that anyone should believe in it — except myself.” Why? Because “The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural.” One team of astrophysicists (1973) opined that it “involves a certain metaphysical aspect which may be either appealing or revolting.” Robert Jastrow (1925-2008), head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, initially remarked, “On both scientific and philosophical grounds, the concept of an eternal Universe seems more acceptable than the concept of a transient Universe that springs into being suddenly, and then fades slowly into darkness.” And Templeton Prize winner (2011) Martin Rees recalls his mentor Dennis Sciama’s dogged commitment to an eternal universe, no-Big Bang model: For him, as for its inventors, it had a deep philosophical appeal — the universe existed, from everlasting to everlasting, in a uniquely self-consistent state. When conflicting evidence emerged, Sciama therefore sought a loophole (even an unlikely seeming one) rather as a defense lawyer clutches at any argument to rebut the prosecution case. Evidence forced theorists to abandon their preferred eternal-universe model. From the mid 1940s, Hoyle attempted to disprove the theory he named. Until 1964, when his preferred theory, the Steady State, lost an evidence test. In 1965, an unexpected discovery both confirmed and publicized the Big Bang: Two physicists at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, accidentally discovered the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the radiation apparently left over from the origin. Then in 1990, NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite confirmed Big Bang cosmology with more accurate measurements. A 2011 discovery of gas generated minutes after the Big Bang further confirmed predictions. That wasn’t good news for those who track the progress of science by the progress of atheism. “These men and women have built their entire worldview on atheism,” says cosmologist Frank Tipler: “When I was a student at MIT in the late 1960s, I audited a course in cosmology from the physics Nobelist Steven Weinberg. He told his class that of the theories of cosmology, he preferred the Steady State Theory because ‘it least resembled the account in Genesis.'” So disapproval snowballed along with evidence rather than with disconfirmation. In 1989, Nature‘s physics editor John Maddox predicted, “Apart from being philosophically unacceptable, the Big Bang is an over-simple view of how the Universe began, and it is unlikely to survive the decade ahead.” In 1992, Geoffrey Burbidge of the University of California at San Diego taxed his colleagues with rushing off to join “the First Church of Christ of the Big Bang.” Stephen Hawking opined in 1996, “Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. … There were therefore a number of attempts to avoid the conclusion that there had been a big bang.” Hawking himself offered one such attempt: He tried designing a design-free universe. To make his cosmology work, he relied on imaginary time rather than real time, explaining, “Maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.” Cute inversion of imaginary vs. real. The problem is that one must convert one’s results back to real time to say anything meaningful about the real world. Another alternative was an oscillating universe that swings back and forth, into and out of existence. Quantum cosmologist Christopher Isham recalls, Perhaps the best argument in favor of the thesis that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas, such as continuous creation or an oscillating universe, being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his/her theory. In any event, the Maddox obituary (“unlikely to survive the next decade”) was certainly premature. Though disliked, the Big Bang has accounted well enough for the evidence that it can’t just be dismissed, exploded, or destroyed. The Big Bang stubbornly refused to provide obvious support for materialism. Worse, things got worse. Not only, on the evidence, does the universe look like it was suddenly created, it also looks finely tuned. New Scientist‘s Marcus Chown notes: … it seems as if the strength of any of the fundamental forces or masses of the fundamental particles were different by even a small amount, they would not have created a universe with galaxies, stars, planets and life. Or as cosmologist Max Tegmark explains: If the cosmological constant were much larger, the universe would have blown itself apart before galaxies could form. A reasonable explanation would be design in nature. But materialism operates on the principle that reason and the human mind are an illusion. So that explanation can’t be true, by definition. There has to be a more acceptable alternative. As we shall see, it is remarkable what people determined to explain something away will see as an acceptable alternative.
1098	dbpedia	2	10	https://telescoper.blog/tag/dennis-sciama/	en	In the Dark	https://telescoper.blog/…778407.jpg?w=200	https://telescoper.blog/…778407.jpg?w=200	[ "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/vicent_perugia.jpg?w=450", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/perugia_1.jpg?w=1024", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/perugia_2.jpg?w=685", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/perugia_3.jpg?w=678", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/perugia_4.jpg?w=1024", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/feyndir2.jpg", "https://scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/454664445_1201032747757515_4430264853523774306_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=102&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=0iOVRj9igcsQ7kNvgF2arcT&_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYBpw2kiWyqvXZcRfZVU3Spxrq39u2vfTDbrovDf70xTrg&oe=66BDC03C", "https://scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/451372901_1162934428330504_4884463404001156311_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=102&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=XAEPRe0MNkgQ7kNvgFUk4fI&_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYDNIN1krBzp-RW0_samJ-w9xhqdPS1JmI4F85EELnuoHg&oe=66BDA453", "https://scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/454515997_810296821286098_54569585294950364_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=110&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=SGg1KGa2IHMQ7kNvgGG33IC&_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYDYO_GF3iz8c_1c2W6hY4gBw5YHIQsNNJYDtcOb_PhXDA&oe=66BD9E0F", "https://scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/454422268_862369822618930_2608265698863365936_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=106&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=gFHs6F8WbSsQ7kNvgFRgm1p&_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYAqm53MSUG7Ga1VaqOQDptx8YrCF3wNaA7n9RbZoOPb_Q&oe=66BD9D28", "https://scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/453778332_866553968140966_8013045187197453299_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=105&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=5Whm7AEppKgQ7kNvgEaLSia&_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYAUQviydfvKsqanoOesuWn2VMn8PteLqmeH7seyy-ZCRA&oe=66BDBA81", "https://scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/451624383_403128782737101_3254072712187938000_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=XoXevRElk0kQ7kNvgHlSP6Z&_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYCFyApHuMrlI0GnGzddbHXkf-KQxR1bNvtTGlv4pvjJYA&oe=66BD9BDB", "https://scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/450363355_3280625635578058_3982909219162386665_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=110&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=yCh5rgeoJJsQ7kNvgHaYhLS&_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYD_HQJZjhVTkNRMnz1DsV5H5hDupMgPDDZoZ8-IGkuzfg&oe=66BD9BFE", "https://scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/449801509_855046846543609_1215168262055959567_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=102&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=-Wt0La7-OpsQ7kNvgETHSwV&_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYBra4WFqZHpbzIaGs8pXW5daBhe8tC_nyEU4-u6HuQ3zA&oe=66BD9B01", "https://scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/449668431_2202138030120726_776468461504931607_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=101&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=18de74&_nc_ohc=fCShGTooB1cQ7kNvgEkeuBe&_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-1.cdninstagram.com&edm=ANo9K5cEAAAA&oh=00_AYAi81yfg3zbk55cZcfcb891vkckZ1EVHsWJWW0Hbv_gyg&oe=66BDA3A9", "https://telescoper.blog/i/rss/orange-medium.png", "https://telescoper.blog/i/rss/orange-medium.png", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/wp-1590846778407.jpg?w=50", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/wp-1590846778407.jpg?w=50", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Posts about Dennis Sciama written by telescoper	en	https://telescoper.blog/…6778407.jpg?w=32	In the Dark	https://telescoper.blog/tag/dennis-sciama/	My friend and colleague Vicent Martínez sent me this picture which dates from the spring of 1988. It took me a while to figure out where it was taken but I finally came to the conclusion that it was in Perugia (the University thereof) in Italy at a small workshop organized there by Silvio Bonometto. If memory serves that room was called the Aula Mussolini… I am on the far left (looking deranged) and talking to Alain Blanchard (with the long black hair). In between us is Vincent Icke. Further along the same row you can see Dennis Sciama, who is sadly no longer with us, and John Miller. In the middle looking at the camera is Rien van de Weijgaert. Just behind me is Bernard Jones. I guess Vicent must have taken the picture! You can find this and other pictures from this bygone era here. Yes, I know it’s very white and very male. Meetings tended to be like that in those days. Incidentally 1988 was the year that I finished my DPhil thesis so I was still a graduate student at the time of this meeting. I think I gave a talk but can’t remember what it was about! In fact I don’t remember much about that meeting except for the splendid lunch that happened at the end. We took a coach trip to a magnificent Castello in the country and were treated to a lavish banquet of many courses. As luck would have it I sat next to Dennis Sciama at the meal, which I enjoyed greatly. Dennis was my academic grandfather (i.e. he supervised my supervisor). He was a lovely gracious man as well as hugely knowledgeable about a wide range of things, wonderful to talk to, and very generous with his time. He was also teetotal, so when they came to fill up his glass he gave it to me so I had a double wine ration, and a single ration would have been a lot! If I recall correctly the coach trip also took in quick visits to the towns of Cortona and Arezzo. Anyway, seeing that picture sent me a bit down memory lane during which I opened up a box of old photographs to find some more of Perugia. That meeting in 1988 was the first time I’d visited that ancient and beautiful place but I’ve been back a few times since then and on one occasion took a few snaps as I wandered round. I thought black-and-white would capture the atmosphere of the place. You can decide whether I was right! The first picture is of the main square (Piazza IV Novembre) and the second the famous Etruscan Arch, which dates from pre-Roman times, emphasizing how ancient this place is! The town is perched on top of a steep-sided hill so it’s quite hard work getting around on foot but well worth exploring. Follow @telescoper Since getting rid of my telly a few weeks ago I’ve reverted to a previous incarnation as a bookworm, and have been tackling the backlog of unread volumes sitting on my coffee table at home. Over the last couple of days I’ve spent the evenings reading The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo, a biography of the great theoretical physicist Paul Dirac. I’m actually quite ashamed that it has taken me so long to get around to reading this. I’ve had it for two years or more and really should have found time to do it before now. Dirac has long been one of my intellectual heroes, for his unique combination of imagination and mathematical rigour; the Dirac equation is one of the topics I most enjoy lecturing about to physics students. I am also immensely flattered to be one of his academic descendants: Paul Dirac was the PhD supervisor of Dennis Sciama, who supervised my supervisor John Barrow, making me (in a sense) his great-grandson. Not that I’ll ever achieve anything of the magnitude he did. The book is pretty long, and I suppose one of the factors putting me off reading it was that I thought it might be heavy going. That turned out to be far from the case. It’s wonderfully well written, never getting bogged down in details, and cleverly interweaving Dirac’s life and scientific career together against a vivid historical backdrop dominated by the rise of Nazism in Germany and the tragedy of World War 2. It also beautifully conveys the breathless sense of excitement as the new theory of quantum mechanics gradually fell into place. Altogether it’s a gripping story that had me hooked from the start, and I devoured the 400+ pages in just a couple of evenings (which is quick by my standards). I’ve never read a scientific biography so pacey and engaging before, so it’s definitely hats off to Graham Farmelo! Among the book’s highlights for me were the little thumbnail sketches of famous physicists I knew beforehand mostly only as names. Niels Bohr comes across as a splendidly warm and avuncular fellow, Werner Heisenberg as a very slippery customer of questionable political allegiance (likewise Erwin Schrödinger), Ernest Rutherford as blunt and irascible. I was already aware of the reputation of Wolfgang Pauli had for being an absolute git; this book does nothing to dispel that opinion. We tend to forget that the names we came to know through their association with physics also belonged to real people, with all that entails. I was also interested to learn that Dirac and his wife Manci spent their honeymoon in 1937, as the clouds of war gathered on the horizon, in Brighton, which Farmelo describes as ..a peculiarly raffish town., famous for its two Victorian piers jutting imperiously out to sea, for the pale green domes of its faux-oriential pavilions, its future-robot and a host of other tacky attractions. So in most respects it hasn’t changed much, although one of the two piers has since gone for a Burton. So what of Dirac himself? Most of what you’re likely to hear about him concerns his apparently cold and notoriously uncommunicative nature. I never met Dirac. He died in 1984. I was an undergraduate at Cambridge at the time, but he had moved to Florida many years before that. I have, however, over the years had occasion to talk to quite a few people who knew Dirac personally, including Dennis Sciama. All of them told me that he wasn’t really anything like the caricature that is usually drawn of him. While it’s true that he had no time for small talk and was deeply uncomfortable in many social settings, especially formal college occasions and the like, he very much enjoyed the company of people more extrovert than himself and was more than willing to talk if he felt he had anything to contribute. He got on rather well with Richard Feynman, for example, although they couldn’t have had more different personalities. This gives me the excuse to include this wonderful picture of Dirac and Feynman together, taken in 1962 – the body language tells you everything there is to know about these two remarkable characters: Feynman is also an intellectual hero of mine, because he was outrageously gifted not only at doing science but also at communicating it. On the other hand, I suspect (although I’ll obviously never know) that I might not have liked him very much at a personal level. He strikes me as the sort of chap who’s a lot of fun in small doses, but by all accounts he could be prickly and wearingly egotistical. On the other hand, the more I read The Strangest Man the more I came to think that I would have liked Dirac. He may have been taciturn, but at least that meant he was free from guile and artifice. It’s not true that he lacked empathy for other people, either. Perhaps he didn’t show it outwardly very much, but he held a great many people in very deep affection. It’s also clear from the quotations peppered throughout the book that people who worked closely with him didn’t just admire him for his scientific work; they also loved him as a person. A strange person, perhaps, but also a rather wonderful one. In the last Chapter, Farmelo touches on the question of whether Dirac may have displayed the symptoms of autism. I don’t know enough about autism to comment usefully on this possibility. I don’t even know whether the term autistic is defined with sufficient precision to be useful. There is such a wide and multidimensional spectrum of human personality that it’s inevitable that there will be some individuals who appear to be extreme in some aspect or other. Must everyone who is a bit different from the norm be labelled as having some form of disorder? The book opens with the following quote from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which says it all. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. Another thought occurred to me after I’d finished reading the book. Dirac’s heyday as a theoretical physicist was the period 1928-1932 or thereabouts. Comparatively speaking, his productivity declined significantly in later years; he produced fewer original results and became increasingly isolated from the mainstream. Eddington’s career followed a similar pattern: he did brilliant work when young, but subsequently retreated into the cul-de-sac of his Fundamental Theory. Fred Hoyle is another example – touched by greatness early in his career, but cantankerous and blinded by his own dogma later on. Even Albert Einstein, genius-of-geniuses, spent his later scientific life chasing shadows. I think there’s a tragic inevitability about the mid-life decline of these geniuses of theoretical physics, because the very same determination and intellectual courage that allowed them to break new ground also rendered them unwilling to be deflected by subsequent innovations elsewhere. And break new ground Dirac certainly did. The word genius is perhaps over-used, but it certainly applies to Paul Dirac. We need more like him. Follow @telescoper
1098	dbpedia	1	12	https://ethnicelebs.com/dennis-sciama	en	Dennis Sciama - Ethnicity of Celebs	https://ethnicelebs.com/…Ethnicouples.jpg		[ "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Ethnicouples.jpg", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Ethnicouples.jpg", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/CNO-003709-Gelila-Bekele.jpg&h=300&w=300&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/CNO-003709-Gelila-Bekele.jpg&h=300&w=300&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Maxi-Iglesias.jpg&h=300&w=300&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Maxi-Iglesias.jpg&h=300&w=300&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Werner-Herzog.jpg&h=300&w=300&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Werner-Herzog.jpg&h=300&w=300&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PRR-076432-Serayah.jpg&h=300&w=300&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PRR-076432-Serayah.jpg&h=300&w=300&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/jason-biggs.jpg&h=300&w=300&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/jason-biggs.jpg&h=300&w=300&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/bigstock-BEVERLY-HILLS-CA-JAN-K-Kelly-Rohrbach-1.jpg&h=200&w=200&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/bigstock-BEVERLY-HILLS-CA-JAN-K-Kelly-Rohrbach-1.jpg&h=200&w=200&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/bigstock_Salli_Richardson_19687559small.jpg&h=200&w=200&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/bigstock_Salli_Richardson_19687559small.jpg&h=200&w=200&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/LMK-109834-Helen-Lasichanh.jpg&h=200&w=200&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/LMK-109834-Helen-Lasichanh.jpg&h=200&w=200&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Wendy-Williams.jpg&h=200&w=200&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Wendy-Williams.jpg&h=200&w=200&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/prince-william.jpg&h=200&w=200&zc=1", "https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/plugins/featured-post-with-thumbnail/scripts/timthumb.php?src=https://ethnicelebs.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/prince-william.jpg&h=200&w=200&zc=1" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Manila" ]	2018-03-27T06:56:30+00:00	...	en		Ethnicity of Celebs \| EthniCelebs.com	https://ethnicelebs.com/dennis-sciama	Birth Name: Denis William Siahou Sciama Date of Birth: 18 November, 1926 Place of Birth: Manchester South, Lancashire, England, U.K. Date of Death: 18/19 December, 1999 Place of Death: Oxford, England, U.K. Ethnicity: Sephardi Jewish Dennis Sciama was a British physicist. He is considered one of the fathers of modern cosmology. His father, Abraham Sciama, was a textile businessperson, also from Manchester. His mother, Nelly Ades, was born in Cairo, Egypt. Both of them traced their roots to Aleppo, Syria. The surname Sciama was originally spelled Shama, but the later spelling was adopted to conform better to the Latin alphabet. Dennis was married to a social anthropologist, Lidia Dina, until his death, with whom he had two daughters. Dennis’ paternal grandfather was Moses Abraham Sciama (the son of Raphael Abraham Sciama and Esther). Moses was born in Manchester, Lancashire, England, to Syrian Jewish parents, from Aleppo. Dennis’ paternal grandmother was Elizabeth “Bessie/Betsy” Henriques Valentine (the daughter of Emanuel Henriques Valentine and Frances “Fanny” Woolf). Elizabeth was born in London. Emanuel was the son of Abraham/Aaron Henriques Valentine and Julia/Judith Mordechai Mendoza. Frances was the daughter of Abraham Woolf and Elizabeth Samuel. Dennis’ maternal grandfather was named Ezra Ades. Sources: Biography of Dennis Sciama – http://rsbm.royalsocietypublishing.org Genealogy of Dennis’ brother, Maurice Sciama – http://farhi.org Dennis’ father on the 1891 England and Wales Census – https://www.familysearch.org Marriage record of Dennis’ paternal grandparents, Moses Abraham Sciama and Elizabeth Henriques Valentine – https://www.familysearch.org Dennis’ paternal grandfather, Moses Abraham Sciama, on the 1871 England and Wales Census – https://www.familysearch.org Dennis’ paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Henriques Valentine, on the 1871 England and Wales Census – https://www.familysearch.org
1098	dbpedia	1	7	https://www.kidpaw.net/famous-people/dennis-w.-sciama-pid78472	en	Dennis W. Sciama Biography, Birthday. Awards & Facts About Dennis W. Sciama	https://www.kidpaw.net/d…-sciama-5789.jpg	https://www.kidpaw.net/d…-sciama-5789.jpg	[ "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg", "https://www.kidpaw.net/images/default-avatar.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Dennis W. Sciama detail biography, family, facts and date of birth. Awards of Dennis W. Sciama, birthday, children and many other facts. See Dennis W. Sciama's spouse, children, sibling and parent names.	en			https://www.kidpaw.net/famous-people/dennis-w.-sciama-pid78472	Stephen Hawking Stephen Hawking was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author. This biography offers detailed information about his childhood, career, life, achievements, trivia and timeline. Born: 08 January 1942 British Michael Faraday Physicist & Chemist Michael Faraday was the most celebrated British scientist of the 19th century. Know more about his childhood and life with this biography. Born: 22 September 1791 British Paul Dirac Paul Dirac was an English theoretical physicist known for his contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. 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Born: 24 December 1818 British Henry Moseley Henry Moseley was a renowned English physicist who developed the Moseley’s Law in the field of x-ray spectroscopy. To know more about his childhood, career, profile and timeline read on. Born: 23 November 1887 British John Tyndall John Tyndall was an Irish physicist. This biography of John Tyndall profiles his childhood, life, academic career, achievements and timeline. Born: 02 August 1820 British John Cockcroft John Cockcroft was a British Physicist who shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics with Ernest Walton for their work on splitting the atomic nucleus. Check out this biography to know about his childhood, life, achievements, works & timeline. Born: 27 May 1897 British George Paget Thomson George Paget Thomson was an English physicist who won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics. Check out this biography to know about his childhood, life, achievements, works & timeline. 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1098	dbpedia	0	88	https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/chap08.htm	en	Space and Time			[ "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/diamond.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/diamond.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/infinity.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/infinity.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/infinity.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/r_curl.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/figure81.jpg", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/omega.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/not_equal.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/not_equal.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/figure82.jpg", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/figure83.jpg", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/figure84.jpg", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/a_stroke.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/z_stroke.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/z_bar.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/b_box.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/d_box.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/b_box.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/d_box.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/b_box.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/q_box.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/d_box.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/p_box.gif", "https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience/figure85.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "philosophy", "metaphysics", "Norman Swartz", "space", "time", "electricity", "Immanuel Kant", "Gottfried Leibniz", "Isaac Newton", "sensorium of God", "container model of space", "absolute space", "absolute time", "relative space", "relative time", "relational theory of space", "relational theory\r\nof time", "paraphrase", "nothing", "nothingness", "paradox", "antinomy", "curvature\r\nof space", "geometry", "Karl Friedrich Gauss", "Bernhard Reimann", "Hermann Helmholtz", "nonexistence", "St. Augustine", "J.M.E. McTaggart", "A-series", "B-series", "past", "present", "future", "extension in time", "extension in space", "Richard Taylor", "spatial analogy", "temporal analogy", "change", "movement in time", "time travel", "right-left problem", "enantiomorph", "William James", "SETI", "Martin Gardner", "Ozma problem", "connectedness of space", "connectedness of time", "unified space", "unified time", "Jonathan Bennett", "Anthony Quinton", "memory", "veridical memory", "falsidical memory", "change the past" ]	null	[ "Norman Swartz" ]	null	Knowing what space and time are consists in our having an account which is, first of all, free of internal inconsistency, and, secondly, robust enough both to make sense of our ordinary uses of these concepts and to allow us to do physics. Common, everyday notions of space and time are in quite good enough shape for ordinary affairs, but they are not in particularly good shape for sophisticated thinking about the universe writ large.				null	Beyond Experience: Metaphysical Theories and Philosophical Constraints, Second Edition, Copyright © Norman Swartz, 2001. Available for downloading, free of charge, at http://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/beyond_experience. {page 145} CHAPTER EIGHT Space and Time In our conversation, no word is more familiarly used or more easily recognized than "time". We certainly understand what is meant by the word both when we use it ourselves and when we hear it used by others. What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled. – St Augustine (AD 354-430), Confessions ([15], 264) Augustine's dilemma is one all of us have experienced frequently in our lives, not only about time, but space, morality, justice, education, art, etc. We are perfectly capable of using these concepts in our ordinary affairs; but we seem unable to give an explication, or – better – a theoretical reconstruction, of these concepts. All of us understand the concept of time well enough to schedule meetings, to set alarm clocks, to time a cake's baking, and the like. But if asked "What is time?", most persons – like Augustine – would not know how to answer. 8.1 Is it possible to explain what space and time are? Time and again when I was a student in public school, my teachers solemnly insisted: "In spite of everything we know about electricity, we do not know what electricity is." This verdict about electricity can be found, too, in many books of the period. To use Popper's phrase (he {page 146} was speaking of objections to Einstein's relativity theories; [159], 34), this was – in the end – just a piece of "popular nonsense". The first page of chapter one in The Boy Electrician, which I read countless times as a youngster, reads, in part: Electrical science ... has brought us the telephone, radio, electric lights, motors, sound pictures, television, new materials, medicines, and a host of other things. And all of these wonders have been invented and perfected by men who did not know what electricity is. No one knows what electricity is. There have been many theories or attempts to explain what this mysterious force may actually be, but all of them have been mere guesses and cannot be proven. (p. 13) —The Boy Electrician, by Alfred P. Morgan (Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.) 1940. Reprinted by Lindsay Publications Inc., Bradley IL, 1995. What made that slogan nonsense stemmed from a certain presupposition that prompted it. When asked to explain what it meant to say "We do not know what electricity is", my teachers would often reply with something of the sort, "We know that electrical phenomena arise out of the movement of charged particles, and we know many of the physical laws involved, but however much knowledge we gain of this sort, it will never tell us what electricity is." I have no doubt that my teachers were well-intentioned, that they honestly believed that this was a legitimate thing to say and to impart to their students. But in the end, it is nonsense nonetheless. It is nonsense because as a general principle it would deny that we know of anything at all what it is. There is nothing special in this regard about electricity. What my teachers alleged to be a peculiar problem with electricity could just as well have been said about glass, the wind, your nose, profit, or freedom. And quite contrary to their argument, we know what things are precisely by knowing what their makeup is, what sorts of physical laws describe their behavior, how they typically act, and how we make use of them. We know, for example, a great deal about the wind. We understand that the wind is not the exhalation of a god but is movement within the atmosphere in which we live. We have learned, too, that air is made up of a mixture of various gases, that air moves because of differential heating (due to the Sun's heat, ocean currents, concentrated burning of fossil fuels, etc.) and because of the Coriolis force (due to the rotation of the Earth), and that air may move in laminar or turbulent ways. And we have learned, over a period of centuries by trial and error and more recently with the greater efficiency conferred by having mathematical theories of gas dynamics, to harness the wind (in windmills, for example). Once we know these sorts of things, even if our knowledge is incomplete, even if, for example, we cannot predict or explain the behavior of the wind as precisely as we might like, we know what the wind is. And the same may be said for electricity: once we know the atomic nature of electrical phenomena, have discovered a great many of the physical laws of those phenomena, have harnessed electricity in our generators, machines, radios, computers, and the like, we may perfectly reasonably say, "For the most {page 147} part, we know what electricity is." Of course we cannot sum up this extensive knowledge in a brief paragraph. A good understanding of electricity comes about only after several weeks or months of study. But it is something attainable with effort. It is certainly nothing unknowable in principle. The moral should also be applied for space and for time. Just as in the case of electricity, many persons have, like Augustine, convinced themselves that there is something deeply mysterious about space and time and that space and time are so inscrutable as to be unknowable. "In spite of everything we know about space and time, we really do not know what space and time are", I think many persons are inclined to think to themselves. Certainly there are problems about space and time, but the pessimistic belief that space and time are somehow so enigmatic as to be fundamentally unknowable strikes me as a piece of popular nonsense which ought to be excised just like the nonsense about electricity. What does coming to know what space and time are consist in? The answer, I suggest, is perfectly straightforward: it consists, simply, in our having an account which is, first of all, free of internal inconsistency, and, secondly, robust enough both to make sense of our ordinary uses of these concepts and to allow us to do physics. Common, everyday notions of space and time, as Augustine noted seventeen centuries ago, are in quite good enough shape for ordinary affairs. But they are not in particularly good shape for sophisticated thinking about the universe writ large. Buber, we have earlier seen, had tried to imagine an edge of space and a beginning and end to time and found that he was unable to imagine that there could be such things and (unfortunately for him) was unable to imagine that there could not be such things. Recall (from p. 10 above): "A necessity I could not understand swept over me: I had to try again and again to imagine the edge of space, or its edgelessness, time with a beginning and an end or a time without beginning or end, and both were equally impossible, equally hopeless – yet there seemed to be only the choice between the one or the other absurdity" ([37], 135-6). In this passage, Buber, writing years later, correctly – but unwittingly – diagnoses the source of the problem: the very ideas at play are 'absurd'. But he never clearly plumbed the absurdity, either as a teenager or as a mature philosopher relating his youthful experience. The source of Buber's difficulty is an untenable concept of space. It is deeply and irremediably flawed, for it leads, as we see explicitly in Buber's narrative, to incoherence. In Kant's terminology, this particular concept of space was beset by 'antinomies'. In modern terminology we would deem it 'paradoxical'. {page 148} Leibniz, in contrast, had a significantly different concept of space. In spite of certain difficulties1 in his theory of space, I am tempted to say that in the fundamental insight which informed his theory, Leibniz 'got it right'. However, if I were to put my praise in just that way, I would undercut what I said earlier about philosophical reconstructions, viz. that they cannot be judged to be true or false. So, forgoing the claim that Leibniz 'got it right', I am inclined to say that Leibniz's account is vastly superior to the common view and, with some repairs, can be made to work reasonably well. (Hereafter, I will refer to the theory being offered below as the "neo-Leibnizian" theory. The qualification "neo" connotes that what follows adopts the core of Leibniz's original theory, but is not to be thought to preserve the whole of that historical theory.) Let me state the essential element in the neo-Leibnizian theory of space in an initially provocative manner, using a form of words only slightly different from Leibniz's own: Space does not exist. 1. For instance, Leibniz denied both that spatial relations are 'real' and that a vacuum is a possibility. Both of these claims are, however, peripheral to his main thesis, and I wish only to pursue his main thesis. The neo-Leibnizian theory can equally be characterized as being the 'negative' theory of space. It argues, in effect, that there is nothing more to the concept of space than that places are dependent on the existence of physical objects.2 Take away those objects and there are no 'places'. In imagination annihilate all the matter of the universe. Having done so, in no intelligible sense can you then go on to say: "This is the place where the Andromeda galaxy used to be." Without physical things, there are no places. To say of a world devoid of physical objects that one place might be distinguished from another would be of the same order of nonsense as to say that someone might vacate a room and leave her lap behind. Just as a lap is a spatial feature of one physical object, places are spatial features of two (or more) physical objects. In the absence of physical objects, there are no places. Still less is there a 'physical space' which might be thought to be the conglomeration of all places. 2. On some contemporary interpretations of modern physics, some writers suggest that physical objects are best conceived of as clumps or distributions of energy. That refinement is inessential for our purposes. But having now stated the thesis – that space does not exist, that there are only things and their places – in a deliberately provocative way, let me try now both to explain what I mean by this and to defend (what must surely appear at the outset to be) an outrageous claim. {page 149} 8.2 A neo-Leibnizian theory of space It is a truth of logic that any class of things can be divided, without remainder, into two mutually exclusive subclasses. Roses, for example, may be divided into all those that are red and all those that are not red. Mammals, for example, may be divided into those that are marsupials and those that are not. And similarly for theories of space, which may be divided into those theories which posit space as a subtle (ethereal) kind of 'stuff' permeating the universe and those theories which do not so regard space. Isaac Newton, like most persons, subscribed to a theory of the first kind, although Newton's theory, as we would expect, was considerably more robust than most persons'. Motivated in part by a Cartesian* theory of perception and in part by certain theological beliefs, he posited that space was, in his words, 'the sensorium of God', a kind of 'sense organ' by which God was able immediately to know the place (whereabouts) of anything in the universe. We will not concern ourselves with these latter sorts of subsidiary features of Newton's theory. What is essential in his theory was that it was one of the kind which regarded space as a 'container' of the physical objects in the universe. Most persons, I am quite sure, subscribe to a 'container' theory of space. When they say such a thing as "There are many galaxies scattered about in space", they will often imagine a picture, just on a grander scale, similar to that imagined when they say, for example, "The Eiffel Tower is located in Paris." Just as the Eiffel Tower and Paris may each be regarded as a kind of spatial object (although of course the latter is a rather large spatial object, occupying some 106 square kilometers), the common view would have it that galaxies, too, are physical objects (very big ones) and that they are located in space, viz. a yet larger container (a kind of 'super-Paris' as it were) which is, nonetheless, a 'somewhat physical' sort of thing. The reasoning is by analogy: the Eiffel Tower (a physical thing having spatial properties) is in Paris (also a physical thing having spatial properties), and thus galaxies (physical things having physical properties), being in space, must be in a thing (i.e. space) which in its turn is a physical thing having spatial properties. This 'container' model of space is unquestionably the one presupposed by Buber. He conceived of space as a kind of stuff of which it was appropriate (meaningful) to speculate where its edge might lie. For containers, whether they be something as small as jam jars or as large as Paris, have outer bounds: there clearly are places which lie on the 'inside' (i.e. are within) and there are other places which lie on the {page 150} 'outside' (i.e. are without). But, as we have seen (p. 10 above), Buber nearly went insane trying to reconcile himself to operating with this model of space. Leibniz strongly attacked the 'container' model of space. His particular challenge was to Newton's particular version, but it need not be regarded as so restricted. His objections, and his alternative theory, can be read as applying to any version of the 'container' theory. §2. ... real absolute space ... is an idol of some modern Englishmen. I call it an idol, not in a theological sense, but in a philosophical one. ... §3. These gentlemen maintain ... that space is a real absolute being. But this involves them in great difficulties; for such a being must needs be eternal and infinite. Hence some have believed it to be God himself, or, one of his attributes, his immensity. But since space consists of parts, it is not a thing which can belong to God. §4. As for my own opinion, I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something merely relative, as time is; that I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions. For space denotes, in terms of possibility, an order of things which exist at the same time, considered as existing together. ([5], Third paper, 25-6) And in the following paragraph Leibniz talks of the "chimerical [fictitious] supposition of the reality of space in itself" (26). What all of this comes down to is Leibniz's arguing that space does not exist; that there are physical objects which, as we say, are 'in space', but space does not exist as a distinct further kind of thing which 'contains' these objects. In reading Leibniz's characterization of Newton's theory as one of an "absolute" space, and his own as one of a "relative" space, one must recall that these terms did not mean quite the same to seventeenth-century writers as they have come to mean in the period since Einstein proposed his theories of the relativity of space. When Einstein wrote, early in the twentieth century, that space is "relative", he was advancing a thesis which clearly presupposed the neo-Leibnizian concept of space, but which advanced – at the same time – claims about the universe, and in particular about mass, energy, gravity, and the transmission of light, which were never dreamed of by Leibniz. It is no part of my concern here to review Einstein's theories. What I am attempting to do is to propose a theory of space and time which is consistent with modern physical theory and which {page 151} provides a suitable base on which to erect current theories in physics. I will content myself, that is, with arguing against a common, but woefully confused concept of space and time, a concept totally inappropriate for the doing of modern physics. When Leibniz contrasts his own theory with that of Newton, saying that Newton hypothesizes that space is 'absolute' and that he, instead, hypothesizes that space is 'relative', we must understand that Leibniz is not saying that each of them is arguing that space is a kind of stuff and that they are arguing about whether it is one sort of stuff or another. Quite the contrary, in his saying that Newton subscribes to a theory of absolute space, Leibniz is arguing that Newton believes that space is a kind of stuff. In contrast, when he himself argues that space is relative, Leibniz is arguing that space is nonexistent, in his own words, that the reality of space is "chimerical". In the Newtonian world-view, space and its contents are two different sorts of things; each exists. And although physical things could not exist except by being (at some determinate point or other) in space, space could exist even if it were devoid (empty) of all physical things whatsoever. This view, as I have said, is more or less the commonly held view of space. Leibniz's view is far more economical, but distinctly at variance with common, popular views. In Leibniz's view, physical objects do not 'inhabit' space. Physical objects exist; some touch one another; others are separated by various distances from one another; but there is no further kind of 'stuff' (space) filling up the places where there are no physical objects. There is, of course, one immediate benefit from adopting the neo-Leibnizian theory: it solves Buber's problem at a stroke. If space does not exist, then it neither has nor lacks an edge. If space does not exist, then there is no place which lies 'within' space and some other point which lies 'without'.3 3. Note too that Lucretius's imagined spear thrower stationed at (in his words) "the last limits" (see above p. 9) simply could not exist, and he could not exist for the same sorts of reasons that a person who factored the largest odd number could not exist. Just as there is no largest odd number and hence there could not be anyone who factored it, there is no space and hence there could not be anyone who stood at its "last limits". Many persons find this particular manner of solving philosophical puzzles deeply disturbing and find themselves resisting the proposal. {page 152} To them it seems something of a cheat to attempt to solve a puzzle by undercutting its presuppositions. Thus, for example, some persons have balked at Russell's solution to the famous Barber paradox. Russell described a male, adult barber, who himself had whiskers, who shaved all and only those persons in his village who did not shave themselves ([179], 261). The question arises: Who shaves the barber? Whether one answers that he is unshaved, that he shaves himself, or that someone else shaves him, the answer immediately contradicts one of the explicit claims made in the description of the barber. Russell's solution – and indeed the only solution possible to the puzzle – is to recognize that the very description given of the barber is internally incoherent, i.e. it is logically impossible that there should be such a barber. The puzzle can be solved, in effect, only by 'backing up', as it were, and challenging one of the presuppositions of the very problem itself. One 'solves' such a problem, not by answering it, but by rejecting the problem, by showing that it harbors an untenable presupposition.4 4. For more on the Barber paradox, see [163] and [34], 117-18. Buber could not solve his problem. That either answer led immediately, in Buber's own words, to "absurdity" is evidence not of the profundity of the problem itself, not of the need for ingenious solutions, but of something fundamentally incoherent in the very problem itself. And what that incoherence consisted in, I suggest, is the popularly held, but ultimately untenable, view that space is a kind of 'stuff' of which it is appropriate to imagine that it has a boundary and of which it is appropriate to ask what lies within it and what lies outside it. This 'absolute' (or 'container') notion of space cannot be freed of incoherence. There is an altogether different sort of argument which may also be brought to bear against the concept of space as being a kind of 'stuff', an argument from English grammar. Consider the two English sentences, (S1) There is water between the chair and the wall. and (S2) There is space between the chair and the wall. From a point of view of English grammar, these two sentences are identical. From a grammatical point of view, they match word for {page 153} word, phrase for phrase. But in spite of that, there is something profoundly different about these two sentences. The concepts water and space which occur in them behave unexpectedly differently from a logical point of view. The remarkable dissimilarity is revealed when we try to paraphrase these two sentences. For the latter can be given a paraphrase which is anything but possible for the former. (S2) may be paraphrased this way: (S2') There is nothing between the chair and the wall, and the chair is not touching the wall. In this paraphrase, only two sorts of 'things' (or stuff) are referred to: the chair and the wall. Talk of space has dropped out altogether. No such paraphrase is possible for (S1). For in (S1), there really are three sorts of things involved: chairs, water, and walls. But space is not a sort of thing, and this is revealed by the remarkable paraphrase possible for (S2). Two points need to be made about this maneuver. First, and foremost, is the need to address the objection that the paraphrase does not genuinely eliminate talk of space as a kind of stuff, it merely substitutes a synonym, viz. "nothing", in its place. For some persons, in reflecting on the paraphrase (S2'), will believe that they detect in it a reference to three kinds of things: chairs, walls, and nothingness. Indeed, some persons quite explicitly regard "empty space" and "nothingness" as (near-)synonyms. We have, it seems, offered a solution to one philosophical problem, only to have it replaced by another. Is "nothing", when used in a sentence such as "There is nothing between the chair and the wall", to be regarded as referring to a thing in the way in which "the chair" and "the wall" refer to things? What role does "nothing" play in such a sentence? The debate over the question what, if anything, "nothing" denotes has a long and checkered history in philosophy.5 Philosophers are split into two camps: those that regard "nothing" as denoting something (viz. the nothingness) and those that regard "nothing" as playing a non-denoting role in our sentences. 5. P.L. Heath's article, "Nothing", in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy ([67], vol. 5, 524-5), exhibits two virtues: it is informative and, at the same time, it is one of the few intentionally humorous writings in modern philosophy. Lewis Carroll (1832-98), the author of Through the Looking-Glass (who was by profession a mathematician and by avocation a philosopher), {page 154} spoofs the view which would make of "nothing" (and "nobody") the name of something (or someone).6 6. It comes as no surprise that the same person, P.L. Heath, has written both the articles "Lewis Carroll" and "Nothing" in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy ([67]). "Who did you pass on the road?" the King went on, holding out his hand to the Messenger for some more hay. "Nobody," said the Messenger. "Quite right," said the King: "this young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody walks slower than you." "I do my best," the Messenger said in a sullen tone. "I'm sure nobody walks much faster than I do!" "He can't do that," said the King, "or else he'd have been here first." ([46], 196) Many twentieth-century philosophers, especially those among the Continental schools and the Existential schools, have written of Nothingness, treating it – as the King regards "Nobody" in Carroll's fable – as referring to some actually existent thing. They have talked of the fear of Nothingness and of the anxiety caused by the prospects of Nothingness. Some of these philosophers identify Nothingness with death; and others with 'the void'. But other philosophers will have nothing (!) of that kind of theorizing. These latter philosophers (myself among them) regard "nothing" as playing a different kind of role in our sentences. "Nothing", according to this theory, is just one among several so-called quantifiers, words which, in effect, serve to indicate the size of the classes one is talking about. Thus, for example, we might say, "Everything troubles me today", or "Practically everything is troubling me today", or "Something is troubling me today", or – finally – "There is nothing troubling me today". What this latter sentence says, I would urge, is that there is not anything that is troubling me, i.e. that I am free of troubles. "There is nothing troubling me today" ought not, I suggest, be thought to be saying that I am being troubled and what is doing that troubling is Nothing.7 7. Strawson has written of the tendency of certain descriptive phrases, e.g. "the round table", 'to grow capital letters' and become converted into names, e.g. "the Round Table". One might notice that there is a tendency, too, in the writings of certain philosophers for quantifiers similarly 'to grow capital letters'. If we are not careful to resist the temptation, we may find the innocent, familiar "nothing" mysteriously transmogrifying into a name for the (dreaded) Nothing. Arguments which adopt this latter sort of linguistic fraud fall among what have come to be called 'fallacies of reification'. As a sidelight, I might mention that Strawson's clever phrase occurs in a reply (1950), "On Referring" ([199]), which was directed against Bertrand Russell's "On Denoting" ([177]) written some forty-five years earlier, in 1905. As a matter of fact, at the time Russell wrote "On Denoting", Strawson's birth lay fourteen years in the future. Russell's eventual reply to Strawson was published in 1957 ([181]). There must be few other instances in the history of thought where an author may be found to be defending one of his/ her writings fifty-two years after having penned it. {page 155} Along perfectly similar lines, when we offer a paraphrase of "There is space between the chair and the wall" which reads "There is nothing between the chair and the wall and the chair is not touching the wall", the latter ought to be understood as saying "There is no (third) thing between the chair and the wall" rather than as saying "There is some third thing between the chair and the wall, namely, Nothing." If "Nothing" named a kind of thing in the world, then – by parallel reasoning, it seems to me – so too would "something", "practically everything", "hardly anything", "most", and "a few", etc. None of these, I suggest, names anything in the world. No more so than does "it" in "It is raining" or "there" in "There is a car in the driveway." If one identifies space with The Nothing, then one immediately invites back Buber's conundrum, only it now reads: "Where does the Nothingness leave off, and what is on the other side?" The second concern arising over the maneuver of 'paraphrasing-away', as it were, the reference to space as a kind of thing does not so much question the results of applying that technique, but challenges the very technique itself. Some persons are deeply suspicious and troubled over the technique of solving philosophical problems by grammatical or linguistic means. Even cheerfully admitting the correctness of the paraphrase, some persons will resist seeing it as a genuine solution to the original problem. The objection they make is to the alleged relevance of the paraphrase to solving the problem. Again, just as in the case of Russell's proposed solution of the Barber paradox, persons will have differing attitudes about the philosophical methodology involved. Persons come to philosophy with different expectations. What one person sees as a perfectly cogent solution to a {page 156} problem, another person may fail to regard as even being relevant. For some persons, the demonstration that "space" has a quite different 'logical grammar' from ordinary substantive terms, such as "water", "wall", and "chair", does nothing to address the problem of sorting out the concept of space. Linguistic maneuvers, of the sort we have just gone through paraphrasing away "space" in (S2), are regarded as mere 'word-chopping' or 'hairsplitting', but not as grappling with the deep conceptual problems afoot. Other persons, in being presented with precisely the same paraphrase and the accompanying discussion of how "space" and "nothing" do not behave grammatically like (incontrovertible) substantive terms such as "water", "wall", and the like, experience something of a 'Eureka'-flash, and come to regard problems like Buber's as having their source in thinking of space as if it were an (ethereal) kind of thing. In my own classroom, I often see the different attitudes persons have toward these methods. On encountering the method of paraphrase and the claim that it can sometimes reveal important distinctions among our concepts, some of my students will embrace it with zeal and regard it as revelatory while others of them will reject it with open contempt. Who is right? How does one adjudicate when fundamental conceptions about the very practice itself of philosophy are at stake? How does one argue in support of, or against, the method of paraphrasing as a means of solving some philosophical problems? Certainly great numbers of modern philosophers use such techniques: if not every day, then at least on some occasions. One can hardly pick up a current philosophical journal without finding within it some article in which the writer has utilized it or a kindred technique. But for the person unfamiliar with, or unused to, such techniques, to whom such techniques seem linguistic sleights of hand, who initially regards them as being some sort of cheat, how is one to recommend and justify the adoption of such a technique? There can, of course, be no definitive answer. There can be no answer which is ultimately assured of winning converts to a methodology which some persons view with suspicion or disfavor. It is no more possible to find a way to convince one's opponents of the rightness or utility of a philosophical methodology than it is to find a way to convince one's opponents of the profit of looking at the world through the eyes of a new scientific theory or adopting a new technology. In spite of the commonly held view that there is some one canonical 'scientific method', its existence is, when all is said and done, mythical. Similarly, {page 157} there is nothing that can be called 'the' philosophical method, either. Philosophers are bound to disagree among themselves about philosophical methods, just as scientists are bound to disagree over scientific methods. There is no argument in support of the method of paraphrasing which will be convincing to all doubters. One can do no more than apply that method to various cases, display the results, and invite one's readers to decide for themselves whether they regard the method and its results as acceptable. My own attitude has been to adopt the method as one tool among several to be used in struggling to explicate our concepts. I am happy to utilize it in the present case because its results cohere with the results of other approaches and because its results offer a solution to Buber's problem and because the method offers a concept of space suitable for erecting modern physical theories. This is not to say that I believe that the method of paraphrase is the touchstone for doing philosophy. Quite the contrary, I believe that in some instances it has been used in a jawbone fashion, for example in the analysis of the concept of causation where it has been applied – in the hands of some philosophers – to too few examples, and thus been used to advance an overly restricted explication of "cause". In short, I do not rest my case, of arguing that space is nonexistent, simply on the basis of a paraphrase of (S2). I build the argument on that paraphrase, to be sure, but on much else besides, e.g. that such an explication solves Buber's problem and that such an explication coheres with modern physical theories whereas a 'container' notion of space does not. 8.3 Objections and replies to the neo-Leibnizian theory It has been my own experience that most persons relish a lavish ontology. By this I mean that most persons prefer a conceptual scheme in which there figure a great number of kinds of things. The term "things" here is meant in a very broad, inclusive sense. On this interpretation, "things" will include, of course, the most familiar things of all, namely physical objects, but will include as well all sorts of nonphysical things, e.g. minds (if indeed they are nonphysical), supernatural beings, numbers, classes, colors, pains, mathematical theorems, places, and events. In short, "things" is being used here as a general name for any sort of thing (!) whatsoever that can be named or described. Most persons, it seems to me, are willing to prune their ontologies {page 158} only with reluctance. Few persons cheerfully or readily are willing to discard items from their stock-in-trade ontology. Every philosopher who has ever argued that some item or other in the popularly held ontology is expendable insofar as it is mythical or incoherent has, I am sure, met with resistance from persons arguing that the suggestion is a patent offense against common sense. There is much to be said for the commonsense view of the world. Foremost is the fact that it works extremely well. One tampers with it only gingerly and always at some risk of damaging it. But commonsensical views of the world are not perfect and are not immune to change and improvement. One can sometimes improve on common sense, but one must take care in trying to do so. For a good deal of suggested repair – e.g. that disease is a myth – is downright dangerous. The neo-Leibnizian theory I have described above, the theory that space does not exist, i.e. that there is no such thing as space, is guaranteed to elicit from many persons the objection that it does so much violence to common sense that it is simply fantastic. The concept of space as being a kind of thing is so pervasive in our commonsense view of the world that any suggestion that space does not really exist is regarded as a philosopher's fancy not to be seriously credited. Let me try, somewhat further, to undo this sort of resistance. Let me try both to show how the theory works, and how it succeeds in preserving what is valuable in common sense and how it discards what is problematic in the commonsensical view. Objection 1: Lord Kelvin once extolled the virtues of measurement this way: "... when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind" ([109] 80). Probably he overstated the negative side of the case. There are doubtless all sorts of things – such as beauty in music and nobility of character – which have not succumbed to precise measurement but about which our knowledge cannot, reasonably, be judged to be 'unsatisfactory'.8 On the positive side, however, Kelvin's point is well taken. Measurement, especially if it is reproducible, public, accurate, and utilizable in {page 159} a well-established scientific theory, does provide us with valuable knowledge.9 More particularly, it provides us with knowledge of real features of the world. If something is measurable, then it exists. Nonexistent things cannot be measured. Now space surely can be measured. We need not, for example, content ourselves merely with noting that there is some space between the chair and the wall, we can proceed to measure quantitatively that amount of space. Using a steel tape measure, we may find that the shortest distance between the two is 55.6 cm. Using more refined laboratory instruments, we can measure space with an accuracy of better than one part in ten million. Surely it must be a mistake, then, given the acknowledged possibility of performing such public, reproducible, and accurate measurements, to argue that space itself is a fiction. 8. Abraham Kaplan's views on measurement are even stronger than Kelvin's: "No problem is a purely qualitative one in its own nature; we may always approach it in quantitative terms. We may; but can we always do so? Are there not some things which are intrinsically unmeasurable ... ? For my part, I answer these questions with an unequivocal 'No' " ([108], 176). 9. See also Cassirer: "A fact is understood when it is measured" ([47], 140). Reply to Objection 1: The theory of space being proposed here must not be thought to deny the possibility of our performing such measurements. Any theory which said that it is impossible to measure the distance between chairs and walls would be at such gross variance with simple physical facts as to be worthy of rejection immediately. The neo-Leibnizian theory, obviously, cannot deny such 'hard facts' if it is to be seriously entertained. And indeed it does not. Quite the contrary, Leibniz implicitly allows that such measurements are possible ([5], Fifth paper, §54, 75). Certainly it is possible to measure the distances between many physical objects. For ordinary-sized physical things, close at hand, we can use calipers and meter sticks; for greater distances, surveyors' transit theodolites; and for still greater distances, radar, parallax measurements, and Doppler red-shift measurements. All of this simply must be admitted, and indeed all of it is left perfectly intact in the neo-Leibnizian theory. Even more to the point, this theory makes the picture of physical objects standing in various spatial relationships to one another its fundamental notion. According to the neo-Leibnizian theory, it is precisely physical objects and their spatial relationships which are real. What {page 160} is denied to be real is some sort of pervasive 'stuff' (i.e. space) of which these relations are somehow to be thought of as properties. In this neo-Leibnizian theory, from the point of view of physics, what exists are physical bodies, persisting through time, some very small (including the molecules of the gaseous mixture air), others immense, some touching one another, others at various distances, some at relative rest, i.e. not moving with respect to some object conventionally chosen as the 'fixed point', and yet others in motion with respect to that 'fixed point'. But that's it. There is no further ethereal soup (space) in which all these objects 'float', as it were, like fish in the sea. But if there is no ethereal 'stuff' between objects, then Buber's peculiar views of the world cannot arise. What we have in this theory is what is worth preserving, viz. physical objects of various sizes moving about with respect to one another. What falls away is precisely, and only, that part of the picture which was problematic: the idea that space was a further kind of 'thing' of which it was appropriate to imagine that it, too, had an 'inside' and an 'outside'. Objection 2: It is not simply that we are able to measure the distance between non-contiguous objects. It goes well beyond that. Physicists, astronomers, cosmologists, and geometers attribute geometrical properties to space, e.g. they are wont to talk of space being "curved" and of space having "three dimensions". Surely only an existent thing can have such physical properties. If there is curvature, then there must exist something to be curved; if there are three dimensions, then there must exist something to be three-dimensional. Reply to Objection 2: The definition of "curvature", as a mathematically calculable measure, was invented by Gauss (1777-1855) in two papers of 1825 and 1827 on the geometry of two-dimensional10 surfaces ([76], 15, 97). The Gaussian measure of the curvature at any {page 161} point is the reciprocal of the products of the greatest and least radii of curvature at that point. For example, consider the curvature at a point on the 'equator' of a perfect sphere. The surface curves equally in all directions, e.g. along the equator itself and along the line of longitude through that point; i.e. both these circles have the same radius. Let us call that radius "R". The measure of the curvature, then, according to the Gaussian formula would be 1/(R x R). Note that it makes no matter whether "R" is regarded as positive or negative: in being multiplied by itself, the result must be positive. Thus, for a (perfect) sphere, the measure of curvature is at every point the same and is always positive. 10. With the advent, c. 1975, of fractal geometry (launched by Benoit Mandelbrot; see [131], chap. XII, for a history) and its talk of 'fractal dimensions', it is becoming common among mathematicians to replace this historical, unqualified use of "dimension" with "topological* dimension". But since there is no discussion in this book of fractal geometry, I have felt no particular need to adopt the reformed terminology. When I speak of spatial dimensions, I will be referring to the historically familiar dimensions of width, height, and depth. Imagine now the sphere growing to infinite size: the surface is (effectively) flat, and the radius is infinite (i.e. ). The Gaussian formula tells us that the curvature is 1/( x ), i.e. zero. That is, a plane surface, a flat two-dimensional 'space', has a curvature of zero. Thirdly, imagine a doughnut-shaped surface, or as mathematicians call it, a torus (pl. tori). Imagine it to be oriented as if lying on a tabletop. (See figure 8.1, p. 162) Choose a point on the inner surface, i.e. on the perimeter of the hole in the middle. (In figure 8.1, see the left-hand side of the lower diagram.) There are two circles here, at right angles: a horizontal circle (whose radius is labeled "R") comprising that inner perimeter; and a vertical circle (whose radius is labeled "r"), that of the cross-section through the dough of the pastry. (If you prefer, imagine two interlocked key rings, touching at right angles.) What makes this case importantly different from the preceding two is that the two radii of curvature are in opposite directions. If one is assigned a positive value, the other must be assigned a negative value. Assume one is +r and the other is –R. Then the Gaussian formula gives a negative value for the curvature, i.e. 1/(–R x +r), which is, of course, equal to –1/(\|R\| x \|r\|). Such negatively curved surfaces are exhibited along the inner surfaces of tori, on saddles, and on the bells (flares) of hunting horns, trumpets, etc. (Incidentally, you might notice that the curvature of the surface of tori changes from place to place. While the curvature is negative on the perimeter of the hole, it is positive on the points farthest from the hole [see the right-hand half of the diagram in figure 8.1]. There the two radii, and r, point in the same direction, and hence the curvature is positive.11) 11. For more on the concept of curvature, see [3], esp. 261-86 and 356-70. As Gauss originally introduced the concept, to apply to features of {page 162} Figure 8.1 two-dimensional surfaces, curvature is readily grasped. But it was not long before the concept was extended in 1854, by Riemann (1826-66), to apply, not to two-dimensional surfaces, but to three-dimensional space ([173]). For a mathematician, a 'space' may be of any number of dimensions. Indeed, a 'space' need not refer to anything physical whatever: it is just a measure of the number of 'dimensions' needed to specify the 'location' of something of interest. For example, Helmholtz cites the case of the three-dimensional 'space' of colors: any given color may be located in the (finite) three-dimensional space of red, green, and blue, by specifying for each of these 'dimensions' (primary colors) what percentage occurs in the given color. (He omits intensity; had he included that parameter, he would have needed a four-dimensional 'space' {page 163} which was finite in three of its dimensions, and infinite in the fourth.) If someone offered a theory of intelligence, for example, in which there were five independent parameters to be measured – e.g. verbal skills, mathematical skills, physical skills, creative skills, and social skills – then one would have to posit a 'space' of these five dimensions in which to locate any given person. From the mathematical point of view, there is utterly no difference between the 'spaces' of geometry, of color spectra, and of intelligence. All of these, and countless other 'manifolds', are called "spaces". Even philosophers have adopted the concept and sometimes talk (perhaps a bit pretentiously) of such esoterica as "logical" space. When Riemann extended Gauss's original concept of the curvature of two-dimensional surfaces to a three-dimensional space, we must understand that he was proceeding by mathematical analogy. He was, in effect, arguing that certain features of three-dimensional geometry (and by extension, four-, five-, six-, indeed any n-dimensional geometry) would be extensions of features of two-dimensional geometry. In any analogy, certain features are preserved and others discarded. And in extending Gauss's original notion, devised for two-dimensional geometry, to three-, four-, or higher-dimensional geometries, we must take care to understand exactly what may be carried over and what is to be discarded. Riemann discovered that in a 'positively curved' space, many of the familiar theorems of Euclidean geometry do not hold. For example, in such a space, there are no parallel lines and the sum of the angles of triangles always exceeds 180°. But what, exactly, is one to make of this notion of a 'positively curved' space? The intellectual puzzle arises because of the difficulty we have in trying to extend the familiar notions of curvature which were introduced, in the first instance, to apply to two-dimensional surfaces: of the sphere, of the torus, etc. To be sure, the sphere and the torus are three-dimensional objects; but their surfaces are two-dimensional 'spaces'. We can intuitively grasp the sense of "curvature" operative in these familiar cases because we can visualize that the curved surfaces are the two-dimensional surfaces of a three-dimensional figure. But when we are then told that our own physical space is (or might be) curved, and we try by analogy to visualize it as being the surface of some four-dimensional solid, our imaginations fail us. The analogy becomes more hindrance than help. Mathematicians are practiced enough to know how to handle the analogy correctly. Mathematicians, that is, know how to abstract the essential mathematical features from such examples – the plane, the {page 164} sphere, the torus, etc. Non-mathematicians, however, are done a disservice by these models, for they are not practiced in focusing in on just the relevant mathematical features at play, and are far too likely, virtually inevitably likely, to be distracted by the robust reality of the physical objects (the Earth, the hunting horn) which 'sport' these curved surfaces. What the mathematician wants to focus on in these models are the surfaces themselves, divorced from the things of which they happen to be the surfaces, i.e. the mathematician is concerned solely with the mathematical, not the physical, properties of these surfaces. But all of this is usually lost in most popular presentations of modern geometry. Already in the nineteenth century, Hermann Helmholtz recognized non-mathematicians' inability to handle the concept of curvature in the manner of physicists and mathematicians, i.e. he recognized that non-mathematicians tried to conceive of the curvature which was said to characterize physical space after the model of curvature which was familiar in the case of the two-dimensional surfaces of three-dimensional objects. Helmholtz advises that one abandon any attempt to conceive of curvature in that manner. Instead we should conceive of curvature as the result of a certain kind of calculation we perform on quantities we measure with our instruments. All known space-relations are measurable, that is, they may be brought to determination of magnitudes (lines, angles, surfaces, volumes). Problems in geometry can therefore be solved, by finding methods of calculation for arriving at unknown magnitudes from known ones. ... Now we may start with this view of space, according to which the position of a point may be determined by measurements in relation to any given figure (system of co-ordinates), taken as fixed, and then inquire what are the special characteristics [e.g. the curvature] of our space as manifested in the measurements that have to be made. This path was first entered by ... Riemann of Göttingen. It has the peculiar advantage that all its operations consist in pure calculation of quantities which quite obviates the danger of habitual perceptions being taken for necessities of thought. ... To prevent misunderstanding, I will once more observe that this so-called measure of space-curvature is a quantity obtained by purely analytical [mathematical] calculation, and that its introduction involves no suggestion of relations that would {page 165} have a meaning only for sense-perception. ([89], 44-7) Helmholtz, like Riemann himself, regards this 'new talk' of curvature, not as describing perceivable, or even imaginable, properties of space, but rather as a result to be obtained by mathematical calculation on measured quantities. In modern science, too, many writers repeat the advice, cautioning readers explicitly about the potentially misleading use of the word "curved". The astronomer Dennis Sciama, for example, writes that it is misleading to talk of non-Euclidean space as "curved". But his point is perfectly general, and does not apply only to non-Euclidean space, for it is, in a way, just as misleading to describe Euclidean space as "flat". I will bracket certain phrases in quoting him, so as to make his point more general. In this instance, bracketing indicates not my insertions, but rather my suggested deletions from the original: "We can easily understand what it means to say that a two-dimensional surface is curved, because we can see this surface lying in three-dimensional [Euclidean] space, and the meaning of the word 'curvature' is quite obvious. But when this same name 'curvature' is also given to a three-dimensional [non-Euclidean] space (footnote: let alone four-dimensional space-time!) it becomes rather misleading. ... All that is meant by the curvature of space, then, is that gravitation affects the motion of bodies" ([186], 146). The essential point is Sciama's last sentence: "All that is meant by the curvature of space, then, is that gravitation affects the motion of bodies." And he might have added, "and affects the path of light rays."12 (A minor matter: {page 166} The so-called curvature of space varies from place to place. The curvature is more marked, i.e. light rays are more affected, in the vicinity of massive bodies than at places remote from them. And the overall curvature of the entire universe is a function of both the amount and the distribution of mass within the universe.) 12. The mathematician-astronomer I.W. Roxburgh makes much the same point, but writes at somewhat greater length: "... what is this stuff called space whose curvature is to be determined – how do we measure it? We can, like Gauss, set up a triangulation experiment and measure the angles of a triangle – the answer will not be 180° – but this does not mean space is curved. The experiment is done with light rays and theodolites – the empirical result is a statement about the behaviour of light rays – not about space. It is, as it must be, an experiment about the relationship between objects in space not about space itself. The same is necessarily true about any experiment; from it we learn of the relationship between objects not of the background we call space. ... Space ... is an intermediary that we bring into the formalism [of relativity theory] for ease of representation, but in any empirical statement about the world the representation [i.e. space itself] is eliminated" ([175], 87; italics added). Talk of space itself being curved has become commonplace within physics. But one must beware not to interpret such talk too literally, or at least not with the common meanings we assign to the word "curvature". We should no more want to regard the physicist's use of the term "curvature" as being akin to the ordinary use than we should want to regard the physicist's use of the word "field" as being akin to the farmer's. In suggesting that we should deliberately and consciously try to resist the temptation to conceive of space as a kind of subtle, tenuous, ethereal, or subliminal kind of 'stuff', the sort of thing which begs us to try to imagine where its boundaries might be or what its curvature or geometry might be, I am not suggesting that we reform our language so as to purge it of the word "space" or that we cease altogether to talk of space. To try to avoid talking of space strikes me as futile and as foolhardy an enterprise as some have attempted with certain other terms. History provides us with the spectacle of a number of linguistic cultists who have trained themselves to speak without ever uttering words which they regarded as 'corrupt' – not barbarisms like "priorize", "irregardless" and "de-hire", but perfectly ordinary nuts-and-bolts words such as "but" or "not" and even (incredibly) "is".13 (I have had students, bamboozled by bizarre linguistic theories, try to explain to me that every time one uses the word "but" in describing the behavior of another person, one has insulted that person.14) 13. For example, this sort of linguistic nonsense was occasionally peddled in the 1930s by some of the more extreme of the disciples of Alfred Korzybski, founder of the school of General Semantics. General Semantics must not be confused with the modern science of semantics. Indeed Korzybski himself wrote, "My work in General Semantics has nothing to do with the above-mentioned disciplines [pragmatics, semantics, and logic]" ([113], 282). 14. Counterexamples which refute the theory are easy to find. It is no insult, but rather a compliment, to say, "She had missed a day of work because of an airline strike, but still managed to break all sales records for July." Some proposals to reform language are grounded in good reasons; some are not. Certain proposals – e.g. to use nonsexist pronouns and {page 167} nonsexist descriptive terms or to eliminate offensive racist and ethnic labels – have powerful ethical warrant. However, there are no similarly good reasons – either on ethical or on any other grounds – for eliminating such words as "is", "but", and "space". These latter sorts of terms, or equivalents, are enormously useful, being well-suited for most contexts. It would be pointless and counterproductive to abstain from using the word "space". All of us, myself included, will surely continue to say such perfectly intelligible and correct things as "There is not enough space on the shelf for this book" or "There is too much space in the garden to conceal with a single rosebush." My suggestion is only that, even though we use the word "space" often and with propriety, we not allow ourselves to think that the term designates some sort of tenuous 'stuff'. When we find ourselves lapsing into the kinds of speculations which so befuddled Buber, and perhaps ourselves earlier, it is at that point that we should remind ourselves that "space" does not function in our language like "water", that any sentence containing the word "space" can be paraphrased so that talk of "space" drops out. ("There's not enough space on the shelf for this book" might become, for example, "If all the objects on the shelf were to be shoved to the left end of the shelf, then the distance at the right end, between the last object and the right edge of the shelf, would be less than the width of this book.") George Berkeley (1685-1753), perhaps paraphrasing Francis Bacon, wrote: "... we ought to 'think with the learned and speak with the vulgar [ordinary persons]' " (A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, [27], 45-6). Although I certainly do not share the views he was advancing in the context in which the quotation appears (he was arguing against the reality of material objects), the maxim, divorced from that particular application, remains good advice. The word "space" is here to stay. Nonetheless, there is nothing to prevent our adopting a refined understanding of the concept invoked by that word. Although we persist in using the word, we can certainly adopt the sort of conception counseled by the learned: by Leibniz, by Helmholtz, and by modern cosmologists. We are free to abandon the incoherent notion of space which would make space a kind of 'stuff', or, even worse, a kind of 'curved stuff'. Objection 3: The idea that space exists derives not just from common sense, or even, for that matter, from physics, but from perception. Space is not a theoretical posit, or hypothetical entity, in the way in which the 'collective unconscious' might be thought to be. Quite the {page 168} contrary, space is every bit as perceivable as are physical objects. For I do not see only physical objects, I can also see the space between them. On clear moonless nights, I can look up at the sky and see the very blackness of space itself. In short, I can see space. Since I can see space, and since I am experiencing neither an illusion nor a delusion, space must, then, exist. Reply to Objection 3: It is perfectly clear what the reply must be to this last objection. Someone holding to a neo-Leibnizian theory of space, who thereby wishes to deny the reality of space, must counterargue that space is not visible. But can one reasonably do this? Is not space visible in just the same sort of way, for example, that my hand is visible when held up before my eyes in a well-lighted room? There are, I think, two different sorts of cases where one might think one is perceiving space itself, and we would do well to examine both of them. The first sort of case involves ordinary, daylight perception, the kind you and I regularly experience as we look about ourselves in well-lighted places. What do we see? Typically, all sorts of physical objects – tables, chairs, pictures on the walls, carpets, human beings, etc. (if we are indoors); buildings, trees, roads, flowers, clouds, human beings, etc. (if we are outdoors) – lying at different distances from our vantage point. These many things are scattered about in different places, and often there are few if any other things occupying the places between them. About this we can all agree, and up to this point we give identical reports. But is there something more to be seen? Is there, in addition to the sorts of things just mentioned, space as well? Do we see space between the objects? To be sure, we say such things as "I can see space between the wall and the chair" or "I can see that there is a space between the wall and the chair." But – as before – we must treat such locutions very carefully. If you could really (or genuinely or authentically) see space, then you ought to be able to answer the question, "What color is that space?" Immediately, you are brought up short. What color is the space between the chair and the wall? If you try to answer that it is colorless, then you might rightly be asked how you could possibly see something which is colorless. In more familiar cases where we use the term "colorless", we can talk of seeing the colorless item, a liter of distilled water for example, because the object refracts light (other objects look distorted in various ways when viewed through the {page 169} object) or because the colorless object exhibits reflections on its surface. But space is supposed to be even more colorless than the most perfectly distilled water. Locally, in our living rooms and on the street in front of our homes, space does not refract the images of objects and space does not boast a surface which sports reflections. Space is thought to be non-refractive and non-reflective. If so, then it must be perfectly invisible. What 'seeing space' amounts to, then, is looking at the places between visible things and failing to see anything there. 'Seeing space' is not the successful seeing of something which exists, but is instead the looking at a place and the failure to see anything there. We do not see space; what we see – and describe in a slightly misleading way – are places devoid of things. This leaves the other case which I mentioned a moment ago. Can't we see space when we look up at the sky on a moonless night? Can't we see the inky blackness of space itself? "Space is not colorless after all; phenomenologically space is black, and can be seen," our critic might object. Often, persons who hold to the theory that space is a kind of thing are not consciously aware that they hold two inconsistent views about space: both that space in our living rooms is colorless and space between galaxies is black. But they cannot have it both ways. And they must be challenged: "Well, which is it, colorless or black, and why the difference?" The simple answer is that it is neither. The tension between the conflicting answers arises out of a misbegotten concept of space. The places between objects, where there are no other objects, are not 'things' of which one can ask, "Are they colored or colorless?" Empty places are not things: they are neither colored nor colorless; they are not black, and they are not any other color either. "Why, then, is the space between the chair and the table, unlike the space between Mars and Venus, not black?" This way of putting the question persists with the confusion. The 'space' between Mars and Venus is not black. We do not see blackness between the chair and the table, not because the space 'there' is some other color, but because we can see, by looking through that place, the illuminated wall beyond. If space existed and were colored, then I could not see my hand when held up a few inches from my nose: the intervening space would block my view. The sky is black between Mars and Venus, not because (interplanetary) 'space' is black, but rather because there is nothing to be seen there (between the planets) and nothing (except for {page 170} an occasional distant star) to be seen further on, either.15 15. From a phenomenological point of view, i.e. from the point of view of the sensory quality of the experience rather than the physics of its cause, we should realize that black is a color, on an equal footing with red, blue, yellow, etc. The often-heard slogan "black is not a color" is an article of physics, not of the phenomenology of sense perception. Black happens to be the color we perceive within our visual fields in those areas which are negligibly illuminated. It is possible, of course, to imagine that such minimally illuminated areas might have been perceived as red or yellow, or some other color. That we perceive such areas as black just happens to be a product of the way we are wired. It is not surprising, then, that when at first robbed of illumination, our visual sense offers up to us a visual field which is black. But, as we know, after a while, the blackness 'fades' from our consciousness. When seated in a darkened room for several minutes, most of us become oblivious to the black visual field in just the way that we become oblivious to the kinesthetic sensations of our body pressing against our chair. We come gradually not to see anything: there is no color sensation at all, not even of blackness. What is it like to be born blind? Is it to experience an infinite, black featureless visual field? I think not. I sometimes try to imagine blindness by moving my hand from clear view in front of my face around to the back of my head. At no point does my hand enter 'the inky blackness'. It simply disappears from view. That is what, I imagine, it must be like to be blind: just what it is like for me not to be able to see something positioned directly behind my head. I am, like everybody, blind in that direction. To be completely blind is to be unseeing, not as we all are in some directions, but to be unseeing in all directions. It is not to perceive an inky blackness. When we look up at the sky on a moonless night and get an impression of black, we are not seeing a black 'thing'. We are not seeing anything at all, and our nervous system fools us, by presenting it to our consciousness as if it were a gigantic piece of coal. Sometimes we get an impression of black from genuinely black physical objects, e.g. lumps of coal and the like. But our nervous system presents (much) the same visual impression when there is nothing there whatsoever. We must take care not to think that if there is a visual impression of black, then there is something there which is black. The ancients used to think that the (night) sky was the interior of a hollow black globe and the stars were tiny holes in that globe through which light shone. We should not want to replace that defective notion with one which would substitute for the black globe an infinite, tenuous, subtle 'container', either black or colorless. Physical things exist, {page 171} and because there are physical things, and only because there are physical things, there are also places. There is no need to posit an antecedently and independently existing physical space, a container, as it were, in which to imbed these physical objects. Neither physics nor our logic requires such a posit. Indeed, the very idea itself is, ultimately, internally incoherent. 8.4 Interlude: The expression "x does not exist" Doubtless one of the things which bemuses, indeed even baffles, persons new to philosophy is metaphysicians' proclivity to pronounce of all sorts of things which non-philosophers regard as relatively familiar that they are, in the end, nonexistent. Metaphysicians have often been known to deny the very existence of such (seemingly) obvious things as space, time, minds, material objects, superegos, evil, miracles, causes, physical laws, free will, and objective truth. Sometimes their negative pronouncements have the result of inducing great curiosity in their hearers, but sometimes the effect is entirely opposite to that intended, inducing, instead, great impatience, even outright alienation. The audience for such claims may find themselves initially protesting: "But surely that cannot be right. It is patently obvious that such a thing really does exist." Such persons may come to regard metaphysics as the wholesale rejection of common sense. Generally metaphysicians know very well that in denying the existence of certain things we are bucking common sense. Metaphysicians are not a species apart. Virtually all of us grow up among the very persons to whom we direct our writings and speak (more or less) the same language as the proverbial 'man in the street'. What explains our talk about "x does not really exist" is our indulging in a kind of literary license, a minor – but possibly potentially misleading – piece of professional hyperbole. Usually such locutions are meant as attention-getters, as a means of highlighting dramatically and forcefully the focus of our concerns. In most cases (but certainly not quite all), the metaphysician who writes "x does not exist" may be found to be advancing a rather more complicated theory, viz. "x does not exist, if by 'x' one means 'y'; and while y does not exist, something else, viz. z does; and taking the latter to be what is denoted by 'x' is a better theory." Put less formally, generally what is involved in the metaphysician's denying that x exists is really the offering of an alternative theory, to be substituted in place of the prevailing, and allegedly defective, theory about the nature of x. {page 172} In denying, as I have just done in the previous section, that space exists, I did not stop simply with making that denial. What was involved in denying that space exists was the elaboration that what was being challenged was a particular concept of space, a concept which would portray space as being itself something like a spatial object. And it is that particular concept, I argued, which is incoherent and in need of replacement. What was not being challenged, indeed what was being insisted upon, is most of what occurs in the ordinary concept, e.g. that there are physical objects, that they are strewn about the universe in different places at varying, and indeed measurable, distances, and that physics can tell us a very great deal about how material objects can interact gravitationally and can tell us the geometry of the path of radiation in the vicinity of massive bodies. In denying that space exists, not only was none of this latter denied, it was positively insisted upon. The claim that space does not exist is my (and several other philosophers') way of calling attention to the fact that space conceived after the fashion of a quasi-physical object is an untenable notion. And thus it goes. Typically when metaphysicians deny that something exists, we do not just leave it at that. What we are in fact doing is offering an alternative theory; we are trying to show that there is something defective in the ordinary notion and are offering a repair. Only rarely, if ever, do we suggest that a concept should be discarded without being replaced by anything at all. In the following section, we will, for the first and only time in this book, encounter a theory, McTaggart's theory of time, which is of the latter sort. McTaggart argued that neither of the two principal theories of time is tenable, and that time does not exist. Few other metaphysicians are disposed to accept his arguments. 8.5 Positive and negative theories of time Just as there are two major theories of space – the 'container' theory and the relational (or Leibnizian) theory – there are two major theories of time. Indeed, I regard it as one of the most important successes of modern metaphysics to have discovered just how much similarity there is, in their formal aspects, between space and time. (We will devote sections 8.7 through 8.10 to the topic of spatial and temporal analogies.) There is a certain problem in what we are to call each of these theories. The first is sometimes called the "absolute", "dynamic", "Augustinian", {page 173} or, simply, the "A-theory". The latter name, "A-theory", does not stand either for "absolute" or for "Augustinian", but derives from J.M.E. McTaggart (1866-1925), who distinguished two sets of temporal terms, one he designated the "A-series" and the other, the "B-series". The second, opposing, theory is sometimes known as the "relative", "static", or "B-theory" of time. In its way, the Augustinian theory of time is the temporal analog of the 'container theory' of space and, not surprisingly, it prompted in Augustine himself much the same sort of bewilderment that we have already seen in Buber: "Time ... is never all present at once. The past is always driven on by the future, the future always follows on the heels of the past, and both the past and the future have their beginning and their end in the eternal present" ([15], §11). Hardly are these words down on paper than Augustine has second thoughts and retracts, or contradicts, what he has just said about the present being 'eternal': "Of these three divisions of time ... how can two, the past and the future, be, when the past no longer is and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time but eternity" (§14). But this is only the start of his problems. For now he goes on to write: If the future and past do exist, I want to know what they are. I may not yet be capable of such knowledge, but at least I know that wherever they are, they are not there as future or past, but as present. For if, wherever they are, they are future, they do not yet exist; if past, they no longer exist. So wherever they are and whatever they are, it is only by being present that they are. (§18) ... it is abundantly clear that neither the future nor the past exist, and therefore it is not strictly correct to say that there are three times, past, present, and future. It might be correct to say that there are three times, a present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future things. Some such different times do exist in the mind, but nowhere else that I can see. (§20) What Augustine is finally driven to, we see, is a 'psychological' theory of time: the past and the future exist (mysteriously) 'in the mind', but not in objective reality. Any such theory must immediately face the problem how it is possible to measure time. This would be an {page 174} especially acute problem in modern physics where it is commonplace, using exquisitely crafted instruments, to resolve time intervals into million-millionths of seconds. Such remarkable precision seems orders of magnitude beyond what any of us is capable of by psychological reckoning. But even in the far cruder physics of the fourth century AD, a psychological theory of time faced a hopeless uphill battle. Augustine's claim – "It is in my own mind, then, that I measure time. I must not allow my mind to insist that time is something objective" (§27) – is a virtual non-starter when it comes to explaining several persons' common measurements of time. Augustine would have us believe that memories and expectations are the actual objects of our temporal measurements: "... it is not future time that is long, but a long future is a long expectation of the future; and past time is not long, because it does not exist, but a long past is a long remembrance of the past" (§28). Memories of the past and expectations of the future are no substitute for actual physical measurements of temporal intervals as they occur. My memory of my son's birthday celebration, for example, may last only a fleeting moment, although the celebration may have gone on for hours. Presently held memories and expectations simply do not have the temporal extents of the events remembered or expected and cannot be used as their proxies in our trying to determine their durations. How can we summarize the core of Augustine's theory? Augustine, himself, provides a useful characterization: "[Time] can only be coming from the future, passing through the present, and going into the past. In other words, it is coming out of what does not yet exist, passing through what has no duration, and moving into what no longer exists" (§21). You can see here why Augustine's theory has sometimes been called the "dynamic" theory. He posits, not things or events evolving through time, but time itself as moving from the future, through the present, to the past. And you can also see why one might regard such a theory as the temporal analog of the spatial theory which regards space as a 'container'. For just as the absolute theory of space treats space itself (as we have seen) as a quasi-spatial thing, Augustine's theory of time treats time itself as a quasi-temporal thing, i.e. as a sort of thing which "passes" and "moves". And you can see, too, why Augustine's is sometimes regarded as a 'positive' theory of time: because it asserts that there is more to time than just events standing in temporal relations. It may be contrasted with so-called 'negative' theories which assert that there is nothing more to time than events standing in temporal relationships. {page 175} Augustine, to be sure, is not wholly happy with his own theory, and seems constantly to be troubling himself with peculiar questions – ones which arise naturally for a positive theory – such as "While we are measuring it, where is it coming from, what is it passing through, and where is it going?" (§21). But where Buber was driven to despair, Augustine – cleric that he was – was driven to prayer. Throughout his chapter on time, Augustine beseeches God for divine illumination on these mysteries. At the beginning of the twentieth century, McTaggart may be found to be promoting arguments virtually identical to Augustine's. But where Augustine confessed his bewilderment at the results of his own researches and seemed distressed by them, McTaggart unabashedly concludes that time is, in his words, "unreal". It may seem strange that I will take McTaggart to task for this latter conclusion. After all, have I not just finished a moment ago, in this very chapter, a lengthy argument to the effect that space is nonexistent? Why should I be sanguine about my own denial that space exists, and then take exception to McTaggart's claim that time does not exist? There is an important distinction between the sort of theory about space which I have just advanced and the sort of theory about time which McTaggart advances. In denying that space exists, I tried to explain that what that short proposition was to be understood to be asserting was that there is nothing in Nature like what is described by the theory of absolute space. I was denying one particular theory of space, only to be offering what I take to be a better theory, that of relative space, in its stead. And what makes the foregoing enterprise so different from McTaggart's theory of time is that McTaggart, in arguing for the unreality of time, is not offering a theory of relative time to replace or supersede a theory of absolute time, but is arguing against the viability of either theory. McTaggart is not saying, "Time does not exist, if you mean by 'time' y"; he is saying, "Time does not exist, period."16 16. A certain qualification is in order. In the latter half of The Nature of Existence ([130]), McTaggart makes a concerted effort to explain how, if time does not exist, then there is at least the appearance of time. So while it is strictly correct to say that McTaggart argues that time does not exist, he at least tries to preserve something of our ordinary account, viz., if not the actuality, then at least the appearance, of temporality. McTaggart begins by directing attention to two different ways we {page 176} commonly refer to positions in time. Right at the outset, he qualifies his introduction to this topic by writing "as time appears to us prima facie". He can hardly begin by saying that time is one way or another, for he is setting out to prove that time does not exist. Hence he talks of the "appearance" of time, so as not to admit that time does in fact exist: "Positions in time, as time appears to us prima facie, are distinguished in two ways. Each position is Earlier than some and Later than some of the other positions. ... In the second place, each position is either Past, Present, or Future.17 The distinctions of the former class are permanent, while those of the latter are not. If M [some event] is ever earlier than N [some other event], it is always earlier. But an event, which is now present, was future, and will be past" ([130], §305). 17. Later, in a footnote to §329, McTaggart qualifies these statements a bit. On the supposition that there is a first moment of time, then there is no moment Earlier than that moment and there is nothing Past to that moment. Similarly, if there is a last moment of time, there is nothing Later than that moment, nor is there anything Future to that moment. So when he writes that each "position is Earlier than ... some other position", etc., he wants to be understood as making this claim for all positions in time except for the first and last moments, if such exist at all. This minor correction is inessential for his ensuing arguments. The latter of these series, McTaggart calls the "A-series", the former, the "B-series": "For the sake of brevity I shall give the name of the A series to that series of positions which runs from the far past through the near past to the present, and then from the present through the near future to the far future, or conversely. The series of positions which runs from earlier to later, or conversely, I shall call the B series" ([130], §306). McTaggart then proceeds to argue that it is the A-series which is metaphysically more fundamental, for it is the A-series alone which can account for change, not the B-series. The B-series is, in a certain sense, static: it cannot account for an event's changing from having been future, to becoming present, and, finally, becoming past. Take any event – the death of Queen Anne, for example – and consider what changes can take place in its characteristics. That it is a death, that it is the death of Anne Stuart, that it has such causes, that it has such effects – every characteristic of this sort {page 177} never changes. ... At the last moment of time – if time has a last moment – it will still be the death of a Queen. And in every respect but one, it is equally devoid of change. But in one respect it does change. It was once an event in the far future. It became every moment an event in the nearer future. At last it was present. Then it became past, and will always remain past, though every moment it becomes further and further past. Such characteristics as these are the only characteristics which can change. And, therefore, if there is any change, it must be looked for in the A series, and in the A series alone. If there is no real A series, there is no real change. The B series, therefore, is not by itself sufficient to constitute time, since time involves change. ([130], §311) Notice how McTaggart's account of time is reminiscent of Augustine's: the future 'changes' into the present, and the present 'changes' into the past. Once an event is past, then it 'recedes' further and further from the present. According to this account, it is time itself, or positions in time, which undergo change. Various critics have strenuously objected to this account, since it seems to temporalize time itself. Time itself seems to be moving through time: the future 'becomes' the present, and the present 'becomes' the past. The picture seems to presuppose a kind of super-time, against which the flow of 'ordinary' time might be measured. Needless to say, many philosophers have attempted to create theories of time in which such an awkward, and probably unintelligible, notion is not introduced at all. In chapter 11, we will examine a totally different sort of theory, one in which time itself does not change, but it is objects, or things, which change in time. (McTaggart, in §315, explicitly rejects this alternative theory.) But this is to get ahead of ourselves. For the moment, we must see what McTaggart concludes from his argument that the A-series is metaphysically more fundamental than the B-series. He continues by arguing that time itself can exist only if there is something in reality which has the properties of the A-series. That is, he argues that time is real only if there are events which are future, become present, and recede into the past. But there can be no such events. For nothing whatever can have these properties since they are, as he attempts to show, logically inconsistent with one another, and no real (existent) thing can have logically inconsistent properties. Just as a five-sided square would have logically inconsistent properties and {page 178} hence could not possibly exist, McTaggart tries to demonstrate that a time which was future, became present, and receded into the past would have logically inconsistent properties and hence could not possibly exist: Past, present and future are incompatible determinations. Every event must be one or the other, but no event can be more than one. ... But every event [except the first and the last, if there are first and last events] has them all. If M is past, it has been present and future. If it is future, it will be present and past. Thus all three characteristics belong to each event. ([130], §329) In short, every event has incompatible determinations: it is past, present, and future. The case is analogous to a figure having exactly four and having exactly five sides. The characteristics are incompatible, and no such figure could possibly exist. McTaggart anticipates the obvious objection that he has neglected the tenses of the various verbs. It may seem that this [claim that there is an incompatibility of determinations] can easily be explained [i.e. exposed to be an error]. Indeed, it has been impossible to state the difficulty without almost giving the explanation, since our language has verb-forms for the past, present and future, but no form that is common to all three. It is never true, the answer will run, that M is present, past and future. It is present, will be past, and has been future. Or it is past, and has been future and present, or again is future, and will be present and past. The characteristics are only incompatible when they are simultaneous, and there is no contradiction to this in the fact that each term has all of them successively. ([130], §330) But McTaggart has raised this objection only, in turn, to dispute it. His ensuing counterobjection, i.e. his defense of his theory, lies in his asserting that every moment of time "is both past, present, and future" ([130], §331). As I reconstruct his rebuttal (§331), it seems to me to be something of the following sort. Consider the present moment: it is of course present; but equally, if we were to pick a past {page 179} moment, then the present moment is future; and equally, if we were to pick a future moment, then the present moment is past. Thus, the present moment is not only present, but past and future as well. This reply in defense of his theory strikes me as wrongheaded in the extreme. It strikes me as analogous to, and as unacceptable as, the following argument (where Carol plays the role of Future, Betty of Present, and Alice of Past). Carol is taller than Betty, who in turn is taller than Alice. Focus your attention on Betty. Now, pick someone who is shorter than Betty, e.g. Alice. Compared to Alice, Betty is tall. Now pick someone who is taller than Betty, e.g. Carol. Compared to Carol, Betty is short. Betty is thus both short and tall. But being short and being tall are incompatible determinations. Thus Betty could not possibly exist. I suggest that McTaggart has made the equivalent error. That any moment of time may be present, and equally may – relative to some other moments of time – be future, and equally may – relative to still other moments of time – be past, does nothing to show that any moment of time is both past, present, and future. No more than does your being taller than some persons and shorter than still others establish that you are both tall and short. One need not, then, conclude – as did McTaggart – that time is self-contradictory, and hence, that its very existence is logically impossible. McTaggart's theory of time, which virtually all commentators have subsequently found curious, unorthodox, and – in the end – quite unacceptable, was not just an isolated or insignificant fragment of his philosophizing. It stemmed in large measure from his inability to shake off the Augustinian concept of time, in which time was conceived as something 'moving' from the future, through the present, and into the past. McTaggart marked the culmination, if not quite the end, of a long era of conceiving of time in this familiar, even though confused, manner. The modern approach is, in a way, the very antithesis of McTaggart's. McTaggart's theory, like Augustine's, was a positive theory: it argued that there was something more to time than merely events standing in temporal relations. (Other writers have called this additional feature 'becoming', and argued that becoming could not be accounted for within a negative theory, e.g. within a bare B-series.) Negative theorists propose, in contrast, that temporal relations can be {page 180} treated analogously to spatial relations and that adequate theories of time can be constructed by regarding time as nothing over and above the temporal relations events have to one another. What is currently regarded as being needed, both for metaphysics and for science, is a theory of time which is free of internal inconsistency and which is able to accommodate a variety of facts: (1) that temporal events form a series, i.e. that events may be earlier than, simultaneous with, or later than other events; (2) that there is a present, a future, and a past; (3) that things change, evolve, grow, degenerate, etc.; and (4) that temporal relations – as attested to by the fact that they can be measured by scientific instruments with accuracies far beyond what are psychologically possible – are not 'just in the mind', but are objective facts of Nature. 8.6 The generalized concept of space Descartes and a number of subsequent philosophers, e.g. Locke, have argued that it is of the essence of material objects to be extended in space, i.e. to 'take up room' as we might say more colloquially. Descartes wrote: "... nothing whatever belongs to the concept of body [i.e. material object] except the fact that it is something which has length, breadth and depth and is capable of various shapes and motions" (Replies to the Sixth Set of Objections in [55], vol. II, 297). Nothing is a material object, we are inclined to assert, if it is not 'extended' in these three dimensions. Shadows cast by our bodies and images projected on movie screens, while extended in two spatial dimensions, specifically, while having width and height, lack the third spatial dimension, viz. depth, and are thus not accorded the status of materiality, are not, that is, regarded as being material objects. Being extended in three dimensions is not, however, a sufficient condition for being a physical object. It is merely a necessary condition. Reflections in mirrors are three dimensional; so are well-crafted projected holographic images. And yet neither reflections in mirrors nor projected holographic images are material objects. Clearly something more, besides being extended in three spatial dimensions, is required for something to count as being a bona fide material object. What is the difference between – let us use as our example – a real (physical or material) chair and its reflection, both of which are extended in three dimensions? The crucial difference is that although the real chair and its reflection in a mirror are both visible, only the former is tangible. Put another way, we can say that although both the {page 181} real chair and its reflection exist in visual space, only the real chair, not its reflection, exists in tactile space. There are in this example two conceptually distinct spaces: that of sight and that of touch. There are, to be sure, remarkable correlations between the two, but the two spaces remain, nonetheless, conceptually distinct. Indeed each and every sensory mode may be regarded as giving us access to a 'space': there is the space of sight; of touch; of hearing; of temperature; etc.18 18. "Older babies live more and more in a world in which the information from the senses is separated into a visual world [i.e. a visual space], an auditory world [space], and a tactual world [space]" ([32], 47). Whatever correlations there are in the data across sensory spaces (visual-auditory; visual-tactile; etc.) are both contingent and knowable only by experience (i.e. knowable only a posteriori). As infants we had to learn by trial and error the connection between the visual and the tactile.19 We had to learn that if something felt a certain way, then it would (probably) look a certain way, and that if something looked a certain way, then it would (probably) feel a certain way. Persons born blind who, by surgery, have acquired sight as adults find that it takes them some months before they are able, using their eyes, to recognize objects which are perfectly familiar to their hands.20 As adults, they have had to learn over a period of months, as the rest of us did as {page 182} infants, how to map the data of the visual and the tactile sensory modes back and forth. 19. One of the most surprising findings of experimental psychology is that newborns, in contrast to six-month-old infants, have an ability to reach directly for objects in their visual and auditory fields. Even blind newborns "stare at their hands, tracking them with their unseeing eyes" ([32], 69). But these sorts of innate abilities, strangely, seem to fade as the child grows during the first year, and come to be replaced in the second half-year after birth by learned hand movements guided initially by eye, and later, kinesthetically. These totally unexpected findings provide a good object lesson against trying to do science in an a priori manner. Once again, we see how the world often frustrates our naive anticipations of its manner of working. 20. In 1693, William Molyneux (1656-98) wrote to John Locke posing the following question (which has since come to be known as "Molyneux's problem"): "Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere. ... Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table, and the blind man made to see. ... [I pose the following question:] whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?" ([124], book II, chap. IX, §8). Molyneux and Locke both agreed the newly sighted adult would not be able immediately to make the connection between his visual and tactile data. Their scientific instincts were to prove correct. Modern empirical research has confirmed their prediction (see, e.g. [218], 204, and [83]). In talking and writing uncritically of space, we habitually overlook the differences between visual space and tactile space. But occasional exceptions remind us that there really is not just a theoretical difference between these two spaces, but a real one. Persons born blind have no experience of the features of visual space. But they can detect the features of tactile space. They can tell, by feeling physical things, what their shapes are, how large they are, whether they are rough or smooth, hard or soft, and where they are positioned in relation to other physical objects.21 For the sighted, shadows and holographic images occur in visual space but not in tactile space. And for all of us – sighted and sightless alike – there is at least the logical possibility, as is so often featured in fiction, of invisible objects: things which are detectable tactilely but not visually. 21. They can also tell, with their fingers, whether something is hot or cold. But the temperature of things is not usually considered to be a tactile property, even though the nerve endings which are sensitive to temperature are located within our skins alongside our organs of touch. Nonetheless, in spite of the real differences between visual and tactile space, there is – for the normally sighted among us – such a good mapping between the contents of these two spaces that we tend naively to regard these two spaces as one, real, unified, objective public space. We operate with the assumption that if something appears in visual space, then it occurs in tactile space as well, and conversely. But it must be understood that this assumption of a single, unified space of sight and touch, handy as it is, is warranted by contingent facts about this particular possible world. It is not especially difficult to imagine how those facts could be otherwise. With a little ingenuity, we can invent possible-worlds tales in which the enormously useful correlation we find between the visual and tactile in this world simply does not exist. We can describe possible worlds in which your visual data bear little if any detectable correlation with the data furnished by your tactile senses. We can imagine a world, for example, where your hands inform you that you are feeling a teakettle in the cupboard beside the stove, but where your eyes, at that very moment, tell you that you are looking at a distant catamaran hauled up onto the sand of {page 183} a windswept beach. Such a tale is merely an extension of the sorts of stories which are actually true of our visual and auditory senses. I am now looking through an open window and can see rain falling outside. At the same time, I am also hearing Beethoven's Archduke Trio (there is a recording playing in the adjoining room). I – like you – have no difficulty living simultaneously in the two, often disparate, sensory spaces of sight and sound. The correlation between the two is often exceedingly poor. And from such an example, we can see how it could be (i.e. how it is logically possible) that the correlation between the visual and the tactile might be equally poor. The things we standardly regard as being material objects typically exist in (at least) two sensory spaces: the visual and the tactile. Is one of these two spaces more fundamental in our attributing materiality to a thing? Would we be inclined to attribute materiality to something which was visible but not (even in principle) tangible? Would we be inclined to attribute materiality to something tangible but which was invisible? I think the answer is fairly clear. 'Merely visible' things, e.g. shadows, reflections in mirrors, projected holographic images, are standardly regarded as nonphysical.22 In contrast, were we to find a region of space where our hands, sonar, etc. told us there was an object, but where our eyes were unable to detect anything, we would come, especially if the same results were obtained by other persons as well, to regard that place as being occupied by an invisible physical object. 22. The list of my examples may be contested. Some writers place reflections in mirrors in a different category than shadows and holograms. They argue that in viewing a reflection in a mirror, e.g. of a chair, one is seeing a material object, viz. the chair, only one is seeing it in a somewhat misleading way, i.e. as if it were in a place where it is not in fact. Nothing I am saying depends on how we choose to describe reflections in mirrors. Reflected images are merely presented as a putative example of intangible visual data. If reflections are not to be accorded this status, then – for the purposes of illustration – there are others: holograms and afterimages might serve nicely. Granted, I may be misjudging the pre-analytic inclinations of other persons. I am, to be sure, depending heavily on assessments of how I actually use the concept of material object in typical cases and of how I would use that concept in unusual cases. I am assuming, as a speaker and writer of a commonly shared language and of a more-or-less commonly shared conceptual scheme, that my own use is fairly typical and that my own leanings in this matter are reasonably representative of {page 184} those of most other persons. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have diagnosed correctly both my own and other persons' weighting of the various criteria for invoking the concept of material object: that most of us, if it came to having to choose between the tactile and the visual as being more fundamental to the concept of materiality, would choose the former. If this is in fact true, might there be any explanation for it? Or, is
1098	dbpedia	0	30	https://oxfordjournals.org/book/57385/chapter/464718279	en	Roger Penrose’s Impossible Diagrams	https://oup.silverchair-…IE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA	https://oup.silverchair-…IE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA	[ "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/umbrella/oxford-academic-logo.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/i.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/account.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/i.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/account.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/oup/backfile/content_public/books/57385/book/1/m_9780190062804.jpeg?Expires=1726692834&Signature=P7-rKYVy7Z3iQ~Wl2t7NL9kO47ySi17lzYGVtiDBTfBB3VUrIiSt2Lj5ttSnFnlBQWhvq7UlWqTbHSfVn73z7MakqiPf-B1WEo7-vh081VNlgOEkv6fMjYJIyJDBUrHOZ3FJVf9gpUysU4Q8dZhPy1jVpSwevTjmacUiXU4X9PYKtpJ9d2bbTubCgn8zw07ashH9IDNldThR6nvcWvj5ZTErwIfmpFGvnW1HkGfBo-ueRtQx2PgjnfT6JshbgI0IHTyV8hIHejbwMNH4r6Vov44qQHyAvDH3oRtvfkXxOjrygEeNSlqS5iU6zyXHoGIx2IrhBnfoWJSFuBU4FjzFDQ__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/oup/backfile/content_public/books/57385/book/1/m_9780190062804.jpeg?Expires=1726692835&Signature=0WNGylbPyCZKlOR0ZtDfz70oT~cKMvCy12KCSA~4HQiuluVgW~3J6NGgew4sevRNzU9BiQeLsVv7ZoQRXY3F~lEDd9mDt2gsWf01m~RiCQeUNtlyTaEemXtJ4M4in-aQlnX6JlTRSlcPfrtHn0fOR4eLE0ADmH6AMeV~W45Ks8QrrypYJ8iHhrms7oQNkwT5EAcVdUK~PFcVVxRzC9mGKj4wASgu-zvOOQyTuYUM9Rf~C~I3bLef30ol43ae9iUlFT6bVkkCcqXgwVIvOGrSRQ9lhWsnJdhrWIpBCRZqezruqoyNXbROxG2VqW4FQLhtFhbGoKHgVX9C0glwqJv19A__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA", "https://oxfordjournals.org/UI/app/svg/chevron-right-white.svg", "https://oxfordjournals.org/UI/shared/SCM.SharedControls/img/annotate.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/i.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/chevron-right-white.svg", "https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/svg/umbrella/oup-logo.svg", "https://ouptag.scholarlyiq.com/ntpagetag.gif?js=0" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Aaron Sidney Wright", "Aaron Sidney" ]	2024-03-11T00:00:00	Abstract. Penrose diagrams gave new shape to the universes described by General Relativity, and in turn they shaped the development of the field. Penrose d	en	//oup.silverchair-cdn.com/UI/app/img/v-638576256025047103/apple-touch-icon.png	OUP Academic	https://academic.oup.com/book/57385/chapter/464718279
1098	dbpedia	3	6	https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/38160	en	Dennis W. Sciama	https://encyclopedia.pub…/header_logo.png	https://encyclopedia.pub…/header_logo.png	[ "https://encyclopedia.pub/build/images/header_logo.png", "https://encyclopedia.pub/build/images/logo.png", "https://encyclopedia.pub/build/images/point-3.png", "https://encyclopedia.pub/media/biography/202212/638fe52213955200px-Sciama2.jpg", "https://encyclopedia.pub/media/banner/202408/huodongbanner85-66b2e82a63c33.jpg", "https://encyclopedia.pub/build/images/feedback_success.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2022-12-07T04:41:33+01:00	Encyclopedia is a user-generated content hub aiming to provide a comprehensive record for scientific developments. All content free to post, read, share and reuse.	en	/favicon.ico		https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/38160	1. Introduction Dennis William Siahou Sciama, ( ; 18 November 1926 – 18/19 December 1999)[1][2] was a British physicist who, through his own work and that of his students, played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War.[3][4] He was the Ph.D supervisor to many famous cosmologists, including Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees and David Deutsch; he is considered one of the fathers of modern cosmology.[5][6][7][8] 2. Education and Early Life Sciama was born in Manchester, England , the son of Nelly Ades and Abraham Sciama.[9] He was of Syrian-Jewish ancestry—his father born in Manchester and his mother born in Egypt both traced their roots back to Aleppo, Syria.[10] Sciama earned his PhD in 1953 at the University of Cambridge supervised by Paul Dirac, with a dissertation on Mach's principle and inertia. His work later influenced the formulation of scalar-tensor theories of gravity. 3. Career and Research Sciama taught at Cornell University, King's College London, Harvard University and the University of Texas at Austin, but spent most of his career at the University of Cambridge (1950s and 1960s) and the University of Oxford as a Senior Research Fellow in All Souls College, Oxford (1970s and early 1980s). In 1983, he moved from Oxford to Trieste, becoming Professor of Astrophysics at the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA), and a consultant with the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. He also taught at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. From 1972 to 1973 he was the Donegall Lecturer in Mathematics at Trinity College Dublin.[11] During the 1990s, he divided his time between Trieste (with a residence in nearby Venice) and his main residence at Oxford, where he was a visiting professor until the end of his life. Sciama made connections among some topics in astronomy and astrophysics. He wrote on radio astronomy, X-ray astronomy, quasars, the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave radiation, the interstellar and intergalactic medium, astroparticle physics and the nature of dark matter. Most significant was his work in general relativity, with and without quantum theory, and black holes. He helped revitalize the classical relativistic alternative to general relativity known as Einstein-Cartan gravity. Early in his career, he supported Fred Hoyle's steady state cosmology, and interacted with Hoyle, Hermann Bondi, and Thomas Gold. When evidence against the steady state theory, e.g., the cosmic microwave radiation, mounted in the 1960s, Sciama abandoned it and worked on the Big Bang cosmology; he was perhaps the only prominent Steady-State supporter to switch sides (Hoyle continued to work on modifications of steady-state for the rest of his life, while Bondi and Gold moved away from cosmology during the 1960s). During his last years, Sciama became interested in the issue of dark matter in galaxies. Among other aspects he pursued a theory of dark matter that consists of a heavy neutrino, certainly disfavored in his realization, but still possible in a more complicated scenario. 3.1. Doctoral Students Several leading astrophysicists and cosmologists of the modern era completed their doctorates under Sciama's supervision, notably: George Ellis (1964) Stephen Hawking (1966) Brandon Carter (1967) Martin Rees (1967) Gary Gibbons (1973) James Binney (1975) John D. Barrow (1977) Philip Candelas (1977)[12] David Deutsch (1978) Adrian Melott (1981) Antony Valentini (1992) Sciama also strongly influenced Roger Penrose, who dedicated his The Road to Reality to Sciama's memory. The 1960s group he led in Cambridge (which included Ellis, Hawking,[13] Rees, and Carter), has proved of lasting influence. 3.2. Publications Sciama, Dennis (1959). The Unity of the Universe. London: Faber & Faber. Sciama, Dennis (1969). "The Physical Foundations of General Relativity". Science Study Series (New York: Doubleday) 58. Short (104 pages) and clearly written non-mathematical book on the physical and conceptual foundations of General Relativity. Could be read with profit by physics students before immersing themselves in more technical studies of General Relativity. Sciama, Dennis (1971). Modern Cosmology. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521080699. https://archive.org/details/moderncosmology0000scia. Sciama, Dennis (1993). Modern Cosmology and the Dark Matter Problem. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521438483. https://books.google.com/books/about/Modern_Cosmology_and_the_Dark_Matter_Pro.html?id=7dTOlXBLiFQC. 3.3. Awards and Honours Sciama was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1983.[1] He was also an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Academia Lincei of Rome. He served as president of the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation, 1980–84. His work at SISSA and the University of Oxford led to the creation of a lecture series in his honour, the Dennis Sciama Memorial Lectures.[14] In 2009, the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth elected to name their new building, and their supercomputer in 2011, in his honour.[15] Sciama has been portrayed in a number of biographical projects about his most famous student, Stephen Hawking. In the 2004 BBC TV movie Hawking, Sciama was played by John Sessions. In the 2014 film The Theory of Everything, Sciama was played by David Thewlis; physicist Adrian Melott strongly criticized the portrayal of Sciama in the film.[16] 4. Personal Life
1098	dbpedia	3	73	http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2006/07/thoughts-on-anthropic-principle.html	en	Sabine Hossenfelder: Backreaction: Thoughts on the Anthropic Principle	http://backreaction.blogspot.com/favicon.ico	http://backreaction.blogspot.com/favicon.ico	[ "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N9QDX9zz1aE/XGuq12-EKSI/AAAAAAAAEgE/EuyipZCfAW8vKpgNLc1fh744VXTtai6ZQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/br_banner_new06.jpg", "https://resources.blogblog.com/img/icon18_edit_allbkg.gif", "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_5WwYNr2qHXQ/SXqerc0lDbI/AAAAAAAABTw/AYvKRdPMqDc/S45-s35/m_jonquinn1.6.jpg", "http://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4mx3Y-BdLy5-oY8kYdElWxi_QzUSW4VV-ROA7NnC8FYlpbjPWwfNcFdBc8scGKlMRzAE_f0n5iI8TMoe1nNJ4AbczlmE5uB4vLC6epEjBjTt3iTWlPOaiOwDmmJ_JsWE/s45-c/OaD1tjM0_400x400.jpg", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_5WwYNr2qHXQ/SXqerc0lDbI/AAAAAAAABTw/AYvKRdPMqDc/S45-s35/m_jonquinn1.6.jpg", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_5WwYNr2qHXQ/SXqerc0lDbI/AAAAAAAABTw/AYvKRdPMqDc/S45-s35/m_jonquinn1.6.jpg", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_5WwYNr2qHXQ/SXqerc0lDbI/AAAAAAAABTw/AYvKRdPMqDc/S45-s35/m_jonquinn1.6.jpg", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-beyzC35nwQQ/VT_NX2rVuLI/AAAAAAAAAGg/OFHXigvrjYw/s35/", "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-beyzC35nwQQ/VT_NX2rVuLI/AAAAAAAAAGg/OFHXigvrjYw/s35/", "http://resources.blogblog.com/img/blank.gif", "http://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png", "http://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyoWarF21mwEpN7iOr7SeOWmSinv_-5rY6JeJLfRANa2RyTzuCaaEJo9rz_51QAR1nWJyrkWINfX9RLN0OfqDZfX4nm4jYufxJhpv_2CMQnn8wEJVSEzt6KvkBii0h/s45-c/ProfileGreg.jpg", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71tsBCCS5rL._SY522_.jpg", "http://c44.statcounter.com/3649687/0/b81c9dc8/0/" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Sabine Hossenfelder" ]	null	Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science		http://backreaction.blogspot.com/favicon.ico		http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2006/07/thoughts-on-anthropic-principle.html
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1098	dbpedia	1	4	https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/33994	en	American Institute of Physics	https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/favicon_1.ico	https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/favicon_1.ico	[ "https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/aip-logo-180.png", "https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2022-01/esva-image-not-available.jpg?itok=09xDxOQh", "https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/aipcorp/images/sitewide/aip-logo-fullname-400.png", "https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/aipcorp/images/sitewide/1383075471_twitter.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2021-09-24T10:08:33-04:00	Lightman: I wanted to start by asking you a few questions about your childhood. Can you tell me a little about what your parents were like, what they did?	en	/sites/default/files/favicon_1.ico		https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/33994	Lightman: I wanted to start by asking you a few questions about your childhood. Can you tell me a little about what your parents were like, what they did? Sciama: My father was a businessman. Actually you have taken me slightly aback because lots of things are rather personal, and I don't know if I would like to talk about them for publication. But certainly he was a businessman in Manchester. I grew up in Manchester. I then went to what we in England call a public school — that means a private school — from which I got a very good mathematical training. Those schools could afford to pay for the better teachers. In fact, my main teacher was a man who these days wouldn't go into school teaching. He got first-class honors in all three parts of the mathematical tripos in Cambridge, and he went into school teaching, and he helped me to get a scholarship to Cambridge. Lightman: Were either of your parents interested in science? Sciama: No, not at all. The atmosphere was entirely a business one. It rather surprised my father when I had this interest in science, which was outside his orbit. He was a very clever man, but he had left school at the age of 12 because his father had died, and he wasn't therefore used to higher education or anything like that. Although he had a fine brain, it hadn't been trained. He was trained in the world, but not trained in institutions. He therefore didn't particularly know about higher education until I told him. I told him Cambridge was great and Trinity was great, and he accepted that. But it wouldn't have been anything in his world. Lightman: When he knew that you had an interest in science, when he became aware of that, did he discourage you or encourage you? Sciama: He tried to discourage me because he thought that I ought to go into his business. Lightman: What about your mother? Sciama: She helped me a little bit, but he was much the stronger personality. It was just that I was so motivated to do science and mathematics. I suppose at that age I didn't even distinguish them. I originally thought of myself as a mathematician, and only later did I move first toward physics and then to cosmology. Lightman: Do you remember in your childhood, do you remember any particular books that you read that had a strong influence on you? Sciama: Yes, I can't remember how old I was when I read them, but I think it must have been in school. So many people of several generations were around then — Eddington,[1] in particular. Although I did read Jeans[2] a bit, I found Eddington more challenging. Lightman: He had several popular books. Sciama: He had several popular books. Perhaps now they've faded out a bit. I don't know. At that time they were very well known and considered the leading books of that kind. I don't know if you have read them — they are very imaginative. Lightman: I have read one or two of his books, and I think he is a beautiful writer as well as a good scientist. Sciama: So that certainly appealed to me, although at that time I wasn't thinking of myself as an astronomer. There were other people, mainly connected with Trinity. G.H. Hardy, the pure mathematician, wrote a lovely little book called A Mathematician's Apology.[3] Lightman: That is one of my favorites. Sciama: Then you may remember how he says from an early age his one ambition was to become a Fellow of Trinity. Again, this reads a bit old-fashioned now, and some people would even say it is no longer [impressive] and so on, but at the time it thrilled me. Lightman: Did you read Hardy's book when you were a youngster? Sciama: Yes. I also read some Bertrand Russell, who again was associated with Trinity. Lightman: So you were interested in philosophy? Sciama: I've always had a mild interest in philosophy. In fact, I'm giving a talk on the philosophical aspects of the anthropic principle in a week or two. So, I have had an interest in philosophy. When I went up to Trinity in 1944, I attended a whole course of lectures by Wittgenstein, who was then still a professor and giving lectures. That was a very good experience. So, while I was basically doing mathematics, I had this interest in philosophical things, and it just so happened that many of the leading people at the time were Fellows of Trinity, or had been. Trinity was the most prominent college. That was all part of the image of what a youngster would be attracted to, to strive, as it were, because there was this goal. So that played an important part. Lightman: At this age, before you went up to Cambridge, did you have an intention to go into science or mathematics? Sciama: Yes, from about the age of 15 or 16, I suppose. Before that, I was very young, and I naturally said I would go into my father's business because that was the obvious thing to say. I don't remember precisely, but roughly from the age of about 15 or 16, when I was beginning to be coached to take the scholarship to Cambridge, I realized [science and mathematics was] what I wanted to do. Lightman: One thing you said in your interview[4] with Spencer Weart in 1978 was that at this age you developed a passion for mathematics and science. Do you have any idea how that passion developed or what caused you to be so taken with this subject? Sciama: I think in retrospect I can answer that question perhaps, but it's a bit wisdom after the event. In fact, I came to cosmology and astronomy relatively late. When I was doing my Ph.D., for instance, I started out in statistical mechanics. Only in the middle, partly under the influence of people here like Fred Hoyle and Hermann Bondi, and Tommy Gold, did I start getting interested in cosmology and Mach's principle and so forth. Rather unusually, in the middle of my Ph.D., I switched to relativity and Mach's principle and so on. They had to give me a new supervisor as a result. They gave me no less than [Paul] Dirac, in order to try and cope with this rather alarming change of subject from the point of view of the authorities. So, something inside of me must have burst out at that point. Although the statistical mechanics problem — it was about the Onsager, Ising type of work — is very attractive theoretical physics. But it doesn't, of course, have the connotations of understanding the origin of the universe. Once I started doing things beginning with Mach's principle, I then realized my real passion was for understanding the fundamental nature of the universe. Some people, and perhaps the majority, do that by particle physics, and a few of us do it by cosmology. Of course, as I dare say you will discuss later, now the two things are linked together. So, then I said "ah, hah, it's clear to me what it's all about, and I want to understand the way the world is made, where it comes from, and what it means in the scientific sense." That's my passion. Therefore, always I've tended not so much to work on very technical detailed problems — although some of my students have — but rather on problems that in some way help to understand the great questions. So, that's obviously what my real passion is. But at 15, I didn't say all that. It expressed itself then as an interest in, say, mathematics. I remember enjoying projective geometry at school. I thought it was very beautiful and well ordered, and so on. Cosmology came much later. Lightman: Did you like well-ordered things? Sciama: Yes. Because, you see, if you do understand the universe... I mean, if Mach's principle had been true and sensible and worked well, or if superstrings or something are right, you are imposing order on the universe. And no doubt a psychoanalyst would have his own views as to why one wants to do that. Again, I think I mentioned this to Spencer. If you impose order on [the universe], then you help to achieve it yourself. Roughly speaking, what I like to say is that the universe is enormous — it is much stronger than you are — and your only way of hitting back at it is to understand it. No doubt, a psychoanalyst would use psychoanalytic jargon to describe [that idea], but that's what it amounts to, I guess. Lightman: Do you think that kind of motivation was something you sensed at a young age, or was it something that developed later? Sciama: I don't think I sensed it as explicitly as that. When I was enjoying projective geometry, I just said "how beautiful, and what a nice intellectual challenge, and what lovely theorems you get when you use your intellect, and that's great fun." I didn't realize all that I am now saying, probably until I made that switch in the middle of my Ph.D. But no doubt it was underneath. Lightman: Can you tell me a little about your undergraduate and graduate work at Cambridge? I don't want you to go into too much length because you said quite a bit to Spencer Weart but just give me some of the high points. Sciama: The high point is that I was a disastrously bad student. No, that's putting it too strongly. I did get a minor scholarship in mathematics at Trinity, which was a great achievement. A large part of that was due to very good coaching by the particular school teacher I mentioned earlier. Lightman: Did you say his name? Sciama: I didn't. His name was R.H. Cobb. Anyway, it's a bit like training for a race or something, learning how to solve these problems. It's all book work. You learn how to prove these things. You've been through this yourself, I'm sure. You remember how to prove book-work theorems, and you do many, many "riders," as we used to call them — examples based on the theorems. And so you trained. I was good enough to be trainable to get even a minor scholarship at Trinity, which was the great place in maths at Cambridge. But then I did extremely badly in exams here, so badly that when I finished I had to go into the army. This was just after the war, but there was still conscription, and I couldn't remain to be a research student. I got a lower second in finals, and two thirds in my earlier exams. So I was in disgrace. However, during the two years that I had to be in the army, for 18 months of it I managed to get sent to a government research lab, which was called TRE in those days. [That lab] originally had done a lot of radar work in the war. One was still concerned with detecting enemy airplanes, detecting infrared radiation. They were studying photoconductors, or semiconductors — they become conducting when the light hits them. And I with a team — of course I was guided by the senior people — worked on the quantum mechanics of the band structure in the lead sulfide group of elements. Lightman: So you got to do physics. Sciama: Yes, I wrote internal reports. Hartree was one of the professors here at the time. You know his name, I'm sure. He I had seen just as I was leaving as a student, and I told him I wanted to get back into research. He helped me to get transferred to this government lab and then accepted me back as a research student when he had seen these internal reports. It was all about the group theory, and the levels, and so on. So, that is how I got back in to the system. Lightman: So they thought you might have been dismissed out of hand from Trinity? Sciama: Well, I wouldn't take a student on with my exam records. It's all rather embarrassing when I now have to take students on. If it were a question of a grant, I wouldn't be allowed to give a grant, because you’ve got to get a first or an upper second to get a grant. But he took me back without a grant, and that's where my father being a businessman came in. I was able to live through the help of my father, despite his early discouragement. Lightman: How did he feel about supporting you in this intellectual pursuit? Sciama: Well, he was still terribly upset that I had rejected business, but he saw that I was so determined that he let me do it. Later, I agreed with him whether I would continue depended on certain things. It was a crazy thing to do, because clearly if I was going to be a tenth-rate researcher, then maybe it's better to earn a lot of money in a good firm. So, I agreed with him that [I would stay in scientific research] only if I got the research fellowship at Trinity — the thing Hardy had written all about. That would be a sign that it was worth the sacrifices, and otherwise not. That was a crazy [agreement], because even if I were very good — which I didn't know really at that time — it's very chancy whether you get a [fellowship]. You're competing with a whole group of people in a whole range of all subjects. Lightman: Was this his proposition or your proposition? Sciama: I think I said at one point, "well look, the natural thing for me to do is go in for a Fellowship." It's such a prestigious thing to get, which I explained to him, and he accepted that. Because if I did get [the Fellowship], that would be the sign that it would be worth the sacrifices. Lightman: Then did you also complete the proposition and say that if you didn't get [the Fellowship]; you would put your [fate] in his hands? Sciama: Yes. If I didn't get it, then that would show that it wasn't justified to give up these good prospects in the textile business. Lightman: So you made him a business proposition. Sciama: I made him a business proposition. Exactly. But a very bad one. [Lightman and Sciama laugh.] Arnold Weinstock would never do that today. Perhaps you don't know him. He is the chap in GEC here, and they've just been trying to take him over with clever tricks. Yes, so by sheer luck I did get the damn thing, so I was able to remain in an academic career. Lightman: When you decided to do cosmology, you said that you came under the influence of Hoyle and Bondi. Sciama: And Gold. They were all here. They were senior to me, but I got a bit friendly, particularly with Tommy Gold, and to some extent with Hermann Bondi. Hoyle was still older than that. They were all playing a strong part here. You probably know that they were all considered sort of rebels at that time. Hoyle was not Sir Fred Hoyle, Plumian Professor. He probably had a lectureship then, and I think Bondi did. But Bondi wasn't Sir Hermann Bondi, et cetera, et cetera. Lightman: This was in the early fifties? Sciama: Yes. I got my fellowship in 1952, and I actually got the degree of Ph.D. in 1953. I started being a research student in 1949. The steady-state theory,[5] which was one of the dominating ideas in cosmology at that time, was published in 1948. So at that time it was far too soon for the hostile evidence to arise. [The steady state] was a very attractive idea to some of us. Also, [Hoyle, Bondi, and Gold] were concerned with astronomical questions. But in a lot of their work, they were introducing rather new points of view, which tended to be the kinds of points of view that got resistance from the establishment. They were the young rebels, and they were an exciting influence at the time for a younger person like myself. Even when I was doing the statistical mechanics, I must have gone to their lectures and realized that their personalities were robust and exciting. I suppose that played a part. I don't remember waking up one day and saying "no more Ising [models], I will now do distant galaxies or something." I can't remember the precise details, but it's clear that I started thinking about questions of that kind, and then I proposed a change of subject, and they got very agitated because you don't normally make such a big change. And then there are questions like "have you been working long enough at the new topic?" As I say, they gave me [Dirac], because there weren't many people around at the time. I don't know why they didn't give me Bondi. Lightman: Yes, why did they give you Dirac instead of Bondi? Sciama: I don't know. It's not that I can't remember. I wasn't privy to the discussion. They may have felt that since it was a slightly delicate matter — this big change — they ought to give me a very senior person. But I'm only guessing. Lightman: Dirac didn't really work in general relativity, did he? Sciama: Well, he had done things in cosmology, like the large number business.[6] And he had one something in general relativity. He had done this Hamiltonian theory for quantization purposes. It was all part of his theory of constraints in quantum mechanics, when you have theories with invariants. Electrodynamics is the first example, when you have gauge invanance. [It becomes] coordinate invariance in the relativity case. This gives rise to a lot of technical problems when you try and quantize. He had a whole theory of first-class constraints and second-class constraints designed to deal with that. Then he decided to apply that to general relativity. It was quite important work actually, in a way. Nothing like his greatest work, but it's very considerable. He found[7] a Hamiltonian for general relativity, as distinct from the Lagrangian. He tried to quantize it. And he wrote other papers on general relativity. So, while [general relativity] is obviously not the first thing you would think of with Dirac, he had done quite a bit. Maybe the mere fact that he was a major theoretical physicist was taken into consideration. But by the time I got Dirac, as I think I explained before, I had already worked out this Mach's principle thing that I wrote my thesis on.[8] So, he didn't particularly help me — not through any fault of his. But I did have access to him, and that was fascinating. Lightman: You mentioned steady state a moment ago. Obviously that was extremely important during this period. Can you tell me a little bit about why you were so attracted to the steady state theory? Sciama: I suppose because of its simplicity and predictive power. The big bang — even now, of course, we're struggling to understand the big bang. [I accept the big bang], although Fred Hoyle still doesn't. But I accept now that basically the big bang picture is clearly correct. But, it's a naturally very complicated physics that goes on near the bang. There were even questions like: can you be sure the laws of physics are the same in a changing universe. You see, there might be philosophical reasons for worrying about that. This was all part of the original discussion. Lightman: That was in the original papers. Sciama: Whereas it's at least reasonable to say that if the universe always has the same large-scale appearance, it's less of an assumption that the laws are unchanged. And there were various arguments of that kind. The whole picture you got of the universe was a rather simple, appealing one. And [the steady state theory] did have predictive power, and therefore that was good. All those things didn't mean I believed it, as it were, but just that it was so attractive that I felt in a small way to try and make it work. When hostile evidence started to appear, you weren't sure what to make of it. I remember writing various papers at the time and having arguments with Martin Ryle about whether the evidence against the steady state was good or not. It was worth trying to save [the steady state theory], but as the evidence mounted, there came a point where one couldn't. But the reason for supporting it was not, as I say, that it had to be right, but just that it was to me very attractive and the penalty of having creation of matter didn't seem to be such a terrific penalty. It was rather an interesting process to study. As they used to say at that time, [continuous creation of matter] is even less of a thing to introduce than the creation of a whole universe at one go. Lightman: Was that an argument that you talked about at that time? Sciama: I suppose. I recognized that the standard theory didn't in fact have a creation moment. What we later came to call the singularity was not well understood. But, I never felt then and I don't now feel so alarmed about outrageous proposals in physics, unless they're easily disposed of by experimental evidence. I never felt creation of matter was something disturbing. It was a rather interesting phenomenon, and the bang was obviously even more interesting. It was very remarkable. But I wasn't frightened by saying "let's not have a bang, let's have a steady, continuing process which is subject to physical investigation because it's repetitive." Lightman: You said that you felt that steady state had predictive power, and that appealed to you. Did you feel that it had more predictive power than the big bang model? Sciama: It did in some respects, because by denying the possibility of evolution of the average properties of galaxies, you could make much more specific predictions about, for instance, the number of sources as a function of redshift. Whereas, indeed as we all know now, the [big bang model] requires evolution. You don't just get a distribution of these quantities that is different from steady state because the metric of the universe is different. There is very strong evolution, which, of course, does occur. I accept that. But, from the point of view of making predictions, [in the steady state model] you are denied evolution, which would have many parameters. Then you can be very specific. So, that was certainly appealing in the sense of being useful. Then you decide very quickly, perhaps with luck, whether this proposal was reasonable or not, because you couldn't keep cheating every time there was hostile evidence. At first, you could worry about whether the evidence was accurate or not and so on, but you couldn't say "oh well, we’ll introduce this fudge factor and that fudge factor." Lightman: At this time, during the 1950s, when you did think about the big bang model, did you have any preference for a particular model in the big bang, say open versus closed or that kind of thing? Sciama: I did, and that was linked to my interest in Mach's principle, although this was never fully worked out. But, as did other people perhaps for similar reasons, I preferred the Einstein-de Sitter model, the one that only just expands forever, the k = 0 model. That's the Machian thing, because k, in the Newtonian analogue of these models, is the energy-kinetic plus gravitational. If the energy is due to gravitation, ala Mach, rather than having a kind of spontaneous existence, then at least it might seem as though it would be rather natural to have one [energy] balance the other. One made the other. Therefore, that would be the attractive model. But that turned out not to work later, because I had a student, Derek Raine, now a lecturer at Leicester University, who worked later on Mach's principle, producing a much better theoretical statement of the principle. The principle is a kind of boundary condition. He produced, as far as I'm concerned, still the best discussion of what boundary condition you're really groping for. But when he did that, he found that because of feedback effects in the different models, all the cosmological models of the Robertson- Walker type, with the exception of Minkowski, are Machian. Essentially, if you were to use technical language, you introduce a Green's function to tell you how much a particular piece of source influences the metric here. In relativity, that's got to be a functional of metric. It can't be a fixed quantity. I wrote a paper,[9] with others, which I was quite pleased with, in which I showed that general relativity could be written as an integral equation to represent the metric here as a sum of contributions from the energy momentum tensor everywhere. [That formulation] used a propagator or Green's function, which itself was a functional of metric but had certain structural properties that made it rather attractive. Derek Raine used that idea to make a Machian boundary condition. He has written an article[10] on this by the way. So, he used those ideas and generalized them a bit to say that if you want a Machian boundary condition in addition to the propagator, which is entirely implied by GR itself, you need some statement about boundary conditions somewhere. When he made the most Machian statement he could — a statement that I approved of — he then found that all the Robertson-Walker models except the empty one would count as Machian. Owing to the fact that the Green's function itself depended on the metric. If you chose a non-Einstein Sitter case, there would be adjustments. Lightman: To make itself consistent. Sciama: Each one was self-consistent. The sources were doing their job. The way they did their job was different in each case. I had to accept that, but it was disappointing. But, until that was done, I would have preferred the Einstein-de Sitter model. Lightman: I think the Brans-Dicke theory,[11] which partially incorporates Mach's principle through the scalar field, much more than general relativity, also allows all Roberton-Walker metrics (flat, open, and closed) for cosmology. Sciama: It probably does. I suppose, in a way, the Brans-Dicke theory was at least partly stimulated by my own writings. But I never quite liked that theory. I preferred to [incorporate Mach's principle] within GR [general relativity] if I could, rather than introducing extra fields. Of course, one now introduces extra fields for other purposes. They are very likely. But at that time, I didn't really quite like that. So when [the Brans-Dicke theory] ran into difficulty from observations, I wasn't sorry. I'm sure Bob Dicke was sorry. But I wasn't. Lightman: I know that he was certainly influenced by Mach's principle in designing that theory, and probably your work as well. Sciama: Well, also John Wheeler had seen my work and had written many things himself on it,[12] and we all influenced each other. I suppose of the three of us, I was slightly the first, but we all had different ways of incorporating the principle. Naturally, I like my way the best. But in the end, that hasn't been terribly successful. It all sort of went into the sand, I believe. Lightman: We have been talking about Mach's principle, which has been a theme of a lot of your work starting with your Ph.D. thesis. Do you remember why you got interested in Mach's principle in the first place? Sciama: I have a vague memory that I was thinking about other cosmological questions and steady state questions — how one could make a field theory of steady state. I remember one time writing an article or variation of the thesis that actually pointed out that the scheme I was developing was not consistent with Mach's principle. I then started to attack Mach's principle, [because] I wanted my scheme to be a good one. Then, at a certain moment, I got converted and said, "No, I've got it the wrong way around. The nice thing is Mach's principle, and I'm missing the point." Lightman: Why were you thinking about Mach's principle at all? I didn't know that that was something on people's minds at the time. Sciama: There is a simple answer to that. I probably picked up the idea from Bondi. Lightman: Was he discussing Mach's principle? Sciama: If you look at the Bondi-Gold paper[13] on steady state and you look at Bondi's very lovely book[14] on cosmology that came out in 1952, there was a lot about Mach's principle in both of them. You see, in the steady state, the idea was whatever makes Mach's principle work in the steady state would be happening all the time. So, the arrangement of the world let Mach's principle apply. Also, I went to a course of lectures Bondi gave on cosmology. In fact, I was telling him the other day — because I'm at the college here where he is master now — that I still have the notes from that course. His book came out a little later, but I would have heard about it from the course. I found the idea extremely attractive, and this has something to do with my psychology. I like simple ideas with very great power in physics — the idea that centrifugal forces and Newton's rotating bucket is mainly due to galaxies. As I have pointed out in my books,[15] the main contribution came from galaxies beyond what you can see with telescopes — suggesting that the whole universe acts one unit in this way. That seemed to me to be a mind-blowing idea, as one might say. I realized quite soon that most physicists thought I was not quite a crank, but at least peculiar. Despite the tradition of Mach and Einstein about Mach's principle, most of my contemporaries would have said it was a will of the wisp, a semi-crank [idea]. Yet, after all, the little calculations I did then would show that if an object accelerates towards you, it produces a 1/r force, just like an accelerating [electrical] charge does. Lightman: This is gravitational. Sciama: Gravitational. And you know very well that if you have a 1/r force, distant [sources] are more important than near ones. It's worse than Olber's paradox. It's no good saying it's cranky to talk about distant galaxies, they just dominate. You just do a sum of two lines, and they dominate. The other question is: do they dominate so completely that they do the whole job? That's the boundary condition problem. But, to me it was clear that you had to worry about that. It was no good saying this is cranky. If it's a long-range force, then distant [sources] dominate. As I say, it was the power and the sweep of the idea — the idea that the whole universe was acting as a mechanism. Indeed, my first book was called The Unity of the Universe.[16] That was my [belief]. That's why I liked [Mach's principle], once I learned the idea. And I was very disappointed when it all went into the sand. Lightman: Let me ask you about another project that you worked on somewhat later. Do you remember what motivated you to work[17] with Martin Rees on plotting the distribution of quasar redshifts versus intensities? Sciama: Oh yes! I have probably told Spencer [Weart] this. That was very funny. That was typical of a lot of my work, where the student really does it much better. At that time, the hostile evidence [against the steady state theory] was accumulating, but it was in the early days, and you could still try to save the steady-state theory. So I was tittling around with these various things. The microwave background had just been discovered. But at that stage you couldn't be sure it wasn't due to [things other than the big bang]. In fact, I wrote a paper[18] saying that there might be a type of radio source whose integrated radiation would mimic a black body spectrum over at least a limited range of wavelengths — which was all that could be measured at that time. Lightman: So you were defending the steady-state. Sciama: The idea was to defend the steady-state, and also I learned astrophysics in the process. It was an interesting thing for various reasons. I knew from the great battle between [Martin] Ryle and Hoyle about the radio source counts that questions of counts would be crucial, or might be crucial. Quasar data was beginning to come in during that period. Of course, quasars were just three years old or something. In fact, in 1965 was the great discovery by Maarten Schmidt of a quasar with a redshift of 2. So, I started plotting out the number of quasars as a function of redshift. Lightman: Why did you do that? Sciama: To see whether it agreed with the steady state. This relation between number and red shift is a unique prediction of steady state. You [don't have] to worry about whether [the quasars] evolve at different redshifts. So there was a specific formula, which I knew. I think it probably was in the original Bondi-Gold paper. Anyway, it was a known formula, a straight-forward formula. So, the question was: is there enough data accumulated to test this? You see, today there are far more people in the field, and this sort of thing would be done instantly. But at that time there were fewer of us, and therefore it still had to be done. So I plotted out the number-redshift relation. The way I do these things, it was sloppy. And lo-and-behold, it fit the steady state [prediction]. I remember going to Martin and saying "Martin, Martin, look. I have plotted out N [number] as a function of z [redshift] and the steady state is supported." Martin was then a research student of mine, with whom I discussed all the more astrophysical types of questions involving cosmology. He was always a bit skeptical about my enthusiasm for steady state. He is a very well balanced chap. He said, "well, I'll have a look at it," and he went away to have a look at it, and he did it better. Two days later — I forget how long it took him — he came back and said, "I've done it properly, and it's very bad for steady state. The [observed] relation is quite different [from that predicted by steady state.]" It was the same general kind [of relation] as what I was finding for the regular radio sources. I looked at what he'd done, and I agreed that he'd done it properly. That was the thing, as I probably told Spencer, that for me made me give up steady state. I wasn't prepared. You see, there was a conceivable let-out from people like Hoyle and [Geoffrey] Burbidge, who were then saying that quasars are local. I didn't like that — it was piling one thing on top of another. I have a bit of a conscience, somewhere along the lines, and I couldn't play that game. It really wasn't reasonable. So, I said "okay, the quasars are cosmological, and therefore this decides it." At that time, the blackbody thing was still debatable. So, for me at least — though not for most people... it was this study that was decisive, and I had a bad month giving up steady-state. Then, of course, Maarten Schmidt did a much better job,[19] and it's now always attributed to him, and I think quite rightly. He did a much better job of getting this evolution, about a year later - much better data and more details. But we were the first to actually point out that quasars evolve, so I'm quite proud of that. But, it was Martin, not me. Lightman: This is what convinced you? Sciama: That's what convinced me. Lightman: Martin Rees, and some others, brings up an interesting question: You have been the advisor of a number of students who have gone on to brilliant careers. Can you tell me a little bit about your approach to advising students? Sciama: Let me first say, as I probably said in my last interview [with Spencer Weart],[20] I always feel that I've been in a false position, particularly by being at Cambridge, and to some extent also in Oxford. We've had the best students in England, because of the structure in England. And so, if you have a very good student, you just sit back and let him go, and he does wonderful things, you see. So, that's what's happened in quite a numb~r of cases. My only role was enabling them to do relativity and cosmology. That required a certain structure and someone who is willing to take them on, but then they did their own thing. Lightman: Did you talk to them on a regular basis? Sciama: Oh yes. Well, let's say I'm the kind of person who suggests problems to people. A good example, actually, is Brandon Carter, who did some very important work[21] on the uniqueness of the Kerr solution and other such things. I remember saying to him one day early on when he was my student - and he still remembers this and he says he's grateful for it — I said to him, "Brandon, why don't you do axisymmetric collapse. I think there is a lot of richness and interesting [things there]." And he went away and did[22] axisymmetric collapse. [Sciama laughs] So, therefore, I provoked them a little bit in some cases. In Steve Hawking's case — as Steve himself has recorded now I think in his book[23] and elsewhere for the first year or two he was struggling for a good problem. At that time, in the more relativistic side of cosmology, as distinct from astrophysical, there wasn't too much to do that was] high-class. Then in 1965, Roger Penrose produced the singularity paper[24] — a bombshell, but for a star, a collapsing star. I know there are articles which credit me with saying one ought to look at the singularity theorems more generally. I can't honestly remember doing that. My memory is that Steve came to me one day and said "I can adapt Roger's arguments for the whole universe and get the singularity of the big bang." I said "Yes. Good. Do that." The last chapter of his thesis is his first singularity theorem.[25] Although, in fact, in an article[26] by George Ellis, Chris Clark and Frank Tipler, whom you may know, about the singularity theory, there is a footnote or something that says I insisted that people work on singularity theorems. Perhaps I did. I can't remember. But mainly, it's that they [my students] are gifted to that extent, and there are problems lying around worthy of their gifts, but "do-able." Lightman: Do you think about whether a problem is "do-able" before you suggest it to one of your students? Sciama: Well, I can't necessarily tell. In the case of axisymmetric collapse, it seemed to me that not much had been done on it. I think in the case of the uniqueness of Kerr, I can remember Hawking saying around the department, after [Werner] Israel's proof[27] of the uniqueness of the Schwarzschild [solution], that we should be able to do Kerr. That probably helped Brandon — who was already in that area because of my original suggestion — but I remember Steve saying that. I don't think I would have had the technical understanding to see that it was do-able. So, I regard it as a matter of sheer luck that I've been associated in a minor way with all these students. Lightman: Let me go back to the 1950s again, when you were here among the young Turks — Bondi, Gold, and Hoyle and so forth — and the steady state was in the air. Can you tell me a little bit about the general attitude in the larger community towards cosmology — cosmology in general, not steady state in particular. How did people regard cosmology? Sciama: Physicists regarded it very badly, I think. Physicists generally, and in particular particle physicists, would have said that [cosmology] is highly speculative — everything is uncertain. They were very scornful. I remember Murray Gellman was once a visitor at Cambridge, and he came to dinner — it must have been in the mid-1960s — and he said to me "there has been no progress in cosmology since Friedmann in 1922."[28] [Sciama laughs.] Generally, I think, it was then [regarded] as just speculation — not because of its intrinsic nature, but because of the lack of good observational evidence. [Cosmology] was not quite respected. Lightman: How would a general astronomer have regarded cosmology at that time? Sciama: I think an astronomer would not have had those particular feelings that the particle theorists did. Someone like Hubble was regarded as a great man. Astronomers would have been even more aware of the uncertainties of the data, but they would recognize it as a worthy enterprise, I suppose. The intellectual scorn was more characteristic of the particle theory-type of person. Lightman: What about an astronomical theorist who was not particularly aware of the observational problems? Sciama: An astronomical theorist would have been. Someone like Martin Schwarzschild, say, would have been enough of a general astronomer to know. Well, everybody tried to do things like decide the deceleration parameter, or even the value of the Hubble constant. It was known how uncertain those things were. But I don't think they would have felt, [not quite] the spite and the scorn, but the attitude that this was a low-grade activity that [is undertaken] by people who can't solve problems in particle physics. Astronomers didn't feel that because they were already astronomers. They might have had a few smiles at the passions with which cosmologists argued. But there wouldn't have been the contempt. I don't think contempt is too strong a word in those early days, among physicists. That changed, bit by bit, as the new era came in and particle physics [ideas] became important. Maybe we will talk about that later. [Things changed] particularly when, [for example, the physicists realized] that cosmologists could do much better than the particle physicists at restricting the number of neutrino types.[29] All that came in later. Then they [the physicists] had to admit that maybe the cosmologists have got something. Lightman: Do you think that's when physicists began taking cosmology seriously? Sciama: I believe so. Lightman: Grand unified theories,[30] and so forth? Sciama: Well, slightly earlier maybe than that, because the business of the number of neutrinos slightly predates that. That was perhaps the first sign that you could say something that couldn't be said just from particle physics]. A different example comes more from astronomy than cosmology, though it's linked up. Willie Fowler, who of course by now has won the Nobel Prize for nuclear astrophysics, came in to the subject through the influence of Fred Hoyle. It was partly the famous story about the level of carbon twelve. Here was Willie Fowler, a down-to-earth nuclear physicist at Caltech, being told by this madman that this crazy nonsense could tell him a specific level in a particular nucleus, which was only suspected to exist then by laboratory experiment. Then they do a careful experiment and find out it's there, bang on at the [predicted] energy. [Fowler] said, "it's fantastic that astronomy can do that." And it was taken seriously, and that was one of the major factors, plus the personal attitude, that brought Willie into the fold. Although that's astrophysics and not cosmology, there is a relation, because if you believe in the steady-state theory, you have to make heavy elements in stars. And that actually is one of the great selling points of the steady state theory. Now we know it's wrong. [But] it forced people like Fred to make elements in stars. That was very successful. So actually there is a link. The fact that Fred was studying that problem was directly due to the fact that steady state theory required [that elements be made in stars]. Do you know the old joke of Eddington about a hotter place? Lightman: No. Sciama: In early days, people had vague ideas that the elements had to be made by high-temperature nuclear reactions, and Eddington must have had some kind of primitive theory of this long before the supernova theory of Hoyle. People said to him that the stars he was dealing with weren't hot enough to do this job, and he said "then go and find a hotter place." But, in fact, there is a direct link back with cosmology, so Fred was working on these problems because steady state required some hot place, not the big bang, to make at least the major range of elements like carbon, etc. Supernovae were the obvious choice. And then Willie came into it for the reason I said. Lightman: I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you about your reactions to some recent theoretical and observational discoveries. As background for that, let me ask you I first, do you remember when you first heard about the horizon problem, the causality problem, or thought about it on your own? Sciama: Just about, because the person who wrote the key paper[31] on horizons is a great personal friend of mine, Wolfgang Rindler. Lightman: Yes, as I understand it [however], he didn't discuss the puzzle. He didn't raise the issue of why there is a problem with the current universe in that paper. Sciama: That's correct. Lightman: So, I want to ask you, when did you first hear that there was a problem with the current universe, that there are regions that are causally disconnected according to the big bang theory, and yet have the same temperature and the same properties, and so forth? Sciama: I do understand. I think that the answer to that question is that I am vaguely aware that [Robert] Dicke had raised[32] that point, but it was not in the forefront of, certainly, my consciousness until Alan Guth's paper.[33] Although the history of inflation is complicated. There were people[34] before Guth, who now never get mentioned, and that, I think, is not fair. But then we are not discussing that. Lightman: We will in a moment. Sciama: Okay. I am not very well informed about the fine details, but we can come to that in a moment. As far as I'm concerned, it was, in practice, [Guth's] paper which emphasized that [the horizon problem] had to be taken very seriously. And the business about the flatness. In fact, it was the flatness, perhaps, that Dicke had referred to[35] even more than the communication problem, the horizon problem. Maybe I'm getting them slightly confused. So, perhaps that was what I was referring to a moment ago... Lightman: Do you remember when you became aware of Dicke's discussion of that? Sciama: Well, I was vaguely aware of it because I knew him personally already by then — if only because of our mutual interest in Mach's [principle]. But it's not something I would have given a talk about or gone shouting about. It was just vaguely in my mind that he had said something at that time. Lightman: When you did become vaguely aware of it, did it worry you as a serious problem? Sciama: No, I don't think so. This was probably my concern with other matters or my lack of being smart enough to spot that it really was rather important. I would not have been in a position to say this is so important that I've got to tell people about it and worry about it. No. You're asking about me, and I'm not sure that I'm representative or not. Lightman: I'm just asking about you. Sciama: As far as I'm concerned, it was only very vague. I wouldn't have even known off-hand the formula you would use to show how the density parameter scales with time. I was just vaguely aware that [Dicke] had made some remarks that something was a bit worrisome. That's all that was in my mind. Lightman: You mentioned that you became much more aware of these problems [the horizon and flatness problems] after Guth's paper. When you read that paper, did you take these problems seriously in the sense that they were important problems that demanded solutions? How did you feel about them after Guth's work? Sciama: I do remember that I was a bit slow to appreciate the significance of what Guth had done — perhaps again because I had other things to attend to. When his paper came out, I glanced at it and I didn't say to myself, "ah, hah, here is a great breakthrough. Whether true or not we must attend to this thing." I didn't quite even know fully what it was all about. It was only a few months later, I suppose, when other people started talking a lot about it, that I said "ah, hah, I'm getting left behind, I better find out what this is all about." Then I either read his paper again or read something by Mike Turner or heard a talk, or something. I learned the stuff. I did my book work. Then, it all fell into place and I saw how potentially important it was. In fact, Guth came to the Royal Society in London for some meeting. He spoke, and at lunch I remember saying to him "do you realize that your inflationary epoch is just the steady state theory?" And he said, "What is the steady state theory?" He hadn't even heard of it. So that is just one of many reminders about culture gaps, or time gaps and culture gaps. So I explained to him the way the steady state theory worked. Even things now like the so-called "no hair" theorem, you see with de Sitter. Many, many of the ideas were just steady state, but only for this shortish [epoch], at this early time. I was very amused that it occurred in that way. Fred has recently tried to make more of it than is justified. Lightman: Yes, I saw a recent paper [of Hoyle's to that effect] in Comments on Astrophysics.[36] Sciama: Yes. In that sense, I could understand what Guth had done. Lightman: Once you understood the horizon and flatness problems, or thought about them more deeply, did they seem to you to be serious, fundamental problems? Sciama: Yes. Now we get on to slightly delicate ground because there is still a bit of debate about these things, and I'm one of those who thinks that inflation is getting a bit oversold. I'm sure Roger Penrose talked to you about that. Lightman: I want to ask you about inflation separately in a moment, but I just wanted to ask you now about these two particular problems: the flatness problem and the horizon problem — whether or not inflation ever arrived. Sciama: Yes, I think they are genuine problems, and the reason we weren't all worrying about [them] is partly because until recently there were so few people in the field. What was worked on or worried about at that time was it very sensitive function of who happened to be in the field and what their interests happened to be. It's the same when you look at the history of cosmology and black holes, where rather strange views were peddled by top people like Eddington. They only got away with that because there weren't an army of technically equipped people to say the correct thing and push him aside. It's interesting when a subject depends for its development on so few people that it depends on their individual attitudes and what interests them. Whereas when hundreds of people do it, you very rapidly get a kind of streamlined view. Now, there is a whole army [of researchers]. For any new idea about particle physics, there are hundreds of people ready to apply it to the early universe. In those days there were only a handful of us, you see, and if this handful hadn't paid attention to these problems, then they weren't in the literature or currently debated. I think that's the reason. I suppose once they are thoroughly pointed out to you and your nose is rubbed into it, then yes, they are very important problems. Whether inflation has solved them or not is a separate, technical question. But clearly they are important problems. Lightman: Putting aside inflation, do you have any view as to how the flatness and horizon problems might be solved? Sciama: There's a third problem that's also very important — and I agree with Roger Penrose that inflation doesn't solve it — and that's the smoothness. It's related to the horizon problem. One argument is that the early wrinkles get pulled out by inflation. But that is not a correct argument. What inflation does, if it works well, is provides a possibility for a transport process being slower than light to equilibrate different regions and remove temperature gradients. And that was all that was claimed originally. Then there was a kind of shift of view that came in almost surreptitiously, [which said] that, in addition, inflation already does the smoothing out for you automatically, because of pulling out the smaller scales to larger scales. But if the small scales are very rough and they're pulled out to larger scales, the larger scales are rough. Or, to put it more mathematically, given any state now with a regular differential equation, there's some early state that matched it. This point had been made earlier, in fact, by John Stewart, about [Charles] Misner's mixmaster model.[37] The same idea had been attempted: that, independent of the initial conditions, by mixing processes [you arrive at the present universe]. But it's strictly speaking not true. However, that's perhaps not what you wanted me to talk about. Lightman: That's certainly relevant. Let me ask you about inflation itself, since we have referred to that. You already mentioned the history. When the paper first came out, you were thinking about other things and it took you a few months to read it. What is your view about the inflationary model now, either in the original form or one of the derivatives of it? Sciama: Well, in the end I think it's turned out a bit disappointing. It was a marvelous idea. It had various difficulties, as you know. You referred to the various variants that were produced.[38] It's now in what I call a Baroque state. There are so many variations, and there is no formalism, there is no reasonable grand unified theory and a cosmological formalism that gives a scheme that really does all that is required of it. There are many sub cases. Half a dozen people in the field have produced their own variations. A related question has also ended up rather disappointing, and that's baryosynthesis, which would occur, perhaps, just after inflation. Again, it was a glorious idea, and again it has not worked out in a kind of definitive way. There are many variations of the possibilities. Perhaps this is the nature of scientific research. I'm not saying therefore the idea is wrong, but it's a mess at the moment. I do think that it is oversold by some of the pundits, who no doubt find it an advantage to them, being a highly regarded theory, and it has all these virtues. I do have to say I think it's oversold. But it's still potentially a marvelous idea we just need more particle physics first, to get a grand unified theory that we might have faith in. Lightman: Let me ask you a sociological question: Why do you think that the inflationary idea has caught on so widely? Sciama: Two reasons, I suppose. One is the very elegant link with the most advanced questions of particle physics. Cosmologists like me are happy that particle physics plays a key role, but also the particle physicists enter the arena. And partly that [inflation] doubly delivered what it advertised. To some extent it does. It solves great problems. Those are two perfectly adequate reasons. Plus, it's not every day that there is a great new idea in cosmology. [There is the] fighting for recognition. So therefore people jump at it. And that's fine. It's only if then it's oversold, it's a shame. One ought to be rational. Lightman: Let me ask you about an observational discovery. Do you remember when you first heard about the work[39] of Geller, de Lapparent, and Huchra on the bubble-like structure of the distribution of galaxies? That was a few years ago. Sciama: Yes. Lightman: How did you react to that work? Sciama: I was very excited. That seems to me extremely important. I’ve talked to Margaret Geller about it. She visited Trieste where I work mainly now, and she spoke to the summer school I was organizing. She was saying quite rightly that the irregularities she's finding. [continue] to the largest length scale that she observes, and therefore why shouldn't it go on forever, and maybe the whole idea of a homogeneous universe is lousy. Lightman: How do you feel about that? Sciama: I said to her afterwards, over a meal, "look Margaret, there is one constraint that you have got to recognize, and that is the isotropy of the microwave background. If you put too much irregularity on too large a scale you conflict with that, and that's therefore an overall constraint, although it doesn't come in at 100 megaparsecs." Lightman: Unless our interpretation of that is wrong. Sciama: She said "what would you do if we go on making the studies, and we keep finding this effect, let's just say out to 1,000 megaparsecs?" I said, "Well, that would be the most devastating thing in physics and astrophysics. I don't know what I would do." There is no obvious, easy way out. To say we've totally misinterpreted the microwave background ... We considered that in the early days. There were jokes that if it's so isotropic, that's because your box which is measuring the thing is isotropic. But by now, it would be very, very difficult to reconcile a bumpy universe on a scale of 1,000 megaparsecs with the isotropy of the microwave background. Lightman: Does that worry you? Did that worry you? Sciama: No. I therefore feel confident that the universe has to smooth itself out on that scale. Obviously you can ask me a hypothetical question: "What would you do if it didn't?" But that would just be a crisis in physics. It's silly to speculate. Lightman: No, I don't want to ask you that hypothetical question. I would rather ask you about what your attitude is right now about the thing. Sciama: Well, my attitude is that it's an extremely important discovery because, of course, galaxy formation has to be understood. And it's related to the nature of the dark matter that we haven't talked about — how galaxies form and so forth. It was totally unexpected from a theoretical point of view. Therefore, it's a very, very important scientific discovery. Lightman: I gather from what you have just said, though, that it doesn't shake your belief in the large-scale homogeneity. Sciama: Well, fortunately, up to the scale that's now been found, it wouldn't conflict with the isotropy, although it's interestingly coming close to it. Lightman: A factor of five or six or something [in distance]. Sciama: That's right, and there are plans afoot to improve the measurements of the isotropy another factor of ten. If they don't find anything then, that would also be worrying, even from other points of view. Just structures you can see in the sky would then work at the one in a million level. Therefore, I'm confident they will find something. I think that's reasonable. But if not, then we will have this crisis. So, I just have to suppose that they have almost reached the limit [where the two types of observations are consistent]. It's a numerical matter. Obviously, there is some lumpiness on the scale of 1,000 megaparsecs. It's a matter of the numbers. But I would suppose that you wouldn't find the same effect [inhomogeneities in the distribution of galaxies] at a much larger scale. Perhaps a bit larger, but not ten times larger. So, I'm not worried about this. I'm very much excited because it's got to be understood. Lightman: You mentioned the dark matter. I guess there are two kinds of dark matter: there is the dark matter that we know is there, that takes omega from .01 to .1; and then there is the missing matter that would have to be there if inflation is right, that takes omega from 0.1 to 1. What is your belief in that range of possibilities? Sciama: Well, as a matter of fact, there is an argument going on at the moment between two of my old students, — George Ellis and Martin Rees — as to whether inflation does require an omega of 1. That's a rather technical matter, and I don't want to go into that. But the statement that [inflation] requires omega close to 1 is at least up for argument. Lightman: I see. Sciama: But let us suppose for the purpose of this discussion that inflation does require that. Then, of course, we have to identify that matter. But we still [also] have to identify the matter in galactic haloes. If you are just asking me about my view of the present position, I don't have a particularly individual view. We all agree that any proposal made never seems to work out quite nicely. In fact, just recently, with some colleagues, I have shown[40] that a particular candidate can probably been ruled out because of the supernova in the Magellanic cloud. This is the case of certain super symmetry particles, like photinos, if they have low mass, like 100 eV or something. They've been very seriously considered as candidates [for the missing mass]. I liked [those particles] for various reasons, such as when they decayed and made photons, these photons might show up in astronomy. I've written a number of papers about that recently.[41] But we've just shown that the neutrino data from the supernova and the energetics involved in that and in the neutron star that formed in the supernova — using the very latest ideas about the coupling between photinos and nucleons — can rule out the existence in nature of these [hypothesized] low-mass photinos. Otherwise, the supernova would radiate more energy than it could tolerate in that form. So that's a particular candidate that's gone. Then, of course, with the recent upper limit on the electron-type neutrino mass, both from the lab and from the supernova, [that neutrino] almost certainly can't be responsible [for the missing mass]. There are still candidates left, but I think perhaps the best candidate is the tau-type neutrino. Or a GeV mass photino. Lightman: Something that we have the least data on. Sciama: Well, strictly speaking, I believe that neutrino hasn't yet been detected, although there was a claim from CERN some while ago that, at last, it had. But I think that claim is not substantiated. I'm not seriously suggesting that it doesn't exist. Anyway, it's certainly not clear. Lightman: I gather that since you're not necessarily a strong proponent of inflation, you are not convinced that this missing matter has to be there. Sciama: With an omega of one? Lightman: Yes. I don't want to state your position; I'm just trying to understand it. Sciama: No, I take inflation very seriously. I was only saying — it's an objective fact, I think — that the theory is in a bit of a mess. That is objective. But some form of inflation may very well be correct. It's a marvelous idea. Whether it requires omega as 1, I'm still trying to join in this argument with my colleagues, and I'm not completely sure. I don't want my view to go on record, with two of my good friends next. No, seriously, if there were a decisive argument I would accept it. And, linking with our earlier discussion, since I can no longer claim that [the universe] has to be Einstein-de Sitter [flat] because of Mach, there is no requirement for omega being one. Therefore, it is an open question. Of course, there might be other reasons we don't yet understand why omega equals one. It's a nice thing from the point of view of theoretical physics. So I would be very happy with an omega of one on these vague grounds of fundamental theoretical-physics. It's great fun looking for a form of the dark matter, although equally you have to worry about galactic haloes anyway. Lightman: Yes, we know that's there. Sciama: We know that is there even though, in that case too, it's sometimes been slightly exaggerated how much there is. But I think even the skeptics agree that there is some [dark matter] there. We have to make this identification [of the dark matter], and that's still an unsolved problem. It's very embarrassing. Lightman: How do you feel that theory and observations have worked together in modern cosmology, let's say in the last 15 or 20 years? Sciama: I think extremely well. One example, which I mentioned, is this business about the number of neutrino types. It fits almost too well. If you take the present abundances of the helium-4 and the other light elements and do the theory of it and so on and worry about the neutron half-life, which isn't quite as well in line, you still find that you are only allowed three or four neutrino types. Whether it's 3 or 4 even depends on what you take as the errors of the observation. In particular, a very good friend of mine, Bernard Pagel, who has got the latest measurement of the helium abundance, puts a very low error on his work - and is, perhaps, a little optimistic about that — but he insists that you can't even have 4 neutrino types. Also, you can't have a low mass photino, unless there are tricks for suppressing it. If you don't suppress it, you can't even be allowed that. When this was first realized, the best limit from the lab on the number of neutrino types was several thousand. Now, with the data from CERN on the Z0 particle, it's down to about five. But that, by the way, was one of the things that, I believe, made the particle physicists take cosmology seriously — the fact that we could, ahead of them, make a very stringent constraint on this number. We really stuck our neck out, and then when they do the necessary experiment with their best equipment they get the same result. Now amazingly, as I am sure you know, the supernova, from the same kind of argument about how much energy is emitted, limits the number of neutrino types to perhaps five or six. So all this involves observations of all different kinds — both particle physics and astronomical. It all fits together. I think that's very remarkable. I don't know if that is the kind of thing you had in mind when you asked me. It's not the same as things like great big bubbles and so on, but it's a cosmological thing which involves a variety of arguments — from measuring helium abundances in compact galaxies, to measuring the half-life of a neutron, to measuring things about the Z0 particle, to measuring neutrinos from a supernova. Everything fits together in a consistent way. Lightman: Let me ask you this. Some of modern cosmology in recent years has extrapolated backwards in time to very close to the big bang. What is your attitude about those theoretical extrapolations? Do you think that they are justified? Do you think that's a good way we should be working right now in cosmology? Sciama: Well, I think asking "is it justified?" is not quite the same question as "is it a good way to proceed?" I think it's a good way to proceed, because we have got to proceed in some ordered way. Justifying it would mean I can try and argue and say you've got to do this. Clearly you can extrapolate back to the [period of] nuclear reactions. I know that you are talking about much earlier. Lightman: Much earlier, yes. Sciama: And it's clear that if, say, Linde's ideas[42] are right, where you get these different domains and so on, you might not extrapolate the simplest Robertson-Walker system right back to a very early [time]. But that's part of this kind of theory — whether this domain structure occurs or not. You can't say, "Okay, things got hot enough to make helium, but we won't discuss what it was like when it was hotter or denser." You've got to extrapolate back. Something unexpected or something you overlooked may occur, but this is the nature of the business, at least in astrophysics and cosmology. You proceed by making a natural extrapolation unless you have a strong reason for not doing so. Steady state would say I have another reason, which I bring in, which prevents me going to the densest state, but then if you have a good point to make you are allowed to consider that as an alternative. If that is not present, then of course you would say density, temperature, time relations are so and so in the simplest models; they would imply such and such parameters in the early stages, and that's important to the particle physics. So all that must be done. If you can actually find an explanation of why there is more mater than anti-matter in that process, it's fantastic. Clearly one must proceed that way. Lightman: You have mentioned some of this already, but let me ask you what you consider to be the major outstanding problems in cosmology right now? Sciama: I suppose it depends a bit if you are more interested in astrophysics or fundamental physics. For your fundamental physics — and I'm only saying what everybody says — the essential vanishing of the cosmological constant, because the grand unified theory type of discussion will rather naturally throw out a cosmological constant of 10120 times bigger than any value you have astronomically. With the possible exception of last week's paper on superstrings, which attempts to claim that their particular model gives you a zero cosmological constant, it's completely not understood why that fine tuning occurs. So I think — and I agree with what everybody says — from the point of view of fundamental physical theory, the [problem in] cosmology that is the most glaringly obvious and outstanding is [the question of the vanishing of the cosmological constant]. If you think more astronomically, there is a clutch of problems. Some of them are quite old, like is the universe going to expand forever or collapse or what? That is clearly still not settled. The nature of the dark matter is not settled. The way galaxies form is not settled. We don't even know, observationally, the ultimate scale of [the universe]. I would have said all of those are important problems. Plus the problems that inflation aims to solve. I don't know that there is one outstanding problem. That whole group of problems would be high on everybody's list. In the case of the cosmological constant, one could say that fundamental physicists would feel that is the key. The fact that they can't explain as simple a thing as that means that their grandest theories are still hopelessly missing something, in spite of all the things they might do. But, astronomically speaking, this whole set of problems is about equal in importance. I think most people would say the same. Lightman: Let me end with a couple of philosophical questions. Here you might have to put some of your scientific caution aside a little bit. If you could design the universe any way that you wanted to, how would you do it? Sciama: Can I first answer evasively? I have a view, which I am giving a talk on here in Cambridge in a couple of weeks, and I talked about at a meeting on the anthropic principle. I have a view which by-passes that question. So let me explain it to you, very briefly. The problem of course, as the phrase anthropic principle indicates, is that the universe has to be very fine-tuned to bring about the possibility of intelligent life and human beings, or if you like, myself. That is probably not controversial at all. The controversy is: what is the significance of that [statement]? Very rapidly, there seem to me three possibilities. The one I favor relates to your question. The first is just chance, which I think is really unpalatable. You can't disprove it. The second is purposiveness, or God or something. God exists and regards us as the highest point of creation. He wants us to come about, so he fine-tuned the universe to make jolly sure that we came about. And I find that unpalatable, although many people accept that. And then there is the third proposal, which I didn't invent, but I favor very much. Incidentally, Brandon Carter, when he was working with me, did one of his early, very influential things[43] on the anthropic principle. [According to this third proposal], there are many disjoint universes, where the laws and constants of nature are different from one to another. In fact, I would put it even stronger: any logically possible universe exists, not just for anthropic reasons. Of course the anthropic theory clearly [leads just to the type of universe] we're in. Lightman: Yes, the anthropic principle singles out the universe we're in. Sciama: And the whole problem is trivial. But there is another reason why I favor all these universes. People might say to me, "what about Ocam’s razor? You're crazy." But, on the other hand, I believe that [this third proposal] in a sense satisfies Ocam’s razor, because you want to minimize the arbitrary constraints which you place on the universe. Now, if you imagine all these logically possible universes, then you've got to think there is a committee, or maybe just a chairperson, who looks at this list and says "well, we're not going to have that one, and we won't have that one. We'll have that one, only that one." Now, that could have happened, but it seems to me a remarkable thing that that happened. It's much more satisfying to say that there is no constraint on the universe. All logically possible cases are realized, and we're in one of the few that allow us. So, that's not quite answering your question, but I prefer to say it that way. Lightman: That is an answer. Let me ask you this question: It could turn out, could it not, that when we find a theory of everything — if such a theory is possible — we will discover that there is only one way that the universe could have been formed, consistent with most general notions of relativity theory and quantum theory. That is a possibility, isn't it? Sciama: I would put it slightly differently. In my view, relativity wouldn't hold in some of these universes, or quantum theory wouldn't hold, as long as they're logically possible. Now there is a possibility, which is an extension of what you have asked and which I believe Spinoza advocated, which is that there is only one logically possible universe, period. Lightman: If that were the case, then one wouldn't have all these different branches involved with your third possibility. Sciama: That's correct. I mentioned that in an article I've written on my talk[44] at Venice, so I recognize that that would be a very attractive [possibility] in a way, and yet it doesn't solve this problem, because it's still puzzling why the one logically possible [world] should be just the one that has the fine-tuning that leads to us. That is still unexplained, although it is possible that there is this unique case, right? Lightman: Yes, so that would then go into the same as your first category: that [our universe] is an accident. Sciama: Yes, it's still an accident that the one logically possible case has this very remarkable structure — that doesn't seem to be part of what goes into showing that it's logically possible. Lightman: So you prefer the third possibility? I asked you which universe would you design. You would prefer the third case, where there are many different logically possible universes and there are no constraints, and we happened to be in one of those that allows life. Sciama: Could I add [something], in case you or anyone would think that this is an untestable proposal. It's not like Linde's chaotic inflation.[45] He has something a bit like that, but where [the regions with different physical properties] are all part of this universe. [In the possibility I have mentioned], these would really be disjoint universes. So people might say, "If it's disjoint and there is no way you get a message from it, what are you talking about? It's empty." Now, the whole point is it's not empty, and I make a prediction which is testable. So let me just explain this very rapidly to give some sort of [idea]. Lightman: Go ahead. I want to check the tape, but I have another, so talk as long as you wish. Sciama: Except that we ought to go for coffee at some point or I will fade out. Let's consider all the cases which do lead to me. Now we would not expect that we're in a very special one of those. All I know is that I exist, and I'm happy enough with that. If the universe is unique, however, you might expect a very special initial condition, and Roger Penrose and differently Steven Hawking have both made proposals[46] for the special initial conditions, which I'm sure you know. Lightman: Yes. Sciama: Now my view, or my prediction — and I'm very proud of this sentence which more or less ends my talk — my prediction is that Penrose is wrong and Hawking is wrong, because if there are these other universes, and ones very close to ours, equivalent to ours, then we should be in a generic universe of the set that could lead to me. Therefore, I would not expect a beautiful, elegant, mathematical ersatz, like the Penrose one or the Hawking one, to apply to the initial universe. The initial conditions would be messy, but not too messy, or I [life] wouldn't emerge. But a bit messy. Therefore, when you do a measurement, in principle, of the initial conditions — and in Roger's case you can even make it the isotropy of the background because his statement that the Weyl tensor vanishes at the origin of the universe makes the universe isotropic, and in Steve's case it may be a bit more complicated — I would predict them to be messy, and not describable by a simple, mathematical, elegant statement. Lightman: You would predict that [the initial conditions] would be as messy as possible and still allow life. Sciama: Of course, to make real sense of that you need a measure theory of metrics, and that measure theory is very difficult and hasn't yet been achieved, so I can't do a technical job on this at the moment, but the fact that I make a physical prediction means that there is physics in my proposal. It's not just empty metaphysics. Lightman: If you have a measure of what messiness is and uniqueness is and what a generic metric is, and all of that, if you can make some quantitative measure of that. Sciama: That's right. So if you measure the early anisotropy and it's so and so — delta T over T is some number — does that favor me or [Penrose]. Lightman: You would also have to know what range of anisotropy would allow life, to know whether you have the generic amount of anisotropy, which you are sort of in the middle. Let's suppose that at the Planck time, delta T over T has to be less than a certain value to allow life. You have to know what the value is. Sciama: That's right. Lightman: So you are saying that in principle, what you are saying is testable. Sciama: That's good enough for the moment. My proposal, therefore, is a proposal of physics. That's the idea. Lightman: There is a place in Steve Weinberg's book, The First Three Minutes, where he says that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.[47] Sciama: I remember. Lightman: Have you ever thought about this question of whether the universe has a point? Sciama: I have thought about it, and I can't think of any point it has. It's the old question about why there is something rather than nothing. In fact, Sidney Coleman has written a recent paper[48] called “Why there is Nothing Rather than Something”, referring to the cosmological constant. If you're going to have some logically possible cases, even one, you ought to have the whole lot. But why have any? I find that quite inscrutable. Of course, the very concept of a meaning is perhaps too anthropomorphic. I don't know. But I have nothing to contribute to that. Obviously I have thought about it, but I have nothing to contribute. Lightman: Your explanation number two for your anthropic idea was not unrelated to this. Sciama: But it doesn't really explain. I'm allowing that when I talked in Venice, I permitted that as a conceivable explanation. In fact, it was a Jesuit astronomer who spoke after me, and he said "I am prepared to have all Sciama's universes. I don't mind that these days. But there is God in all of them." But as far as I'm concerned, I'm afraid — and I'm not a professional here — the word "God" is just a word. When this Jesuit spoke after me, he knew so much about God. It was amazing. God was a person, he said. So we have to say "he," "she" or "it," because those are the only personal pronouns in English — not just that God was some force that made the world, it was a person. How can he possibly know such things? It's ridiculous. As far as I'm concerned, it's just a word, and I sometimes argue with my friends and I jokingly say, "Suppose I asked you does the "spongula" exist?" In other words, using a word doesn't mean that there is something that correlates with it. If you had — and this is a schoolboy argument — if you had a concept of something that made the world, and it was needed in order that the world be made, then who made that person or thing or whatever it was, and so on. These are old, standard arguments, but they still have force as far as I'm concerned. It's true that people have, internally, a religious feeling, which they use the word God to express, but how a feeling inside of you can tell you that a thing made the whole universe? There is no relation between the two matters of concern. Therefore, while I'm prepared for and I can't rule out that there is another order of structure than ordinary matter, I know nothing about that order. There could be many orders, and so on. Therefore, the word God just doesn't denote any structure. Lightman: That's a good place to end the interview.
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The next two years are to be tumultuous, frightening and victorious but as the party begins he has little idea of what is in store for him. Written by Peter Moffat - writer of the acclaimed series Cambridge Spies and North Square - Hawking stars Benedict Cumberbatch (Dunkirk, Spooks, Silent Witness) as the young Stephen Hawking who, as a bright and ambitious 21-year-old PhD student at Cambridge University, is diagnosed with the debilitating motor neurone disease and given two years to live. Against the odds, he goes on to achieve scientific success and worldwide acclaim, in particular with his best-selling book A Brief History Of Time. Hawking producer Jessica Pope says: "Stephen's is an heroic story of great achievement. It's about the nature of time on both a deeply personal and a universal scale. "At the moment when his intellect was striving to grow to its full potential his physical self was cruelly closing down. "The fact that he never spoke about it, but through sheer force of will and personality determined to be bigger than his illness, is inspirational." Benedict Cumberbatch says: "I knew very little about Stephen Hawking before starting the project other than this person, a celebrated scientist with an iconic presence. "I had no idea that for the first 21 years of his life he was able bodied and lived a normal adolescence, which made the role and Hawking the person all the more fascinating to me." Benedict Cumberbatch's previous credits include Dunkirk Cambridge Spies and Silent Witness. Michael Brandon, who is currently playing Jerry Springer in the hugely successful West End production of Jerry Springer - The Opera, plays Arno Penzias, an American Nobel prize-winning scientist whose work provided physical evidence to support Hawking's Big Bang theory. Lisa Dillon plays Hawking's first wife, Jane Wilde, who meets the young cosmologist at a party in 1963 and is instantly intrigued by Stephen's talk of stars and the universe. Lisa is currently playing Desdemona in Othello at the RSC. Her previous credits include The Master Builder and Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things. John Sessions - The Lost Prince, Judge John Deed - plays Dennis Sciama, Hawking's academic supervisor and mentor at Cambridge. Director Philip Martin worked with Stephen Hawking on the acclaimed series Stephen Hawking's Universe. He says: "Stephen was at the heart of a scientific revolution at the start of the 1960s, which has transformed the way we think about ourselves and our place in the cosmos, we now know that our Universe began with a big bang some 15 billion years ago. "Yet today, even though Stephen Hawking is one of the world's most recognisable people, few people know about his extraordinary contribution to cosmology, or the dramatic human story that lies behind the science." Writer Peter Moffat adds: "Hawking is probably the singly most challenging and rewarding experience of my working life and the process made me completely re-shape my thinking on so many levels. "The challenge for me was how to make that experience thrilling and dramatic and to make it work in the form of a 90 minute drama. "The process was made much easier as a result of the access I had to Professor Hawking and other scientists such as Roger Penrose and Arno Penzias. "I hope this film will both entertain and contribute to a better understanding of a truly extraordinary area of science." Philip Martin's directing credits include Stephen Hawking's Universe, a six part series for BBC TWO on the origins of the cosmos, presented by Stephen Hawking; Wings of Angels, a drama for BBC TWO about God, Darwin and the Galapogos finches. Hawking was filmed on location in Cambridge and London and is a BBC TWO collaboration between BBC Drama and Horizon in BBC Science. The executive producers are Laura Mackie, Head of BBC Drama Serials, and John Lynch, Creative Director, BBC Science.
1098	dbpedia	2	25	https://tv.apple.com/us/person/dennis-sciama/umc.cpc.39uaj5m93yrfciutzxsmz66dg	en	Dennis Sciama Movies and Shows	https://tv.apple.com/ass…f729ea1c3672.png	https://tv.apple.com/ass…f729ea1c3672.png	[ "https://tv.apple.com/assets/artwork/1x1.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null	Learn about Dennis Sciama on Apple TV. Browse shows and movies that feature Dennis Sciama including A Brief History of Time.	en	/assets/favicon/apple-touch-icon-9a18d92f405f4cba68b503b186df5f5b.png	AppleÂ TV	https://tv.apple.com/us/person/dennis-sciama/umc.cpc.39uaj5m93yrfciutzxsmz66dg
1098	dbpedia	3	86	https://www.oliobymarilyn.com/2015/07/the-theory-of-everything.html	en	The Life Journey of Stephen Hawking	https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vsKaJZWarTc40KgreClOKMCsnrXtgZNKo2Y2PA7MaCrhTW1ouJx8hUUqMeWdPdecHyhfJvrRaMhS8TWSTgm-3rMT2315pT0pL2Ralfshi4OLj6eOm9GivwofDrAycWTikmoJL1StkiW4oTOD6umOW0_z-xCdzntp06aJqTPDJ-KR77eYVEgPs=w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu	https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vsKaJZWarTc40KgreClOKMCsnrXtgZNKo2Y2PA7MaCrhTW1ouJx8hUUqMeWdPdecHyhfJvrRaMhS8TWSTgm-3rMT2315pT0pL2Ralfshi4OLj6eOm9GivwofDrAycWTikmoJL1StkiW4oTOD6umOW0_z-xCdzntp06aJqTPDJ-KR77eYVEgPs=w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu	[ "https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-m0izREGixy0/XGH1V1srVTI/AAAAAAAAYyw/4lZXxWcnjw4sLi997sFhrOSia8cyQmpcgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Blog%2Bheader.jpg", "https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vsKaJZWarTc40KgreClOKMCsnrXtgZNKo2Y2PA7MaCrhTW1ouJx8hUUqMeWdPdecHyhfJvrRaMhS8TWSTgm-3rMT2315pT0pL2Ralfshi4OLj6eOm9GivwofDrAycWTikmoJL1StkiW4oTOD6umOW0_z-xCdzntp06aJqTPDJ-KR77eYVEgPs=s0-d", "https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPMgKBZ1eAsGAXAGuWxjRdwlEPInY7RNxAemBLHbibEPJqZBjqaBhql6QffQDobF2sfDzYWYg1DOj1kGoB_UtsWKHT1gZU13W-Q9PSe83A11ZwQKdQvbVO_FdMcVRJKyj5qewTV4b-c6w/s640/3.png", "https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCSsFQ6Xv3gYEZzK-3awxQ5E-UiAgMEKHfd-gXHq-eqbt931oO7aE-UKeZQGdGDP-Y77-E5Z6kXals5NzG8P4xl_OK1A-OczTCan9KWSzd48xIWfIISsG3f_uSZfsAAlwvoQj0Z7rcal4/s400/4.png", "https://www.blogger.com/img/blogger_logo_round_35.png" ]	[ "https://www.youtube.com/embed/8RHU0X5CYpU?feature=player_embedded" ]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Marilyn R. Wilson" ]	2015-07-08T07:35:00-07:00	o·li·o – a hodgepodge, a medley. Articles featuring a wide variety of topics including fashion, recipes, travel, reviews and more.	en	https://www.oliobymarilyn.com/favicon.ico		https://www.oliobymarilyn.com/2015/07/the-theory-of-everything.html	The Theory of Everything - The Life Journey of Stephen Hawking I finally had a chance to watch Universal Pictures' The Theory of Everything this week. An upcoming trip to Ontario had me downloading onto my iPad to distract me in flight, but I ended up coming back with it unwatched. Once home, Glen and I used Airplay so we could enjoy it together. Fortunately I knew little about the movie other than it was about Stephen Hawking and had received good reviews. That is enough for any movie. Coming in with little expectations allows you to enjoy your simple reactions and mine were oh so positive. It was amazing! Where to start. I felt the casting was strong on this one. Everyone rose to the occasion - their characters believable. I want to say a personal kudos to actor Eddie Redmayne for his wonderful portrayal of Hawking. What a demanding role that had to be. He subtly showed the first signs of ALS - also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease - through the tilt of his head and problems with using his hands/feet/ankles. There was a charming early awkwardness that built over time into symptoms of ALS. From first diagnosis offering no hope and a life expectancy of only two years, to accepting the love of Jane who would become his wife, the arrival of three children and his rise to fame, we follow the wonderful highs of accomplishment to the terrible lows as his progression into loss of personal control steadily continues. I searched high and low to find a few photos of Redmayne later in the film and a similar one of Hawkins to show how uncanny his performance was. The ones I found are just a shadow of what he brought - classic movement problems, garbled speech and difficulty eating all which became more difficult as time passed. Felicity Jones' portrayal of Jane Hawkins was also touching. You felt her determination, strength and the sacrifice this path forced on her. Great performances were also seen from Harry Lloyd (fellow Phd student) and David Thewlis (professor - Dennis Sciama), to name just a few. Helping them offer us believable characters was a strong, tight script, great filming and wonderful pacing. What was most astonishing was to see a comment at the end that Hawking was 72 at the time of release and still working. He is now 73 as of this date. As he was diagnosed at the early age of 21 and was given 2 years to live, that means he has beat the odds by 52 years so far. Although he is the exception to the rule, what a beacon of hope he is for those receiving this diagnosis. If you haven't had a chance to watch this yet, I'd made time soon. This is a truly wonderful film that I will mostly likely enjoy a second time.
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"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/Nuvola_apps_kalzium.svg/19px-Nuvola_apps_kalzium.svg.png", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8a/OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg/10px-OOjs_UI_icon_edit-ltr-progressive.svg.png", "https://login.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAutoLogin/start?type=1x1", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/footer/wikimedia-button.svg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/images/footer/poweredby_mediawiki.svg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Contributors to Wikimedia projects" ]	2001-11-02T20:32:41+00:00		en	/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking	English theoretical physicist (1942–2018) Stephen William Hawking, (8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018) was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge.[6][17][18] Between 1979 and 2009, he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, widely viewed as one of the most prestigious academic posts in the world.[19] Hawking was born in Oxford into a family of physicians. In October 1959, at the age of 17, he began his university education at University College, Oxford, where he received a first-class BA degree in physics. In October 1962, he began his graduate work at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where, in March 1966, he obtained his PhD degree in applied mathematics and theoretical physics, specialising in general relativity and cosmology. In 1963, at age 21, Hawking was diagnosed with an early-onset slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease that gradually, over decades, paralysed him.[20][21] After the loss of his speech, he communicated through a speech-generating device, initially through use of a handheld switch, and eventually by using a single cheek muscle.[22] Hawking's scientific works included a collaboration with Roger Penrose on gravitational singularity theorems in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation, often called Hawking radiation. Initially, Hawking radiation was controversial. By the late 1970s, and following the publication of further research, the discovery was widely accepted as a major breakthrough in theoretical physics. Hawking was the first to set out a theory of cosmology explained by a union of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. He was a vigorous supporter of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.[23][24] Hawking achieved commercial success with several works of popular science in which he discussed his theories and cosmology in general. His book A Brief History of Time appeared on the Sunday Times bestseller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. Hawking was a Fellow of the Royal Society, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. In 2002, Hawking was ranked number 25 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. He died in 2018 at the age of 76, having lived more than 50 years following his diagnosis of motor neurone disease. Early life Family Hawking was born on 8 January 1942[25][26] in Oxford to Frank and Isobel Eileen Hawking (née Walker). Hawking's mother was born into a family of doctors in Glasgow, Scotland.[29][30] His wealthy paternal great-grandfather, from Yorkshire, over-extended himself buying farm land and then went bankrupt in the great agricultural depression during the early 20th century.[30] His paternal great-grandmother saved the family from financial ruin by opening a school in their home.[30] Despite their families' financial constraints, both parents attended the University of Oxford, where Frank read medicine and Isobel read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Isobel worked as a secretary for a medical research institute, and Frank was a medical researcher. Hawking had two younger sisters, Philippa and Mary, and an adopted brother, Edward Frank David (1955–2003). In 1950, when Hawking's father became head of the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research, the family moved to St Albans, Hertfordshire. In St Albans, the family was considered highly intelligent and somewhat eccentric; meals were often spent with each person silently reading a book. They lived a frugal existence in a large, cluttered, and poorly maintained house and travelled in a converted London taxicab. During one of Hawking's father's frequent absences working in Africa, the rest of the family spent four months in Mallorca visiting his mother's friend Beryl and her husband, the poet Robert Graves. Primary and secondary school years Hawking began his schooling at the Byron House School in Highgate, London. He later blamed its "progressive methods" for his failure to learn to read while at the school.[40] In St Albans, the eight-year-old Hawking attended St Albans High School for Girls for a few months. At that time, younger boys could attend one of the houses. Hawking attended two private (i.e. fee-paying) schools, first Radlett School and from September 1952, St Albans School, Hertfordshire,[26] after passing the eleven-plus a year early.[43] The family placed a high value on education. Hawking's father wanted his son to attend Westminster School, but the 13-year-old Hawking was ill on the day of the scholarship examination. His family could not afford the school fees without the financial aid of a scholarship, so Hawking remained at St Albans. A positive consequence was that Hawking remained close to a group of friends with whom he enjoyed board games, the manufacture of fireworks, model aeroplanes and boats, and long discussions about Christianity and extrasensory perception. From 1958 on, with the help of the mathematics teacher Dikran Tahta, they built a computer from clock parts, an old telephone switchboard and other recycled components. Although known at school as "Einstein", Hawking was not initially successful academically. With time, he began to show considerable aptitude for scientific subjects and, inspired by Tahta, decided to read mathematics at university.[53] Hawking's father advised him to study medicine, concerned that there were few jobs for mathematics graduates. He also wanted his son to attend University College, Oxford, his own alma mater. As it was not possible to read mathematics there at the time, Hawking decided to study physics and chemistry. Despite his headmaster's advice to wait until the next year, Hawking was awarded a scholarship after taking the examinations in March 1959. Undergraduate years Hawking began his university education at University College, Oxford,[26] in October 1959 at the age of 17. For the first eighteen months, he was bored and lonely – he found the academic work "ridiculously easy". His physics tutor, Robert Berman, later said, "It was only necessary for him to know that something could be done, and he could do it without looking to see how other people did it." A change occurred during his second and third years when, according to Berman, Hawking made more of an effort "to be one of the boys". He developed into a popular, lively and witty college-member, interested in classical music and science fiction. Part of the transformation resulted from his decision to join the college boat-club, the University College Boat Club, where he coxed a rowing-crew. The rowing-coach at the time noted that Hawking cultivated a daredevil image, steering his crew on risky courses that led to damaged boats. Hawking estimated that he studied about 1,000 hours during his three years at Oxford. These unimpressive study habits made sitting his finals a challenge, and he decided to answer only theoretical physics questions rather than those requiring factual knowledge. A first-class degree was a condition of acceptance for his planned graduate study in cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Anxious, he slept poorly the night before the examinations, and the result was on the borderline between first- and second-class honours, making a viva (oral examination) with the Oxford examiners necessary. Hawking was concerned that he was viewed as a lazy and difficult student. So, when asked at the viva to describe his plans, he said, "If you award me a First, I will go to Cambridge. If I receive a Second, I shall stay in Oxford, so I expect you will give me a First." He was held in higher regard than he believed; as Berman commented, the examiners "were intelligent enough to realise they were talking to someone far cleverer than most of themselves". After receiving a first-class BA degree in physics and completing a trip to Iran with a friend, he began his graduate work at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in October 1962.[26] Post-graduate years Hawking's first year as a doctoral student was difficult. He was initially disappointed to find that he had been assigned Dennis William Sciama, one of the founders of modern cosmology, as a supervisor rather than the noted astronomer Fred Hoyle, and he found his training in mathematics inadequate for work in general relativity and cosmology. After being diagnosed with motor neurone disease, Hawking fell into a depression – though his doctors advised that he continue with his studies, he felt there was little point. His disease progressed more slowly than doctors had predicted. Although Hawking had difficulty walking unsupported, and his speech was almost unintelligible, an initial diagnosis that he had only two years to live proved unfounded. With Sciama's encouragement, he returned to his work. Hawking started developing a reputation for brilliance and brashness when he publicly challenged the work of Hoyle and his student Jayant Narlikar at a lecture in June 1964. When Hawking began his doctoral studies, there was much debate in the physics community about the prevailing theories of the creation of the universe: the Big Bang and Steady State theories. Inspired by Roger Penrose's theorem of a spacetime singularity in the centre of black holes, Hawking applied the same thinking to the entire universe; and, during 1965, he wrote his thesis on this topic.[78] Hawking's thesis[80] was approved in 1966.[80] There were other positive developments: Hawking received a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge; he obtained his PhD degree in applied mathematics and theoretical physics, specialising in general relativity and cosmology, in March 1966; and his essay "Singularities and the Geometry of Space–Time" shared top honours with one by Penrose to win that year's prestigious Adams Prize. Career 1966–1975 In his work, and in collaboration with Penrose, Hawking extended the singularity theorem concepts first explored in his doctoral thesis. This included not only the existence of singularities but also the theory that the universe might have started as a singularity. Their joint essay was the runner-up in the 1968 Gravity Research Foundation competition. In 1970, they published a proof that if the universe obeys the general theory of relativity and fits any of the models of physical cosmology developed by Alexander Friedmann, then it must have begun as a singularity.[88] In 1969, Hawking accepted a specially created Fellowship for Distinction in Science to remain at Caius. In 1970, Hawking postulated what became known as the second law of black hole dynamics, that the event horizon of a black hole can never get smaller. With James M. Bardeen and Brandon Carter, he proposed the four laws of black hole mechanics, drawing an analogy with thermodynamics. To Hawking's irritation, Jacob Bekenstein, a graduate student of John Wheeler, went further—and ultimately correctly—to apply thermodynamic concepts literally. In the early 1970s, Hawking's work with Carter, Werner Israel, and David C. Robinson strongly supported Wheeler's no-hair theorem, one that states that no matter what the original material from which a black hole is created, it can be completely described by the properties of mass, electrical charge and rotation.[95] His essay titled "Black Holes" won the Gravity Research Foundation Award in January 1971. Hawking's first book, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, written with George Ellis, was published in 1973. Beginning in 1973, Hawking moved into the study of quantum gravity and quantum mechanics. His work in this area was spurred by a visit to Moscow and discussions with Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich and Alexei Starobinsky, whose work showed that according to the uncertainty principle, rotating black holes emit particles. To Hawking's annoyance, his much-checked calculations produced findings that contradicted his second law, which claimed black holes could never get smaller, and supported Bekenstein's reasoning about their entropy. His results, which Hawking presented from 1974, showed that black holes emit radiation, known today as Hawking radiation, which may continue until they exhaust their energy and evaporate.[102][103] Initially, Hawking radiation was controversial. By the late 1970s and following the publication of further research, the discovery was widely accepted as a significant breakthrough in theoretical physics. Hawking was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1974, a few weeks after the announcement of Hawking radiation. At the time, he was one of the youngest scientists to become a Fellow. Hawking was appointed to the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1974. He worked with a friend on the faculty, Kip Thorne,[6] and engaged him in a scientific wager about whether the X-ray source Cygnus X-1 was a black hole. The wager was an "insurance policy" against the proposition that black holes did not exist. Hawking acknowledged that he had lost the bet in 1990, a bet that was the first of several he was to make with Thorne and others. Hawking had maintained ties to Caltech, spending a month there almost every year since this first visit. 1975–1990 Hawking returned to Cambridge in 1975 to a more academically senior post, as reader in gravitational physics. The mid-to-late 1970s were a period of growing public interest in black holes and the physicists who were studying them. Hawking was regularly interviewed for print and television. He also received increasing academic recognition of his work. In 1975, he was awarded both the Eddington Medal and the Pius XI Gold Medal, and in 1976 the Dannie Heineman Prize, the Maxwell Medal and Prize and the Hughes Medal. He was appointed a professor with a chair in gravitational physics in 1977. The following year he received the Albert Einstein Medal and an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford. In 1979, Hawking was elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.[121] His inaugural lecture in this role was titled: "Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?" and proposed N = 8 supergravity as the leading theory to solve many of the outstanding problems physicists were studying. His promotion coincided with a health-crisis which led to his accepting, albeit reluctantly, some nursing services at home. At the same time, he was also making a transition in his approach to physics, becoming more intuitive and speculative rather than insisting on mathematical proofs. "I would rather be right than rigorous", he told Kip Thorne. In 1981, he proposed that information in a black hole is irretrievably lost when a black hole evaporates. This information paradox violates the fundamental tenet of quantum mechanics, and led to years of debate, including "the Black Hole War" with Leonard Susskind and Gerard 't Hooft.[126] Cosmological inflation – a theory proposing that following the Big Bang, the universe initially expanded incredibly rapidly before settling down to a slower expansion – was proposed by Alan Guth and also developed by Andrei Linde. Following a conference in Moscow in October 1981, Hawking and Gary Gibbons[6] organised a three-week Nuffield Workshop in the summer of 1982 on "The Very Early Universe" at Cambridge University, a workshop that focused mainly on inflation theory.[129][130] Hawking also began a new line of quantum-theory research into the origin of the universe. In 1981 at a Vatican conference, he presented work suggesting that there might be no boundary – or beginning or ending – to the universe. Hawking subsequently developed the research in collaboration with Jim Hartle,[6] and in 1983 they published a model, known as the Hartle–Hawking state. It proposed that prior to the Planck epoch, the universe had no boundary in space-time; before the Big Bang, time did not exist and the concept of the beginning of the universe is meaningless.[133] The initial singularity of the classical Big Bang models was replaced with a region akin to the North Pole. One cannot travel north of the North Pole, but there is no boundary there – it is simply the point where all north-running lines meet and end. Initially, the no-boundary proposal predicted a closed universe, which had implications about the existence of God. As Hawking explained, "If the universe has no boundaries but is self-contained... then God would not have had any freedom to choose how the universe began." Hawking did not rule out the existence of a Creator, asking in A Brief History of Time "Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence?", also stating "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God";[138] in his early work, Hawking spoke of God in a metaphorical sense. In the same book he suggested that the existence of God was not necessary to explain the origin of the universe. Later discussions with Neil Turok led to the realisation that the existence of God was also compatible with an open universe. Further work by Hawking in the area of arrows of time led to the 1985 publication of a paper theorising that if the no-boundary proposition were correct, then when the universe stopped expanding and eventually collapsed, time would run backwards. A paper by Don Page and independent calculations by Raymond Laflamme led Hawking to withdraw this concept. Honours continued to be awarded: in 1981 he was awarded the American Franklin Medal, and in the 1982 New Year Honours appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).[145] These awards did not significantly change Hawking's financial status, and motivated by the need to finance his children's education and home-expenses, he decided in 1982 to write a popular book about the universe that would be accessible to the general public. Instead of publishing with an academic press, he signed a contract with Bantam Books, a mass-market publisher, and received a large advance for his book. A first draft of the book, called A Brief History of Time, was completed in 1984. One of the first messages Hawking produced with his speech-generating device was a request for his assistant to help him finish writing A Brief History of Time. Peter Guzzardi, his editor at Bantam, pushed him to explain his ideas clearly in non-technical language, a process that required many revisions from an increasingly irritated Hawking. The book was published in April 1988 in the US and in June in the UK, and it proved to be an extraordinary success, rising quickly to the top of best-seller lists in both countries and remaining there for months.[155] The book was translated into many languages, and as of 2009, has sold an estimated 9 million copies.[155] Media attention was intense, and a Newsweek magazine-cover and a television special both described him as "Master of the Universe". Success led to significant financial rewards, but also the challenges of celebrity status. Hawking travelled extensively to promote his work, and enjoyed partying into the late hours. A difficulty refusing the invitations and visitors left him limited time for work and his students. Some colleagues were resentful of the attention Hawking received, feeling it was due to his disability. He received further academic recognition, including five more honorary degrees, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1985), the Paul Dirac Medal (1987) and, jointly with Penrose, the prestigious Wolf Prize (1988). In the 1989 Birthday Honours, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH).[164] He reportedly declined a knighthood in the late 1990s in objection to the UK's science funding policy.[165][166] 1990–2000 Hawking pursued his work in physics: in 1993 he co-edited a book on Euclidean quantum gravity with Gary Gibbons and published a collected edition of his own articles on black holes and the Big Bang. In 1994, at Cambridge's Newton Institute, Hawking and Penrose delivered a series of six lectures that were published in 1996 as "The Nature of Space and Time". In 1997, he conceded a 1991 public scientific wager made with Kip Thorne and John Preskill of Caltech. Hawking had bet that Penrose's proposal of a "cosmic censorship conjecture" – that there could be no "naked singularities" unclothed within a horizon – was correct. After discovering his concession might have been premature, a new and more refined wager was made. This one specified that such singularities would occur without extra conditions. The same year, Thorne, Hawking and Preskill made another bet, this time concerning the black hole information paradox.[171][172] Thorne and Hawking argued that since general relativity made it impossible for black holes to radiate and lose information, the mass-energy and information carried by Hawking radiation must be "new", and not from inside the black hole event horizon. Since this contradicted the quantum mechanics of microcausality, quantum mechanics theory would need to be rewritten. Preskill argued the opposite, that since quantum mechanics suggests that the information emitted by a black hole relates to information that fell in at an earlier time, the concept of black holes given by general relativity must be modified in some way.[173] Hawking also maintained his public profile, including bringing science to a wider audience. A film version of A Brief History of Time, directed by Errol Morris and produced by Steven Spielberg, premiered in 1992. Hawking had wanted the film to be scientific rather than biographical, but he was persuaded otherwise. The film, while a critical success, was not widely released. A popular-level collection of essays, interviews, and talks titled Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays was published in 1993, and a six-part television series Stephen Hawking's Universe and a companion book appeared in 1997. As Hawking insisted, this time the focus was entirely on science. 2000–2018 Hawking continued his writings for a popular audience, publishing The Universe in a Nutshell in 2001, and A Briefer History of Time, which he wrote in 2005 with Leonard Mlodinow to update his earlier works with the aim of making them accessible to a wider audience, and God Created the Integers, which appeared in 2006. Along with Thomas Hertog at CERN and Jim Hartle, from 2006 on Hawking developed a theory of top-down cosmology, which says that the universe had not one unique initial state but many different ones, and therefore that it is inappropriate to formulate a theory that predicts the universe's current configuration from one particular initial state.[180] Top-down cosmology posits that the present "selects" the past from a superposition of many possible histories. In doing so, the theory suggests a possible resolution of the fine-tuning question.[181][182] Hawking continued to travel widely, including trips to Chile, Easter Island, South Africa, Spain (to receive the Fonseca Prize in 2008),[184] Canada, and numerous trips to the United States. For practical reasons related to his disability, Hawking increasingly travelled by private jet, and by 2011 that had become his only mode of international travel. By 2003, consensus among physicists was growing that Hawking was wrong about the loss of information in a black hole. In a 2004 lecture in Dublin, he conceded his 1997 bet with Preskill, but described his own, somewhat controversial solution to the information paradox problem, involving the possibility that black holes have more than one topology.[173] In the 2005 paper he published on the subject, he argued that the information paradox was explained by examining all the alternative histories of universes, with the information loss in those with black holes being cancelled out by those without such loss.[172] In January 2014, he called the alleged loss of information in black holes his "biggest blunder".[191] As part of another longstanding scientific dispute, Hawking had emphatically argued, and bet, that the Higgs boson would never be found. The particle was proposed to exist as part of the Higgs field theory by Peter Higgs in 1964. Hawking and Higgs engaged in a heated and public debate over the matter in 2002 and again in 2008, with Higgs criticising Hawking's work and complaining that Hawking's "celebrity status gives him instant credibility that others do not have." The particle was discovered in July 2012 at CERN following construction of the Large Hadron Collider. Hawking quickly conceded that he had lost his bet[194][195] and said that Higgs should win the Nobel Prize for Physics,[196] which he did in 2013.[197] In 2007, Hawking and his daughter Lucy published George's Secret Key to the Universe, a children's book designed to explain theoretical physics in an accessible fashion and featuring characters similar to those in the Hawking family. The book was followed by sequels in 2009, 2011, 2014 and 2016.[199] In 2002, following a UK-wide vote, the BBC included Hawking in their list of the 100 Greatest Britons.[200] He was awarded the Copley Medal from the Royal Society (2006),[201] the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is America's highest civilian honour (2009),[202] and the Russian Special Fundamental Physics Prize (2013).[203] Several buildings have been named after him, including the Stephen W. Hawking Science Museum in San Salvador, El Salvador,[204] the Stephen Hawking Building in Cambridge,[205] and the Stephen Hawking Centre at the Perimeter Institute in Canada.[206] Appropriately, given Hawking's association with time, he unveiled the mechanical "Chronophage" (or time-eating) Corpus Clock at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in September 2008.[208] During his career, Hawking supervised 39 successful PhD students.[1] One doctoral student did not successfully complete the PhD.[1][better source needed] As required by Cambridge University policy, Hawking retired as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 2009.[121][209] Despite suggestions that he might leave the United Kingdom as a protest against public funding cuts to basic scientific research, Hawking worked as director of research at the Cambridge University Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.[211] On 28 June 2009, as a tongue-in-cheek test of his 1992 conjecture that travel into the past is effectively impossible, Hawking held a party open to all, complete with hors d'oeuvres and iced champagne, but publicised the party only after it was over so that only time-travellers would know to attend; as expected, nobody showed up to the party.[212] On 20 July 2015, Hawking helped launch Breakthrough Initiatives, an effort to search for extraterrestrial life.[213] Hawking created Stephen Hawking: Expedition New Earth, a documentary on space colonisation, as a 2017 episode of Tomorrow's World.[214][215] In August 2015, Hawking said that not all information is lost when something enters a black hole and there might be a possibility to retrieve information from a black hole according to his theory.[216] In July 2017, Hawking was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Imperial College London.[217] Hawking's final paper – A smooth exit from eternal inflation? – was posthumously published in the Journal of High Energy Physics on 27 April 2018.[218][219] Personal life Marriages Hawking met his future wife, Jane Wilde, at a party in 1962. The following year, Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. In October 1964, the couple became engaged to marry, aware of the potential challenges that lay ahead due to Hawking's shortened life expectancy and physical limitations. Hawking later said that the engagement gave him "something to live for". The two were married on 14 July 1965 in their shared hometown of St Albans. The couple resided in Cambridge, within Hawking's walking distance to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). During their first years of marriage, Jane lived in London during the week as she completed her degree at Westfield College. They travelled to the United States several times for conferences and physics-related visits. Jane began a PhD programme through Westfield College in medieval Spanish poetry (completed in 1981). The couple had three children: Robert, born May 1967, Lucy, born November 1970, and Timothy, born April 1979. Hawking rarely discussed his illness and physical challenges—even, in a precedent set during their courtship, with Jane. His disabilities meant that the responsibilities of home and family rested firmly on his wife's increasingly overwhelmed shoulders, leaving him more time to think about physics. Upon his appointment in 1974 to a year-long position at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, Jane proposed that a graduate or post-doctoral student live with them and help with his care. Hawking accepted, and Bernard Carr travelled with them as the first of many students who fulfilled this role.[228] The family spent a generally happy and stimulating year in Pasadena. Hawking returned to Cambridge in 1975 to a new home and a new job, as reader. Don Page, with whom Hawking had begun a close friendship at Caltech, arrived to work as the live-in graduate student assistant. With Page's help and that of a secretary, Jane's responsibilities were reduced so she could return to her doctoral thesis and her new interest in singing. Around December 1977, Jane met organist Jonathan Hellyer Jones when singing in a church choir. Hellyer Jones became close to the Hawking family and, by the mid-1980s, he and Jane had developed romantic feelings for each other. According to Jane, her husband was accepting of the situation, stating "he would not object so long as I continued to love him". Jane and Hellyer Jones were determined not to break up the family, and their relationship remained platonic for a long period. By the 1980s, Hawking's marriage had been strained for many years. Jane felt overwhelmed by the intrusion into their family life of the required nurses and assistants. The impact of his celebrity status was challenging for colleagues and family members, while the prospect of living up to a worldwide fairytale image was daunting for the couple.[181] Hawking's views of religion also contrasted with her strong Christian faith and resulted in tension.[181][239] After a tracheotomy in 1985, Hawking required a full-time nurse and nursing care was split across three shifts daily. In the late 1980s, Hawking grew close to one of his nurses, Elaine Mason, to the dismay of some colleagues, caregivers, and family members, who were disturbed by her strength of personality and protectiveness. In February 1990, Hawking told Jane that he was leaving her for Mason and departed the family home. After his divorce from Jane in 1995, Hawking married Mason in September, declaring, "It's wonderful – I have married the woman I love." In 1999, Jane Hawking published a memoir, Music to Move the Stars, describing her marriage to Hawking and its breakdown. Its revelations caused a sensation in the media but, as was his usual practice regarding his personal life, Hawking made no public comment except to say that he did not read biographies about himself. After his second marriage, Hawking's family felt excluded and marginalised from his life.[239] For a period of about five years in the early 2000s, his family and staff became increasingly worried that he was being physically abused. Police investigations took place, but were closed as Hawking refused to make a complaint.[246] In 2006, Hawking and Mason quietly divorced,[247] and Hawking resumed closer relationships with Jane, his children, and his grandchildren.[181] Reflecting on this happier period, a revised version of Jane's book, re-titled Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, appeared in 2007,[246] and was made into a film, The Theory of Everything, in 2014.[249] Disability Hawking had a rare early-onset, slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease (MND; also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig's disease), a fatal neurodegenerative disease that affects the motor neurones in the brain and spinal cord, which gradually paralysed him over decades.[21] Hawking had experienced increasing clumsiness during his final year at Oxford, including a fall on some stairs and difficulties when rowing.[251] The problems worsened, and his speech became slightly slurred. His family noticed the changes when he returned home for Christmas, and medical investigations were begun. The MND diagnosis came when Hawking was 21, in 1963. At the time, doctors gave him a life expectancy of two years. In the late 1960s, Hawking's physical abilities declined: he began to use crutches and could no longer give lectures regularly. As he slowly lost the ability to write, he developed compensatory visual methods, including seeing equations in terms of geometry. The physicist Werner Israel later compared the achievements to Mozart composing an entire symphony in his head.[259] Hawking was fiercely independent and unwilling to accept help or make concessions for his disabilities. He preferred to be regarded as "a scientist first, popular science writer second, and, in all the ways that matter, a normal human being with the same desires, drives, dreams, and ambitions as the next person". His wife Jane later noted: "Some people would call it determination, some obstinacy. I've called it both at one time or another." He required much persuasion to accept the use of a wheelchair at the end of the 1960s, but ultimately became notorious for the wildness of his wheelchair driving. Hawking was a popular and witty colleague, but his illness, as well as his reputation for brashness, distanced him from some. When Hawking first began using a wheelchair he was using standard motorised models. The earliest surviving example of these chairs was made by BEC Mobility and sold by Christie's in November 2018 for £296,750.[265] Hawking continued to use this type of chair until the early 1990s, at which time his ability to use his hands to drive a wheelchair deteriorated. Hawking used a variety of different chairs from that time, including a DragonMobility Dragon elevating powerchair from 2007, as shown in the April 2008 photo of Hawking attending NASA's 50th anniversary;[266] a Permobil C350 from 2014; and then a Permobil F3 from 2016.[267] Hawking's speech deteriorated, and by the late 1970s he could be understood by only his family and closest friends. To communicate with others, someone who knew him well would interpret his speech into intelligible speech. Spurred by a dispute with the university over who would pay for the ramp needed for him to enter his workplace, Hawking and his wife campaigned for improved access and support for those with disabilities in Cambridge, including adapted student housing at the university. In general, Hawking had ambivalent feelings about his role as a disability rights champion: while wanting to help others, he also sought to detach himself from his illness and its challenges. His lack of engagement in this area led to some criticism. During a visit to CERN on the border of France and Switzerland in mid-1985, Hawking contracted pneumonia, which in his condition was life-threatening; he was so ill that Jane was asked if life support should be terminated. She refused, but the consequence was a tracheotomy, which required round-the-clock nursing care and caused the loss of what remained of his speech. The National Health Service was ready to pay for a nursing home, but Jane was determined that he would live at home. The cost of the care was funded by an American foundation. Nurses were hired for the three shifts required to provide the round-the-clock support he required. One of those employed was Elaine Mason, who was to become Hawking's second wife. For his communication, Hawking initially raised his eyebrows to choose letters on a spelling card, but in 1986 he received a computer program called the "Equalizer" from Walter Woltosz, CEO of Words Plus, who had developed an earlier version of the software to help his mother-in-law, who also had ALS and had lost her ability to speak and write.[280] In a method he used for the rest of his life, Hawking could now simply press a switch to select phrases, words or letters from a bank of about 2,500–3,000 that were scanned. The program was originally run on a desktop computer. Elaine Mason's husband, David, a computer engineer, adapted a small computer and attached it to his wheelchair. Released from the need to use somebody to interpret his speech, Hawking commented that "I can communicate better now than before I lost my voice." The voice he used had an American accent and is no longer produced.[286] Despite the later availability of other voices, Hawking retained this original voice, saying that he preferred it and identified with it.[287] Originally, Hawking activated a switch using his hand and could produce up to 15 words per minute. Lectures were prepared in advance and were sent to the speech synthesiser in short sections to be delivered. Hawking gradually lost the use of his hand, and in 2005 he began to control his communication device with movements of his cheek muscles,[289][290] with a rate of about one word per minute.[289] With this decline there was a risk of him developing locked-in syndrome, so Hawking collaborated with Intel Corporation researchers on systems that could translate his brain patterns or facial expressions into switch activations. After several prototypes that did not perform as planned, they settled on an adaptive word predictor made by the London-based startup SwiftKey, which used a system similar to his original technology. Hawking had an easier time adapting to the new system, which was further developed after inputting large amounts of Hawking's papers and other written materials and uses predictive software similar to other smartphone keyboards.[181][280][290][291] By 2009, he could no longer drive his wheelchair independently, but the same people who created his new typing mechanics were working on a method to drive his chair using movements made by his chin. This proved difficult, since Hawking could not move his neck, and trials showed that while he could indeed drive the chair, the movement was sporadic and jumpy.[280] Near the end of his life, Hawking experienced increased breathing difficulties, often resulting in his requiring the usage of a ventilator, and being regularly hospitalised.[181] Disability outreach Starting in the 1990s, Hawking accepted the mantle of role model for disabled people, lecturing and participating in fundraising activities. At the turn of the century, he and eleven other humanitarians signed the Charter for the Third Millennium on Disability, which called on governments to prevent disability and protect the rights of disabled people.[294] In 1999, Hawking was awarded the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society.[296] In August 2012, Hawking narrated the "Enlightenment" segment of the 2012 Summer Paralympics opening ceremony in London.[297] In 2013, the biographical documentary film Hawking, in which Hawking himself is featured, was released.[298] In September 2013, he expressed support for the legalisation of assisted suicide for the terminally ill.[299] In August 2014, Hawking accepted the Ice Bucket Challenge to promote ALS/MND awareness and raise contributions for research. As he had pneumonia in 2013, he was advised not to have ice poured over him, but his children volunteered to accept the challenge on his behalf.[300] Plans for a trip to space In late 2006, Hawking revealed in a BBC interview that one of his greatest unfulfilled desires was to travel to space.[301] On hearing this, Richard Branson offered a free flight into space with Virgin Galactic, which Hawking immediately accepted. Besides personal ambition, he was motivated by the desire to increase public interest in spaceflight and to show the potential of people with disabilities.[302] On 26 April 2007, Hawking flew aboard a specially-modified Boeing 727–200 jet operated by Zero-G Corp off the coast of Florida to experience weightlessness. Fears that the manoeuvres would cause him undue discomfort proved incorrect, and the flight was extended to eight parabolic arcs.[301] It was described as a successful test to see if he could withstand the g-forces involved in space flight.[304] At the time, the date of Hawking's trip to space was projected to be as early as 2009, but commercial flights to space did not commence before his death.[305] Death Hawking died at his home in Cambridge on 14 March 2018, at the age of 76.[306][307][308] His family stated that he "died peacefully".[309][310] He was eulogised by figures in science, entertainment, politics, and other areas.[311][312][313][314] The Gonville and Caius College flag flew at half-mast and a book of condolences was signed by students and visitors.[315][316][317] A tribute was made to Hawking in the closing speech by IPC President Andrew Parsons at the closing ceremony of the 2018 Paralympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.[318] His private funeral took place on 31 March 2018,[319] at Great St Mary's Church, Cambridge.[319][320] Guests at the funeral included The Theory of Everything actors Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May, and model Lily Cole.[321][322] In addition, actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who played Stephen Hawking in Hawking, astronaut Tim Peake, Astronomer Royal Martin Rees and physicist Kip Thorne provided readings at the service.[323] Although Hawking was an atheist, the funeral took place with a traditional Anglican service.[324][325] Following the cremation, a service of thanksgiving was held at Westminster Abbey on 15 June 2018, after which his ashes were interred in the Abbey's nave, between the graves of Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.[16][321][326][327] Inscribed on his memorial stone are the words "Here lies what was mortal of Stephen Hawking 1942–2018" and his most famed equation.[328] He directed, at least fifteen years before his death, that the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy equation be his epitaph.[329][330][note 1] In June 2018, it was announced that Hawking's words, set to music by Greek composer Vangelis, would be beamed into space from a European space agency satellite dish in Spain with the aim of reaching the nearest black hole, 1A 0620-00.[335] Hawking's final broadcast interview, about the detection of gravitational waves resulting from the collision of two neutron stars, occurred in October 2017.[336] His final words to the world appeared posthumously, in April 2018, in the form of a Smithsonian TV Channel documentary entitled, Leaving Earth: Or How to Colonize a Planet.[337][338] One of his final research studies, entitled A smooth exit from eternal inflation?, about the origin of the universe, was published in the Journal of High Energy Physics in May 2018.[339][218][340] Later, in October 2018, another of his final research studies, entitled Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair,[341] was published, and dealt with the "mystery of what happens to the information held by objects once they disappear into a black hole".[342][343] Also in October 2018, Hawking's last book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, a popular science book presenting his final comments on the most important questions facing humankind, was published.[344][345][346] On 8 November 2018, an auction of 22 personal possessions of Stephen Hawking, including his doctoral thesis ("Properties of Expanding Universes", PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 1965) and wheelchair, took place, and fetched about £1.8 m.[347][348] Proceeds from the auction sale of the wheelchair went to two charities, the Motor Neurone Disease Association and the Stephen Hawking Foundation;[349] proceeds from Hawking's other items went to his estate.[348] In March 2019, it was announced that the Royal Mint would issue a commemorative 50p coin, only available as a commemorative edition,[350] in honour of Hawking.[351] The same month, Hawking's nurse, Patricia Dowdy, was struck off the nursing register for "failures over his care and financial misconduct."[352] In May 2021 it was announced that an Acceptance-in-Lieu agreement between HMRC, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Cambridge University Library, Science Museum Group, and the Hawking Estate, would see around 10,000 pages of Hawking's scientific and other papers remain in Cambridge, while objects including his wheelchairs, speech synthesisers, and personal memorabilia from his former Cambridge office would be housed at the Science Museum.[353] In February 2022 the "Stephen Hawking at Work" display opened at the Science Museum, London as the start of a two-year nationwide tour.[354] Personal views Philosophy is unnecessary At Google's Zeitgeist Conference in 2011, Stephen Hawking said that "philosophy is dead". He believed that philosophers "have not kept up with modern developments in science", "have not taken science sufficiently seriously and so Philosophy is no longer relevant to knowledge claims", "their art is dead" and that scientists "have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge". He said that philosophical problems can be answered by science, particularly new scientific theories which "lead us to a new and very different picture of the universe and our place in it".[355] His view was both praised and criticised.[356] Future of humanity In 2006, Hawking posed an open question on the Internet: "In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?", later clarifying: "I don't know the answer. That is why I asked the question, to get people to think about it, and to be aware of the dangers we now face."[357] Hawking expressed concern that life on Earth is at risk from a sudden nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, global warming, or other dangers humans have not yet thought of.[302][358] Hawking stated: "I regard it as almost inevitable that either a nuclear confrontation or environmental catastrophe will cripple the Earth at some point in the next 1,000 years", and considered an "asteroid collision" to be the biggest threat to the planet.[344] Such a planet-wide disaster need not result in human extinction if the human race were to be able to colonise additional planets before the disaster.[358] Hawking viewed spaceflight and the colonisation of space as necessary for the future of humanity.[302][359] Hawking stated that, given the vastness of the universe, aliens likely exist, but that contact with them should be avoided.[360][361] He warned that aliens might pillage Earth for resources. In 2010 he said, "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans."[361] Hawking warned that superintelligent artificial intelligence could be pivotal in steering humanity's fate, stating that "the potential benefits are huge... Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. It might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks."[362][363] He feared that "an extremely intelligent future AI will probably develop a drive to survive and acquire more resources as a step toward accomplishing whatever goal it has", and that "The real risk with AI isn't malice but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren't aligned with ours, we're in trouble".[364] He also considered that the enormous wealth generated by machines needs to be redistributed to prevent exacerbated economic inequality.[364] Hawking was concerned about the future emergence of a race of "superhumans" that would be able to design their own evolution[344] and, as well, argued that computer viruses in today's world should be considered a new form of life, stating that "maybe it says something about human nature, that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. Talk about creating life in our own image." Religion and atheism Hawking was an atheist.[366][367] In an interview published in The Guardian, Hawking regarded "the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail", and the concept of an afterlife as a "fairy story for people afraid of the dark".[307][138] In 2011, narrating the first episode of the American television series Curiosity on the Discovery Channel, Hawking declared: We are each free to believe what we want and it is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation. There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that, I am extremely grateful.[368][369] Hawking's association with atheism and freethinking was in evidence from his university years onwards, when he had been a member of Oxford University's humanist group. He was later scheduled to appear as the keynote speaker at a 2017 Humanists UK conference.[370] In an interview with El Mundo, he said: Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation. What I meant by 'we would know the mind of God' is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn't. I'm an atheist.[366] In addition, Hawking stated: If you like, you can call the laws of science 'God', but it wouldn't be a personal God that you would meet and put questions to.[344] Politics Hawking was a longstanding Labour Party supporter. He recorded a tribute for the 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, called the 2003 invasion of Iraq a "war crime",[374] campaigned for nuclear disarmament, and supported stem cell research,[375] universal health care, and action to prevent climate change.[377] In August 2014, Hawking was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue.[378] Hawking believed a United Kingdom withdrawal from the European Union (Brexit) would damage the UK's contribution to science as modern research needs international collaboration, and that free movement of people in Europe encourages the spread of ideas.[379] Hawking said to Theresa May, "I deal with tough mathematical questions every day, but please don't ask me to help with Brexit."[380] Hawking was disappointed by Brexit and warned against envy and isolationism.[381] Hawking was greatly concerned over health care, and maintained that without the UK National Health Service, he could not have survived into his 70s.[382] Hawking especially feared privatisation. He stated, "The more profit is extracted from the system, the more private monopolies grow and the more expensive healthcare becomes. The NHS must be preserved from commercial interests and protected from those who want to privatise it."[383] Hawking blamed the Conservatives for cutting funding to the NHS, weakening it by privatisation, lowering staff morale through holding pay back and reducing social care.[384] Hawking accused Jeremy Hunt of cherry picking evidence which Hawking maintained debased science.[382] Hawking also stated, "There is overwhelming evidence that NHS funding and the numbers of doctors and nurses are inadequate, and it is getting worse."[385] In June 2017, Hawking endorsed the Labour Party in the 2017 UK general election, citing the Conservatives' proposed cuts to the NHS. But he was also critical of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, expressing scepticism over whether the party could win a general election under him.[386] Hawking feared Donald Trump's policies on global warming could endanger the planet and make global warming irreversible. He said, "Climate change is one of the great dangers we face, and it's one we can prevent if we act now. By denying the evidence for climate change, and pulling out of the Paris Agreement, Donald Trump will cause avoidable environmental damage to our beautiful planet, endangering the natural world, for us and our children."[387] Hawking further stated that this could lead Earth "to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid".[388] Hawking was also a supporter of a universal basic income.[389] He was critical of the Israeli government's position on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, stating that their policy "is likely to lead to disaster."[390] Appearances in popular media In 1988, Hawking, Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan were interviewed in God, the Universe and Everything Else. They discussed the Big Bang theory, God and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.[391] At the release party for the home video version of the A Brief History of Time, Leonard Nimoy, who had played Spock on Star Trek, learned that Hawking was interested in appearing on the show. Nimoy made the necessary contact, and Hawking played a holographic simulation of himself in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1993. The same year, his synthesiser voice was recorded for the Pink Floyd song "Keep Talking", and in 1999 for an appearance on The Simpsons. Hawking appeared in documentaries titled The Real Stephen Hawking (2001), Stephen Hawking: Profile (2002) and Hawking (2013), and the documentary series Stephen Hawking, Master of the Universe (2008).[397] Hawking also guest-starred in Futurama[181] and had a recurring role in The Big Bang Theory.[398] Hawking allowed the use of his copyrighted voice[399][400] in the biographical 2014 film The Theory of Everything, in which he was portrayed by Eddie Redmayne in an Academy Award-winning role.[401] Hawking was featured at the Monty Python Live (Mostly) show in 2014. He was shown to sing an extended version of the "Galaxy Song", after running down Brian Cox with his wheelchair, in a pre-recorded video.[402][403] Hawking used his fame to advertise products, including a wheelchair, National Savings,[404] British Telecom, Specsavers, Egg Banking,[405] and Go Compare.[406] In 2015, he applied to trademark his name.[407] Broadcast in March 2018 just a week or two before his death, Hawking was the voice of The Book Mark II on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series, and he was the guest of Neil deGrasse Tyson on StarTalk.[408] The 2021 animated sitcom The Freak Brothers features a recurring character, Mayor Pimco, who is apparently modeled after Stephen Hawking.[409] On 8 January 2022, Google featured Hawking in a Google Doodle on the occasion of his 80th birthday.[410] Awards and honours Hawking received numerous awards and honours. Already early in the list, in 1974 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).[6] At that time, his nomination read: Hawking has made major contributions to the field of general relativity. These derive from a deep understanding of what is relevant to physics and astronomy, and especially from a mastery of wholly new mathematical techniques. Following the pioneering work of Penrose he established, partly alone and partly in collaboration with Penrose, a series of successively stronger theorems establishing the fundamental result that all realistic cosmological models must possess singularities. Using similar techniques, Hawking has proved the basic theorems on the laws governing black holes: that stationary solutions of Einstein's equations with smooth event horizons must necessarily be axisymmetric; and that in the evolution and interaction of black holes, the total surface area of the event horizons must increase. In collaboration with G. Ellis, Hawking is the author of an impressive and original treatise on "Space-time in the Large". The citation continues, "Other important work by Hawking relates to the interpretation of cosmological observations and to the design of gravitational wave detectors."[411] Hawking was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1984),[412] the American Philosophical Society (1984),[413] and the United States National Academy of Sciences (1992).[414] Hawking received the 2015 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences shared with Viatcheslav Mukhanov for discovering that the galaxies were formed from quantum fluctuations in the early Universe. At the 2016 Pride of Britain Awards, Hawking received the lifetime achievement award "for his contribution to science and British culture".[415] After receiving the award from Prime Minister Theresa May, Hawking humorously requested that she not seek his help with Brexit.[415] The Hawking Fellowship Main article: Hawking Fellowship In 2017, the Cambridge Union Society, in conjunction with Hawking, established the Professor Stephen Hawking Fellowship. The fellowship is awarded annually to an individual who has made an exceptional contribution to the STEM fields and social discourse,[416] with a particular focus on impacts affecting the younger generations. Each fellow delivers a lecture on a topic of their choosing, known as the 'Hawking Lecture'.[417] Hawking himself accepted the inaugural fellowship, and he delivered the first Hawking Lecture in his last public appearance before his death. [418][419] Medal for Science Communication Hawking was a member of the advisory board of the Starmus Festival, and had a major role in acknowledging and promoting science communication. The Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication is an annual award initiated in 2016 to honour members of the arts community for contributions that help build awareness of science.[420] Recipients receive a medal bearing a portrait of Hawking by Alexei Leonov, and the other side represents an image of Leonov himself performing the first spacewalk along with an image of the "Red Special", the guitar of Queen musician and astrophysicist Brian May (with music being another major component of the Starmus Festival).[421] The Starmus III Festival in 2016 was a tribute to Stephen Hawking and the book of all Starmus III lectures, "Beyond the Horizon", was also dedicated to him. The first recipients of the medals, which were awarded at the festival, were chosen by Hawking himself. They were composer Hans Zimmer, physicist Jim Al-Khalili, and the science documentary Particle Fever.[422] Publications Popular books A Brief History of Time (1988)[199] Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays (1993)[423] The Universe in a Nutshell (2001)[199] On the Shoulders of Giants (2002)[199] God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History (2005)[199] The Dreams That Stuff Is Made of: The Most Astounding Papers of Quantum Physics and How They Shook the Scientific World (2011)[424] My Brief History (2013)[199] Hawking's memoir. Brief Answers to the Big Questions (2018)[344][425] Co-authored The Nature of Space and Time (with Roger Penrose) (1996) The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (with Roger Penrose, Abner Shimony and Nancy Cartwright) (1997) The Future of Spacetime (with Kip Thorne, Igor Novikov, Timothy Ferris and introduction by Alan Lightman, Richard H. Price) (2002) A Briefer History of Time (with Leonard Mlodinow) (2005)[199] The Grand Design (with Leonard Mlodinow) (2010)[199] Forewords Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (Kip Thorne, and introduction by Frederick Seitz) (1994) The Physics of Star Trek (Lawrence Krauss) (1995) Children's fiction Co-written with his daughter Lucy. George's Secret Key to the Universe (2007)[199] George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt (2009)[199] George and the Big Bang (2011)[199] George and the Unbreakable Code (2014) George and the Blue Moon (2016) Films and series A Brief History of Time (1992)[426] Stephen Hawking's Universe (1997)[427] Hawking – BBC television film (2004) starring Benedict Cumberbatch Horizon: The Hawking Paradox (2005)[428] Masters of Science Fiction (2007)[429] Stephen Hawking and the Theory of Everything (2007) Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe (2008)[430] Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking (2010)[431] Brave New World with Stephen Hawking (2011)[432] Stephen Hawking's Grand Design (2012)[433] The Big Bang Theory (2012, 2014–2015, 2017) Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Mine (2013)[434] The Theory of Everything – Feature film (2014) starring Eddie Redmayne[435] Genius by Stephen Hawking (2016) Selected academic works S. W. Hawking; R. Penrose (27 January 1970). "The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology". Proceedings of the Royal Society A. 314 (1519): 529–548. Bibcode:1970RSPSA.314..529H. doi:10.1098/RSPA.1970.0021. ISSN 1364-5021. S2CID 120208756. Zbl 0954.83012. Wikidata Q55872061. S. W. Hawking (May 1971). "Gravitational Radiation from Colliding Black Holes". Physical Review Letters. 26 (21): 1344–1346. Bibcode:1971PhRvL..26.1344H. doi:10.1103/PHYSREVLETT.26.1344. ISSN 0031-9007. Wikidata Q21706376. Stephen Hawking (June 1972). "Black holes in general relativity". Communications in Mathematical Physics. 25 (2): 152–166. Bibcode:1972CMaPh..25..152H. doi:10.1007/BF01877517. ISSN 0010-3616. S2CID 121527613. Wikidata Q56453197. Stephen Hawking (March 1974). "Black hole explosions?". Nature. 248 (5443): 30–31. Bibcode:1974Natur.248...30H. doi:10.1038/248030A0. ISSN 1476-4687. S2CID 4290107. Zbl 1370.83053. Wikidata Q54017915. Stephen Hawking (September 1982). "The development of irregularities in a single bubble inflationary universe". Physics Letters B. 115 (4): 295–297. Bibcode:1982PhLB..115..295H. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(82)90373-2. ISSN 0370-2693. Wikidata Q29398982. J. B. Hartle; S. W. Hawking (December 1983). "Wave function of the Universe". Physical Review D. 28 (12): 2960–2975. Bibcode:1983PhRvD..28.2960H. doi:10.1103/PHYSREVD.28.2960. ISSN 1550-7998. Zbl 1370.83118. Wikidata Q21707690. Stephen Hawking; C J Hunter (1 October 1996). "The gravitational Hamiltonian in the presence of non-orthogonal boundaries". Classical and Quantum Gravity. 13 (10): 2735–2752. arXiv:gr-qc/9603050. Bibcode:1996CQGra..13.2735H. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.339.8756. doi:10.1088/0264-9381/13/10/012. ISSN 0264-9381. S2CID 10715740. Zbl 0859.58038. Wikidata Q56551504. S. W. Hawking (October 2005). "Information loss in black holes". Physical Review D. 72 (8). arXiv:hep-th/0507171. Bibcode:2005PhRvD..72h4013H. doi:10.1103/PHYSREVD.72.084013. ISSN 1550-7998. S2CID 118893360. Wikidata Q21651473. Stephen Hawking; Thomas Hertog (April 2018). "A smooth exit from eternal inflation?". Journal of High Energy Physics. 2018 (4). arXiv:1707.07702. Bibcode:2018JHEP...04..147H. doi:10.1007/JHEP04(2018)147. ISSN 1126-6708. S2CID 13745992. Zbl 1390.83455. Wikidata Q55878494. See also List of things named after Stephen Hawking On the Origin of Time, a book by Thomas Hertog about Hawking's theories Notes References Citations Sources
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Over the last couple of days I've spent the evenings reading The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo, a biography of…	en	https://telescoper.blog/…6778407.jpg?w=32	In the Dark	https://telescoper.blog/2013/01/27/the-strangest-man/	Since getting rid of my telly a few weeks ago I’ve reverted to a previous incarnation as a bookworm, and have been tackling the backlog of unread volumes sitting on my coffee table at home. Over the last couple of days I’ve spent the evenings reading The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo, a biography of the great theoretical physicist Paul Dirac. I’m actually quite ashamed that it has taken me so long to get around to reading this. I’ve had it for two years or more and really should have found time to do it before now. Dirac has long been one of my intellectual heroes, for his unique combination of imagination and mathematical rigour; the Dirac equation is one of the topics I most enjoy lecturing about to physics students. I am also immensely flattered to be one of his academic descendants: Paul Dirac was the PhD supervisor of Dennis Sciama, who supervised my supervisor John Barrow, making me (in a sense) his great-grandson. Not that I’ll ever achieve anything of the magnitude he did. The book is pretty long, and I suppose one of the factors putting me off reading it was that I thought it might be heavy going. That turned out to be far from the case. It’s wonderfully well written, never getting bogged down in details, and cleverly interweaving Dirac’s life and scientific career together against a vivid historical backdrop dominated by the rise of Nazism in Germany and the tragedy of World War 2. It also beautifully conveys the breathless sense of excitement as the new theory of quantum mechanics gradually fell into place. Altogether it’s a gripping story that had me hooked from the start, and I devoured the 400+ pages in just a couple of evenings (which is quick by my standards). I’ve never read a scientific biography so pacey and engaging before, so it’s definitely hats off to Graham Farmelo! Among the book’s highlights for me were the little thumbnail sketches of famous physicists I knew beforehand mostly only as names. Niels Bohr comes across as a splendidly warm and avuncular fellow, Werner Heisenberg as a very slippery customer of questionable political allegiance (likewise Erwin Schrödinger), Ernest Rutherford as blunt and irascible. I was already aware of the reputation of Wolfgang Pauli had for being an absolute git; this book does nothing to dispel that opinion. We tend to forget that the names we came to know through their association with physics also belonged to real people, with all that entails. I was also interested to learn that Dirac and his wife Manci spent their honeymoon in 1937, as the clouds of war gathered on the horizon, in Brighton, which Farmelo describes as ..a peculiarly raffish town., famous for its two Victorian piers jutting imperiously out to sea, for the pale green domes of its faux-oriential pavilions, its future-robot and a host of other tacky attractions. So in most respects it hasn’t changed much, although one of the two piers has since gone for a Burton. So what of Dirac himself? Most of what you’re likely to hear about him concerns his apparently cold and notoriously uncommunicative nature. I never met Dirac. He died in 1984. I was an undergraduate at Cambridge at the time, but he had moved to Florida many years before that. I have, however, over the years had occasion to talk to quite a few people who knew Dirac personally, including Dennis Sciama. All of them told me that he wasn’t really anything like the caricature that is usually drawn of him. While it’s true that he had no time for small talk and was deeply uncomfortable in many social settings, especially formal college occasions and the like, he very much enjoyed the company of people more extrovert than himself and was more than willing to talk if he felt he had anything to contribute. He got on rather well with Richard Feynman, for example, although they couldn’t have had more different personalities. This gives me the excuse to include this wonderful picture of Dirac and Feynman together, taken in 1962 – the body language tells you everything there is to know about these two remarkable characters: Feynman is also an intellectual hero of mine, because he was outrageously gifted not only at doing science but also at communicating it. On the other hand, I suspect (although I’ll obviously never know) that I might not have liked him very much at a personal level. He strikes me as the sort of chap who’s a lot of fun in small doses, but by all accounts he could be prickly and wearingly egotistical. On the other hand, the more I read The Strangest Man the more I came to think that I would have liked Dirac. He may have been taciturn, but at least that meant he was free from guile and artifice. It’s not true that he lacked empathy for other people, either. Perhaps he didn’t show it outwardly very much, but he held a great many people in very deep affection. It’s also clear from the quotations peppered throughout the book that people who worked closely with him didn’t just admire him for his scientific work; they also loved him as a person. A strange person, perhaps, but also a rather wonderful one. In the last Chapter, Farmelo touches on the question of whether Dirac may have displayed the symptoms of autism. I don’t know enough about autism to comment usefully on this possibility. I don’t even know whether the term autistic is defined with sufficient precision to be useful. There is such a wide and multidimensional spectrum of human personality that it’s inevitable that there will be some individuals who appear to be extreme in some aspect or other. Must everyone who is a bit different from the norm be labelled as having some form of disorder? The book opens with the following quote from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which says it all. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. Another thought occurred to me after I’d finished reading the book. Dirac’s heyday as a theoretical physicist was the period 1928-1932 or thereabouts. Comparatively speaking, his productivity declined significantly in later years; he produced fewer original results and became increasingly isolated from the mainstream. Eddington’s career followed a similar pattern: he did brilliant work when young, but subsequently retreated into the cul-de-sac of his Fundamental Theory. Fred Hoyle is another example – touched by greatness early in his career, but cantankerous and blinded by his own dogma later on. Even Albert Einstein, genius-of-geniuses, spent his later scientific life chasing shadows. I think there’s a tragic inevitability about the mid-life decline of these geniuses of theoretical physics, because the very same determination and intellectual courage that allowed them to break new ground also rendered them unwilling to be deflected by subsequent innovations elsewhere. And break new ground Dirac certainly did. The word genius is perhaps over-used, but it certainly applies to Paul Dirac. We need more like him. Follow @telescoper
1098	dbpedia	3	90	https://telescoper.blog/2013/01/27/the-strangest-man/	en	The Strangest Man	https://telescoper.blog/…/01/feyndir2.jpg	https://telescoper.blog/…/01/feyndir2.jpg	[ "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/feyndir2.jpg?w=450&h=497", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/677dd86b526a04d2f45e8bc7981c4bdcaee70974df8b249bfd63556134306039?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/677dd86b526a04d2f45e8bc7981c4bdcaee70974df8b249bfd63556134306039?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/759616154c59332d5e2f078c07bfd91c1454a87208bff77f3eb705c175446f44?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/9bfa08368ede62b73158c84518d90dd7176dbf5bd21f5c425143ba45c7f64cfc?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/4d5145d0c35be97a31e942f8495201852997998bdb85f1ff76825110f1acb32c?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/ede2da2fc49d8466430bac26b9e12519c7d4dad8910eb9129cb42f63393eea8c?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F2.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/678b0dd77e0e226d340642b690965821a5179ceda4233e9d4537e001d88a995d?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/ad56ea1e24669a45c791fd987373540be7d8cdbf4b5b837ae6eeec783c465e14?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/04de0c62bd2f68abd587af44620bc84d3e5f0bed87b5034b01f3996ea233f332?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://i0.wp.com/a0.twimg.com/profile_images/236225872/vernshep2_normal.jpg?resize=32%2C32&ssl=1", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/5bfea975db76223f501df1445cfbc6b92c03f69927163ea2a8e35597979f6008?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F2.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/dc3e688980a900b955a854e6a76c8af62cbfe15512feac38910e9b70d341caf1?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/424c7070ac14fc6a0791d13e9cfd02d7c5324e4ebc7d79224d17fa6ec604801d?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/30444bf02acd28fd49c8ad65028c417be231a844931245806bdbcf8f448a6ca5?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/dc3e688980a900b955a854e6a76c8af62cbfe15512feac38910e9b70d341caf1?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/4d5145d0c35be97a31e942f8495201852997998bdb85f1ff76825110f1acb32c?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/30444bf02acd28fd49c8ad65028c417be231a844931245806bdbcf8f448a6ca5?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/dc3e688980a900b955a854e6a76c8af62cbfe15512feac38910e9b70d341caf1?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/9cedaddd4e3ce35c3c18258271cc1f49fc30332ff7048fae0b0ce9971db54174?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/20c5f96adfa0745555b0b9eff096d223b4396260558e12d6ad2b0ffb669e5dd8?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F2.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://1.gravatar.com/avatar/4d5145d0c35be97a31e942f8495201852997998bdb85f1ff76825110f1acb32c?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/wp-1590846778407.jpg?w=32", "https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/8cddeda5f6ecf835856e38410d402fe723c97e4cf53ade80a5f1fab4c294cfbe?s=32&d=https%3A%2F%2F2.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/wp-1590846778407.jpg?w=50", "https://telescoper.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/wp-1590846778407.jpg?w=50", "https://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?v=noscript" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2013-01-27T00:00:00	Since getting rid of my telly a few weeks ago I've reverted to a previous incarnation as a bookworm, and have been tackling the backlog of unread volumes sitting on my coffee table at home. Over the last couple of days I've spent the evenings reading The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo, a biography of…	en	https://telescoper.blog/…6778407.jpg?w=32	In the Dark	https://telescoper.blog/2013/01/27/the-strangest-man/	Since getting rid of my telly a few weeks ago I’ve reverted to a previous incarnation as a bookworm, and have been tackling the backlog of unread volumes sitting on my coffee table at home. Over the last couple of days I’ve spent the evenings reading The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo, a biography of the great theoretical physicist Paul Dirac. I’m actually quite ashamed that it has taken me so long to get around to reading this. I’ve had it for two years or more and really should have found time to do it before now. Dirac has long been one of my intellectual heroes, for his unique combination of imagination and mathematical rigour; the Dirac equation is one of the topics I most enjoy lecturing about to physics students. I am also immensely flattered to be one of his academic descendants: Paul Dirac was the PhD supervisor of Dennis Sciama, who supervised my supervisor John Barrow, making me (in a sense) his great-grandson. Not that I’ll ever achieve anything of the magnitude he did. The book is pretty long, and I suppose one of the factors putting me off reading it was that I thought it might be heavy going. That turned out to be far from the case. It’s wonderfully well written, never getting bogged down in details, and cleverly interweaving Dirac’s life and scientific career together against a vivid historical backdrop dominated by the rise of Nazism in Germany and the tragedy of World War 2. It also beautifully conveys the breathless sense of excitement as the new theory of quantum mechanics gradually fell into place. Altogether it’s a gripping story that had me hooked from the start, and I devoured the 400+ pages in just a couple of evenings (which is quick by my standards). I’ve never read a scientific biography so pacey and engaging before, so it’s definitely hats off to Graham Farmelo! Among the book’s highlights for me were the little thumbnail sketches of famous physicists I knew beforehand mostly only as names. Niels Bohr comes across as a splendidly warm and avuncular fellow, Werner Heisenberg as a very slippery customer of questionable political allegiance (likewise Erwin Schrödinger), Ernest Rutherford as blunt and irascible. I was already aware of the reputation of Wolfgang Pauli had for being an absolute git; this book does nothing to dispel that opinion. We tend to forget that the names we came to know through their association with physics also belonged to real people, with all that entails. I was also interested to learn that Dirac and his wife Manci spent their honeymoon in 1937, as the clouds of war gathered on the horizon, in Brighton, which Farmelo describes as ..a peculiarly raffish town., famous for its two Victorian piers jutting imperiously out to sea, for the pale green domes of its faux-oriential pavilions, its future-robot and a host of other tacky attractions. So in most respects it hasn’t changed much, although one of the two piers has since gone for a Burton. So what of Dirac himself? Most of what you’re likely to hear about him concerns his apparently cold and notoriously uncommunicative nature. I never met Dirac. He died in 1984. I was an undergraduate at Cambridge at the time, but he had moved to Florida many years before that. I have, however, over the years had occasion to talk to quite a few people who knew Dirac personally, including Dennis Sciama. All of them told me that he wasn’t really anything like the caricature that is usually drawn of him. While it’s true that he had no time for small talk and was deeply uncomfortable in many social settings, especially formal college occasions and the like, he very much enjoyed the company of people more extrovert than himself and was more than willing to talk if he felt he had anything to contribute. He got on rather well with Richard Feynman, for example, although they couldn’t have had more different personalities. This gives me the excuse to include this wonderful picture of Dirac and Feynman together, taken in 1962 – the body language tells you everything there is to know about these two remarkable characters: Feynman is also an intellectual hero of mine, because he was outrageously gifted not only at doing science but also at communicating it. On the other hand, I suspect (although I’ll obviously never know) that I might not have liked him very much at a personal level. He strikes me as the sort of chap who’s a lot of fun in small doses, but by all accounts he could be prickly and wearingly egotistical. On the other hand, the more I read The Strangest Man the more I came to think that I would have liked Dirac. He may have been taciturn, but at least that meant he was free from guile and artifice. It’s not true that he lacked empathy for other people, either. Perhaps he didn’t show it outwardly very much, but he held a great many people in very deep affection. It’s also clear from the quotations peppered throughout the book that people who worked closely with him didn’t just admire him for his scientific work; they also loved him as a person. A strange person, perhaps, but also a rather wonderful one. In the last Chapter, Farmelo touches on the question of whether Dirac may have displayed the symptoms of autism. I don’t know enough about autism to comment usefully on this possibility. I don’t even know whether the term autistic is defined with sufficient precision to be useful. There is such a wide and multidimensional spectrum of human personality that it’s inevitable that there will be some individuals who appear to be extreme in some aspect or other. Must everyone who is a bit different from the norm be labelled as having some form of disorder? The book opens with the following quote from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which says it all. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. Another thought occurred to me after I’d finished reading the book. Dirac’s heyday as a theoretical physicist was the period 1928-1932 or thereabouts. Comparatively speaking, his productivity declined significantly in later years; he produced fewer original results and became increasingly isolated from the mainstream. Eddington’s career followed a similar pattern: he did brilliant work when young, but subsequently retreated into the cul-de-sac of his Fundamental Theory. Fred Hoyle is another example – touched by greatness early in his career, but cantankerous and blinded by his own dogma later on. Even Albert Einstein, genius-of-geniuses, spent his later scientific life chasing shadows. I think there’s a tragic inevitability about the mid-life decline of these geniuses of theoretical physics, because the very same determination and intellectual courage that allowed them to break new ground also rendered them unwilling to be deflected by subsequent innovations elsewhere. And break new ground Dirac certainly did. The word genius is perhaps over-used, but it certainly applies to Paul Dirac. We need more like him. Follow @telescoper
1098	dbpedia	1	66	https://nla.gov.au/anbd.aut-an35484986	en	Sciama, D. W. (Dennis William), 1926			[ "https://nla.gov.au/search/assets/070108412024/img/LAS/LAS-logo.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null			/search/assets/070108412024/ico/apple-touch-icon-144-precomposed.png		null
1098	dbpedia	1	89	https://www.howtopronounce.com/sciama	en	How to pronounce Sciama	https://media.howtoprono…7616191932b1.png	https://media.howtoprono…7616191932b1.png	[ "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/logo-dark.png?id=d5f581577f07831b3eb1", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronouncelayer.png?id=01cc6eec43af674dda58", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronounce.png?id=46e127f00494bb0fe649", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronounce.png?id=46e127f00494bb0fe649", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronounce.png?id=46e127f00494bb0fe649", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronounce.png?id=46e127f00494bb0fe649", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/play-animation.gif?id=3f048eaa7bed72c8cd6a", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronounce.png?id=46e127f00494bb0fe649", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/play-animation.gif?id=3f048eaa7bed72c8cd6a", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronounce.png?id=46e127f00494bb0fe649", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/play-animation.gif?id=3f048eaa7bed72c8cd6a", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronounce.png?id=46e127f00494bb0fe649", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/play-animation.gif?id=3f048eaa7bed72c8cd6a", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/pronounce.png?id=46e127f00494bb0fe649", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/{{quiz.quiz_image}}", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/{{quiz.quiz_image}}", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/{{comment[0].p_image}}", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/private_user.png?id=7f824f4a0a0d617584b2", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/{{reply.c_image }}", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/private_user.png?id=7f824f4a0a0d617584b2", "https://media.howtopronounce.com/question-assets/14a6d55211d807bc25fe935adfdb7f4f.png?ops=wt213,ht112", "https://media.howtopronounce.com/question-assets/e7ce5a149bf97897fd069c073ae03068.jpg?ops=wt168,ht112", "https://media.howtopronounce.com/question-assets/cb01569a8eceb20d5cbf3cd7697bcddb.png?ops=wt213,ht112", "https://media.howtopronounce.com/question-assets/0be0848b89b98a5795bcaf8c9964a806.png?ops=wt213,ht112", "https://media.howtopronounce.com/question-assets/7d9365cf4eca9d8256cd74114400f2f1.jpg?ops=wt168,ht112", "https://media.howtopronounce.com/question-assets/757f1d454d59f703592427d66caec5bb.png?ops=wt213,ht112", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/loader.gif", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/loader.gif", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/loader.gif", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/loader.gif", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/loader.gif", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/{{app.userTrophy[app.userTrophyNo].picture_url}}", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/logo-white.png?id=a258499d635ad04a9b3b", "https://www.howtopronounce.com/images/frontend/loader.gif" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[ "Gaetano Nitzsche" ]	2019-12-06T19:28:21	How to say Sciama in English? Pronunciation of Sciama with 3 audio pronunciations, 1 meaning, 1 translation and more for Sciama.	en	/apple-icon-57x57.png		https://www.howtopronounce.com/sciama	Learn how to pronounce Sciama Sciama X X Rate the pronunciation difficulty of Sciama 2 /5 (4 votes) Very easy Easy Moderate Difficult Very difficult Thanks for your vote! Pronunciation of Sciama with 3 audio pronunciations 191 ratings rating ratings 1 rating rating ratings 0 rating rating ratings Record the pronunciation of this word in your own voice and play it to listen to how you have pronounced it. Practice mode x x x Have you finished your recording? Have you finished your recording? Since you have exceeded your time limit, your recording has been stopped. Can you pronounce this word better or pronounce in different accent or variation ? Contribute mode x x x Have you finished your recording? Have you finished your recording? Since you have exceeded your time limit, your recording has been stopped. Phonetic spelling of Sciama scia-ma 4 ratings rating ratings S-ciama 0 rating rating ratings Thanks for contributing You are not logged in.. Please Log in or Register or post as a guest Meanings for Sciama He is a physicist of English origin, known for his contribution in developing British physics. 0 rating rating ratings Thanks for contributing You are not logged in.. Please Log in or Register or post as a guest Learn more about the word "Sciama" , its origin, alternative forms, and usage from Wiktionary. Quiz on Sciama {{ quiz.name }} {{ quiz.questions_count }} Questions Lets play Collections on Sciama {{collection.cname}} {{collection.count}} View collection -Private -{{collection.uname}} Translations of Sciama Russian : Сиамы 0 rating rating ratings Thanks for contributing You are not logged in.. Please Log in or Register or post as a guest
1098	dbpedia	0	1	https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/33994	en	American Institute of Physics	https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/favicon_1.ico	https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/favicon_1.ico	[ "https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/aip-logo-180.png", "https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2022-01/esva-image-not-available.jpg?itok=09xDxOQh", "https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/aipcorp/images/sitewide/aip-logo-fullname-400.png", "https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/aipcorp/images/sitewide/1383075471_twitter.png" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2021-09-24T10:08:33-04:00	Lightman: I wanted to start by asking you a few questions about your childhood. Can you tell me a little about what your parents were like, what they did?	en	/sites/default/files/favicon_1.ico		https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/33994	Lightman: I wanted to start by asking you a few questions about your childhood. Can you tell me a little about what your parents were like, what they did? Sciama: My father was a businessman. Actually you have taken me slightly aback because lots of things are rather personal, and I don't know if I would like to talk about them for publication. But certainly he was a businessman in Manchester. I grew up in Manchester. I then went to what we in England call a public school — that means a private school — from which I got a very good mathematical training. Those schools could afford to pay for the better teachers. In fact, my main teacher was a man who these days wouldn't go into school teaching. He got first-class honors in all three parts of the mathematical tripos in Cambridge, and he went into school teaching, and he helped me to get a scholarship to Cambridge. Lightman: Were either of your parents interested in science? Sciama: No, not at all. The atmosphere was entirely a business one. It rather surprised my father when I had this interest in science, which was outside his orbit. He was a very clever man, but he had left school at the age of 12 because his father had died, and he wasn't therefore used to higher education or anything like that. Although he had a fine brain, it hadn't been trained. He was trained in the world, but not trained in institutions. He therefore didn't particularly know about higher education until I told him. I told him Cambridge was great and Trinity was great, and he accepted that. But it wouldn't have been anything in his world. Lightman: When he knew that you had an interest in science, when he became aware of that, did he discourage you or encourage you? Sciama: He tried to discourage me because he thought that I ought to go into his business. Lightman: What about your mother? Sciama: She helped me a little bit, but he was much the stronger personality. It was just that I was so motivated to do science and mathematics. I suppose at that age I didn't even distinguish them. I originally thought of myself as a mathematician, and only later did I move first toward physics and then to cosmology. Lightman: Do you remember in your childhood, do you remember any particular books that you read that had a strong influence on you? Sciama: Yes, I can't remember how old I was when I read them, but I think it must have been in school. So many people of several generations were around then — Eddington,[1] in particular. Although I did read Jeans[2] a bit, I found Eddington more challenging. Lightman: He had several popular books. Sciama: He had several popular books. Perhaps now they've faded out a bit. I don't know. At that time they were very well known and considered the leading books of that kind. I don't know if you have read them — they are very imaginative. Lightman: I have read one or two of his books, and I think he is a beautiful writer as well as a good scientist. Sciama: So that certainly appealed to me, although at that time I wasn't thinking of myself as an astronomer. There were other people, mainly connected with Trinity. G.H. Hardy, the pure mathematician, wrote a lovely little book called A Mathematician's Apology.[3] Lightman: That is one of my favorites. Sciama: Then you may remember how he says from an early age his one ambition was to become a Fellow of Trinity. Again, this reads a bit old-fashioned now, and some people would even say it is no longer [impressive] and so on, but at the time it thrilled me. Lightman: Did you read Hardy's book when you were a youngster? Sciama: Yes. I also read some Bertrand Russell, who again was associated with Trinity. Lightman: So you were interested in philosophy? Sciama: I've always had a mild interest in philosophy. In fact, I'm giving a talk on the philosophical aspects of the anthropic principle in a week or two. So, I have had an interest in philosophy. When I went up to Trinity in 1944, I attended a whole course of lectures by Wittgenstein, who was then still a professor and giving lectures. That was a very good experience. So, while I was basically doing mathematics, I had this interest in philosophical things, and it just so happened that many of the leading people at the time were Fellows of Trinity, or had been. Trinity was the most prominent college. That was all part of the image of what a youngster would be attracted to, to strive, as it were, because there was this goal. So that played an important part. Lightman: At this age, before you went up to Cambridge, did you have an intention to go into science or mathematics? Sciama: Yes, from about the age of 15 or 16, I suppose. Before that, I was very young, and I naturally said I would go into my father's business because that was the obvious thing to say. I don't remember precisely, but roughly from the age of about 15 or 16, when I was beginning to be coached to take the scholarship to Cambridge, I realized [science and mathematics was] what I wanted to do. Lightman: One thing you said in your interview[4] with Spencer Weart in 1978 was that at this age you developed a passion for mathematics and science. Do you have any idea how that passion developed or what caused you to be so taken with this subject? Sciama: I think in retrospect I can answer that question perhaps, but it's a bit wisdom after the event. In fact, I came to cosmology and astronomy relatively late. When I was doing my Ph.D., for instance, I started out in statistical mechanics. Only in the middle, partly under the influence of people here like Fred Hoyle and Hermann Bondi, and Tommy Gold, did I start getting interested in cosmology and Mach's principle and so forth. Rather unusually, in the middle of my Ph.D., I switched to relativity and Mach's principle and so on. They had to give me a new supervisor as a result. They gave me no less than [Paul] Dirac, in order to try and cope with this rather alarming change of subject from the point of view of the authorities. So, something inside of me must have burst out at that point. Although the statistical mechanics problem — it was about the Onsager, Ising type of work — is very attractive theoretical physics. But it doesn't, of course, have the connotations of understanding the origin of the universe. Once I started doing things beginning with Mach's principle, I then realized my real passion was for understanding the fundamental nature of the universe. Some people, and perhaps the majority, do that by particle physics, and a few of us do it by cosmology. Of course, as I dare say you will discuss later, now the two things are linked together. So, then I said "ah, hah, it's clear to me what it's all about, and I want to understand the way the world is made, where it comes from, and what it means in the scientific sense." That's my passion. Therefore, always I've tended not so much to work on very technical detailed problems — although some of my students have — but rather on problems that in some way help to understand the great questions. So, that's obviously what my real passion is. But at 15, I didn't say all that. It expressed itself then as an interest in, say, mathematics. I remember enjoying projective geometry at school. I thought it was very beautiful and well ordered, and so on. Cosmology came much later. Lightman: Did you like well-ordered things? Sciama: Yes. Because, you see, if you do understand the universe... I mean, if Mach's principle had been true and sensible and worked well, or if superstrings or something are right, you are imposing order on the universe. And no doubt a psychoanalyst would have his own views as to why one wants to do that. Again, I think I mentioned this to Spencer. If you impose order on [the universe], then you help to achieve it yourself. Roughly speaking, what I like to say is that the universe is enormous — it is much stronger than you are — and your only way of hitting back at it is to understand it. No doubt, a psychoanalyst would use psychoanalytic jargon to describe [that idea], but that's what it amounts to, I guess. Lightman: Do you think that kind of motivation was something you sensed at a young age, or was it something that developed later? Sciama: I don't think I sensed it as explicitly as that. When I was enjoying projective geometry, I just said "how beautiful, and what a nice intellectual challenge, and what lovely theorems you get when you use your intellect, and that's great fun." I didn't realize all that I am now saying, probably until I made that switch in the middle of my Ph.D. But no doubt it was underneath. Lightman: Can you tell me a little about your undergraduate and graduate work at Cambridge? I don't want you to go into too much length because you said quite a bit to Spencer Weart but just give me some of the high points. Sciama: The high point is that I was a disastrously bad student. No, that's putting it too strongly. I did get a minor scholarship in mathematics at Trinity, which was a great achievement. A large part of that was due to very good coaching by the particular school teacher I mentioned earlier. Lightman: Did you say his name? Sciama: I didn't. His name was R.H. Cobb. Anyway, it's a bit like training for a race or something, learning how to solve these problems. It's all book work. You learn how to prove these things. You've been through this yourself, I'm sure. You remember how to prove book-work theorems, and you do many, many "riders," as we used to call them — examples based on the theorems. And so you trained. I was good enough to be trainable to get even a minor scholarship at Trinity, which was the great place in maths at Cambridge. But then I did extremely badly in exams here, so badly that when I finished I had to go into the army. This was just after the war, but there was still conscription, and I couldn't remain to be a research student. I got a lower second in finals, and two thirds in my earlier exams. So I was in disgrace. However, during the two years that I had to be in the army, for 18 months of it I managed to get sent to a government research lab, which was called TRE in those days. [That lab] originally had done a lot of radar work in the war. One was still concerned with detecting enemy airplanes, detecting infrared radiation. They were studying photoconductors, or semiconductors — they become conducting when the light hits them. And I with a team — of course I was guided by the senior people — worked on the quantum mechanics of the band structure in the lead sulfide group of elements. Lightman: So you got to do physics. Sciama: Yes, I wrote internal reports. Hartree was one of the professors here at the time. You know his name, I'm sure. He I had seen just as I was leaving as a student, and I told him I wanted to get back into research. He helped me to get transferred to this government lab and then accepted me back as a research student when he had seen these internal reports. It was all about the group theory, and the levels, and so on. So, that is how I got back in to the system. Lightman: So they thought you might have been dismissed out of hand from Trinity? Sciama: Well, I wouldn't take a student on with my exam records. It's all rather embarrassing when I now have to take students on. If it were a question of a grant, I wouldn't be allowed to give a grant, because you’ve got to get a first or an upper second to get a grant. But he took me back without a grant, and that's where my father being a businessman came in. I was able to live through the help of my father, despite his early discouragement. Lightman: How did he feel about supporting you in this intellectual pursuit? Sciama: Well, he was still terribly upset that I had rejected business, but he saw that I was so determined that he let me do it. Later, I agreed with him whether I would continue depended on certain things. It was a crazy thing to do, because clearly if I was going to be a tenth-rate researcher, then maybe it's better to earn a lot of money in a good firm. So, I agreed with him that [I would stay in scientific research] only if I got the research fellowship at Trinity — the thing Hardy had written all about. That would be a sign that it was worth the sacrifices, and otherwise not. That was a crazy [agreement], because even if I were very good — which I didn't know really at that time — it's very chancy whether you get a [fellowship]. You're competing with a whole group of people in a whole range of all subjects. Lightman: Was this his proposition or your proposition? Sciama: I think I said at one point, "well look, the natural thing for me to do is go in for a Fellowship." It's such a prestigious thing to get, which I explained to him, and he accepted that. Because if I did get [the Fellowship], that would be the sign that it would be worth the sacrifices. Lightman: Then did you also complete the proposition and say that if you didn't get [the Fellowship]; you would put your [fate] in his hands? Sciama: Yes. If I didn't get it, then that would show that it wasn't justified to give up these good prospects in the textile business. Lightman: So you made him a business proposition. Sciama: I made him a business proposition. Exactly. But a very bad one. [Lightman and Sciama laugh.] Arnold Weinstock would never do that today. Perhaps you don't know him. He is the chap in GEC here, and they've just been trying to take him over with clever tricks. Yes, so by sheer luck I did get the damn thing, so I was able to remain in an academic career. Lightman: When you decided to do cosmology, you said that you came under the influence of Hoyle and Bondi. Sciama: And Gold. They were all here. They were senior to me, but I got a bit friendly, particularly with Tommy Gold, and to some extent with Hermann Bondi. Hoyle was still older than that. They were all playing a strong part here. You probably know that they were all considered sort of rebels at that time. Hoyle was not Sir Fred Hoyle, Plumian Professor. He probably had a lectureship then, and I think Bondi did. But Bondi wasn't Sir Hermann Bondi, et cetera, et cetera. Lightman: This was in the early fifties? Sciama: Yes. I got my fellowship in 1952, and I actually got the degree of Ph.D. in 1953. I started being a research student in 1949. The steady-state theory,[5] which was one of the dominating ideas in cosmology at that time, was published in 1948. So at that time it was far too soon for the hostile evidence to arise. [The steady state] was a very attractive idea to some of us. Also, [Hoyle, Bondi, and Gold] were concerned with astronomical questions. But in a lot of their work, they were introducing rather new points of view, which tended to be the kinds of points of view that got resistance from the establishment. They were the young rebels, and they were an exciting influence at the time for a younger person like myself. Even when I was doing the statistical mechanics, I must have gone to their lectures and realized that their personalities were robust and exciting. I suppose that played a part. I don't remember waking up one day and saying "no more Ising [models], I will now do distant galaxies or something." I can't remember the precise details, but it's clear that I started thinking about questions of that kind, and then I proposed a change of subject, and they got very agitated because you don't normally make such a big change. And then there are questions like "have you been working long enough at the new topic?" As I say, they gave me [Dirac], because there weren't many people around at the time. I don't know why they didn't give me Bondi. Lightman: Yes, why did they give you Dirac instead of Bondi? Sciama: I don't know. It's not that I can't remember. I wasn't privy to the discussion. They may have felt that since it was a slightly delicate matter — this big change — they ought to give me a very senior person. But I'm only guessing. Lightman: Dirac didn't really work in general relativity, did he? Sciama: Well, he had done things in cosmology, like the large number business.[6] And he had one something in general relativity. He had done this Hamiltonian theory for quantization purposes. It was all part of his theory of constraints in quantum mechanics, when you have theories with invariants. Electrodynamics is the first example, when you have gauge invanance. [It becomes] coordinate invariance in the relativity case. This gives rise to a lot of technical problems when you try and quantize. He had a whole theory of first-class constraints and second-class constraints designed to deal with that. Then he decided to apply that to general relativity. It was quite important work actually, in a way. Nothing like his greatest work, but it's very considerable. He found[7] a Hamiltonian for general relativity, as distinct from the Lagrangian. He tried to quantize it. And he wrote other papers on general relativity. So, while [general relativity] is obviously not the first thing you would think of with Dirac, he had done quite a bit. Maybe the mere fact that he was a major theoretical physicist was taken into consideration. But by the time I got Dirac, as I think I explained before, I had already worked out this Mach's principle thing that I wrote my thesis on.[8] So, he didn't particularly help me — not through any fault of his. But I did have access to him, and that was fascinating. Lightman: You mentioned steady state a moment ago. Obviously that was extremely important during this period. Can you tell me a little bit about why you were so attracted to the steady state theory? Sciama: I suppose because of its simplicity and predictive power. The big bang — even now, of course, we're struggling to understand the big bang. [I accept the big bang], although Fred Hoyle still doesn't. But I accept now that basically the big bang picture is clearly correct. But, it's a naturally very complicated physics that goes on near the bang. There were even questions like: can you be sure the laws of physics are the same in a changing universe. You see, there might be philosophical reasons for worrying about that. This was all part of the original discussion. Lightman: That was in the original papers. Sciama: Whereas it's at least reasonable to say that if the universe always has the same large-scale appearance, it's less of an assumption that the laws are unchanged. And there were various arguments of that kind. The whole picture you got of the universe was a rather simple, appealing one. And [the steady state theory] did have predictive power, and therefore that was good. All those things didn't mean I believed it, as it were, but just that it was so attractive that I felt in a small way to try and make it work. When hostile evidence started to appear, you weren't sure what to make of it. I remember writing various papers at the time and having arguments with Martin Ryle about whether the evidence against the steady state was good or not. It was worth trying to save [the steady state theory], but as the evidence mounted, there came a point where one couldn't. But the reason for supporting it was not, as I say, that it had to be right, but just that it was to me very attractive and the penalty of having creation of matter didn't seem to be such a terrific penalty. It was rather an interesting process to study. As they used to say at that time, [continuous creation of matter] is even less of a thing to introduce than the creation of a whole universe at one go. Lightman: Was that an argument that you talked about at that time? Sciama: I suppose. I recognized that the standard theory didn't in fact have a creation moment. What we later came to call the singularity was not well understood. But, I never felt then and I don't now feel so alarmed about outrageous proposals in physics, unless they're easily disposed of by experimental evidence. I never felt creation of matter was something disturbing. It was a rather interesting phenomenon, and the bang was obviously even more interesting. It was very remarkable. But I wasn't frightened by saying "let's not have a bang, let's have a steady, continuing process which is subject to physical investigation because it's repetitive." Lightman: You said that you felt that steady state had predictive power, and that appealed to you. Did you feel that it had more predictive power than the big bang model? Sciama: It did in some respects, because by denying the possibility of evolution of the average properties of galaxies, you could make much more specific predictions about, for instance, the number of sources as a function of redshift. Whereas, indeed as we all know now, the [big bang model] requires evolution. You don't just get a distribution of these quantities that is different from steady state because the metric of the universe is different. There is very strong evolution, which, of course, does occur. I accept that. But, from the point of view of making predictions, [in the steady state model] you are denied evolution, which would have many parameters. Then you can be very specific. So, that was certainly appealing in the sense of being useful. Then you decide very quickly, perhaps with luck, whether this proposal was reasonable or not, because you couldn't keep cheating every time there was hostile evidence. At first, you could worry about whether the evidence was accurate or not and so on, but you couldn't say "oh well, we’ll introduce this fudge factor and that fudge factor." Lightman: At this time, during the 1950s, when you did think about the big bang model, did you have any preference for a particular model in the big bang, say open versus closed or that kind of thing? Sciama: I did, and that was linked to my interest in Mach's principle, although this was never fully worked out. But, as did other people perhaps for similar reasons, I preferred the Einstein-de Sitter model, the one that only just expands forever, the k = 0 model. That's the Machian thing, because k, in the Newtonian analogue of these models, is the energy-kinetic plus gravitational. If the energy is due to gravitation, ala Mach, rather than having a kind of spontaneous existence, then at least it might seem as though it would be rather natural to have one [energy] balance the other. One made the other. Therefore, that would be the attractive model. But that turned out not to work later, because I had a student, Derek Raine, now a lecturer at Leicester University, who worked later on Mach's principle, producing a much better theoretical statement of the principle. The principle is a kind of boundary condition. He produced, as far as I'm concerned, still the best discussion of what boundary condition you're really groping for. But when he did that, he found that because of feedback effects in the different models, all the cosmological models of the Robertson- Walker type, with the exception of Minkowski, are Machian. Essentially, if you were to use technical language, you introduce a Green's function to tell you how much a particular piece of source influences the metric here. In relativity, that's got to be a functional of metric. It can't be a fixed quantity. I wrote a paper,[9] with others, which I was quite pleased with, in which I showed that general relativity could be written as an integral equation to represent the metric here as a sum of contributions from the energy momentum tensor everywhere. [That formulation] used a propagator or Green's function, which itself was a functional of metric but had certain structural properties that made it rather attractive. Derek Raine used that idea to make a Machian boundary condition. He has written an article[10] on this by the way. So, he used those ideas and generalized them a bit to say that if you want a Machian boundary condition in addition to the propagator, which is entirely implied by GR itself, you need some statement about boundary conditions somewhere. When he made the most Machian statement he could — a statement that I approved of — he then found that all the Robertson-Walker models except the empty one would count as Machian. Owing to the fact that the Green's function itself depended on the metric. If you chose a non-Einstein Sitter case, there would be adjustments. Lightman: To make itself consistent. Sciama: Each one was self-consistent. The sources were doing their job. The way they did their job was different in each case. I had to accept that, but it was disappointing. But, until that was done, I would have preferred the Einstein-de Sitter model. Lightman: I think the Brans-Dicke theory,[11] which partially incorporates Mach's principle through the scalar field, much more than general relativity, also allows all Roberton-Walker metrics (flat, open, and closed) for cosmology. Sciama: It probably does. I suppose, in a way, the Brans-Dicke theory was at least partly stimulated by my own writings. But I never quite liked that theory. I preferred to [incorporate Mach's principle] within GR [general relativity] if I could, rather than introducing extra fields. Of course, one now introduces extra fields for other purposes. They are very likely. But at that time, I didn't really quite like that. So when [the Brans-Dicke theory] ran into difficulty from observations, I wasn't sorry. I'm sure Bob Dicke was sorry. But I wasn't. Lightman: I know that he was certainly influenced by Mach's principle in designing that theory, and probably your work as well. Sciama: Well, also John Wheeler had seen my work and had written many things himself on it,[12] and we all influenced each other. I suppose of the three of us, I was slightly the first, but we all had different ways of incorporating the principle. Naturally, I like my way the best. But in the end, that hasn't been terribly successful. It all sort of went into the sand, I believe. Lightman: We have been talking about Mach's principle, which has been a theme of a lot of your work starting with your Ph.D. thesis. Do you remember why you got interested in Mach's principle in the first place? Sciama: I have a vague memory that I was thinking about other cosmological questions and steady state questions — how one could make a field theory of steady state. I remember one time writing an article or variation of the thesis that actually pointed out that the scheme I was developing was not consistent with Mach's principle. I then started to attack Mach's principle, [because] I wanted my scheme to be a good one. Then, at a certain moment, I got converted and said, "No, I've got it the wrong way around. The nice thing is Mach's principle, and I'm missing the point." Lightman: Why were you thinking about Mach's principle at all? I didn't know that that was something on people's minds at the time. Sciama: There is a simple answer to that. I probably picked up the idea from Bondi. Lightman: Was he discussing Mach's principle? Sciama: If you look at the Bondi-Gold paper[13] on steady state and you look at Bondi's very lovely book[14] on cosmology that came out in 1952, there was a lot about Mach's principle in both of them. You see, in the steady state, the idea was whatever makes Mach's principle work in the steady state would be happening all the time. So, the arrangement of the world let Mach's principle apply. Also, I went to a course of lectures Bondi gave on cosmology. In fact, I was telling him the other day — because I'm at the college here where he is master now — that I still have the notes from that course. His book came out a little later, but I would have heard about it from the course. I found the idea extremely attractive, and this has something to do with my psychology. I like simple ideas with very great power in physics — the idea that centrifugal forces and Newton's rotating bucket is mainly due to galaxies. As I have pointed out in my books,[15] the main contribution came from galaxies beyond what you can see with telescopes — suggesting that the whole universe acts one unit in this way. That seemed to me to be a mind-blowing idea, as one might say. I realized quite soon that most physicists thought I was not quite a crank, but at least peculiar. Despite the tradition of Mach and Einstein about Mach's principle, most of my contemporaries would have said it was a will of the wisp, a semi-crank [idea]. Yet, after all, the little calculations I did then would show that if an object accelerates towards you, it produces a 1/r force, just like an accelerating [electrical] charge does. Lightman: This is gravitational. Sciama: Gravitational. And you know very well that if you have a 1/r force, distant [sources] are more important than near ones. It's worse than Olber's paradox. It's no good saying it's cranky to talk about distant galaxies, they just dominate. You just do a sum of two lines, and they dominate. The other question is: do they dominate so completely that they do the whole job? That's the boundary condition problem. But, to me it was clear that you had to worry about that. It was no good saying this is cranky. If it's a long-range force, then distant [sources] dominate. As I say, it was the power and the sweep of the idea — the idea that the whole universe was acting as a mechanism. Indeed, my first book was called The Unity of the Universe.[16] That was my [belief]. That's why I liked [Mach's principle], once I learned the idea. And I was very disappointed when it all went into the sand. Lightman: Let me ask you about another project that you worked on somewhat later. Do you remember what motivated you to work[17] with Martin Rees on plotting the distribution of quasar redshifts versus intensities? Sciama: Oh yes! I have probably told Spencer [Weart] this. That was very funny. That was typical of a lot of my work, where the student really does it much better. At that time, the hostile evidence [against the steady state theory] was accumulating, but it was in the early days, and you could still try to save the steady-state theory. So I was tittling around with these various things. The microwave background had just been discovered. But at that stage you couldn't be sure it wasn't due to [things other than the big bang]. In fact, I wrote a paper[18] saying that there might be a type of radio source whose integrated radiation would mimic a black body spectrum over at least a limited range of wavelengths — which was all that could be measured at that time. Lightman: So you were defending the steady-state. Sciama: The idea was to defend the steady-state, and also I learned astrophysics in the process. It was an interesting thing for various reasons. I knew from the great battle between [Martin] Ryle and Hoyle about the radio source counts that questions of counts would be crucial, or might be crucial. Quasar data was beginning to come in during that period. Of course, quasars were just three years old or something. In fact, in 1965 was the great discovery by Maarten Schmidt of a quasar with a redshift of 2. So, I started plotting out the number of quasars as a function of redshift. Lightman: Why did you do that? Sciama: To see whether it agreed with the steady state. This relation between number and red shift is a unique prediction of steady state. You [don't have] to worry about whether [the quasars] evolve at different redshifts. So there was a specific formula, which I knew. I think it probably was in the original Bondi-Gold paper. Anyway, it was a known formula, a straight-forward formula. So, the question was: is there enough data accumulated to test this? You see, today there are far more people in the field, and this sort of thing would be done instantly. But at that time there were fewer of us, and therefore it still had to be done. So I plotted out the number-redshift relation. The way I do these things, it was sloppy. And lo-and-behold, it fit the steady state [prediction]. I remember going to Martin and saying "Martin, Martin, look. I have plotted out N [number] as a function of z [redshift] and the steady state is supported." Martin was then a research student of mine, with whom I discussed all the more astrophysical types of questions involving cosmology. He was always a bit skeptical about my enthusiasm for steady state. He is a very well balanced chap. He said, "well, I'll have a look at it," and he went away to have a look at it, and he did it better. Two days later — I forget how long it took him — he came back and said, "I've done it properly, and it's very bad for steady state. The [observed] relation is quite different [from that predicted by steady state.]" It was the same general kind [of relation] as what I was finding for the regular radio sources. I looked at what he'd done, and I agreed that he'd done it properly. That was the thing, as I probably told Spencer, that for me made me give up steady state. I wasn't prepared. You see, there was a conceivable let-out from people like Hoyle and [Geoffrey] Burbidge, who were then saying that quasars are local. I didn't like that — it was piling one thing on top of another. I have a bit of a conscience, somewhere along the lines, and I couldn't play that game. It really wasn't reasonable. So, I said "okay, the quasars are cosmological, and therefore this decides it." At that time, the blackbody thing was still debatable. So, for me at least — though not for most people... it was this study that was decisive, and I had a bad month giving up steady-state. Then, of course, Maarten Schmidt did a much better job,[19] and it's now always attributed to him, and I think quite rightly. He did a much better job of getting this evolution, about a year later - much better data and more details. But we were the first to actually point out that quasars evolve, so I'm quite proud of that. But, it was Martin, not me. Lightman: This is what convinced you? Sciama: That's what convinced me. Lightman: Martin Rees, and some others, brings up an interesting question: You have been the advisor of a number of students who have gone on to brilliant careers. Can you tell me a little bit about your approach to advising students? Sciama: Let me first say, as I probably said in my last interview [with Spencer Weart],[20] I always feel that I've been in a false position, particularly by being at Cambridge, and to some extent also in Oxford. We've had the best students in England, because of the structure in England. And so, if you have a very good student, you just sit back and let him go, and he does wonderful things, you see. So, that's what's happened in quite a numb~r of cases. My only role was enabling them to do relativity and cosmology. That required a certain structure and someone who is willing to take them on, but then they did their own thing. Lightman: Did you talk to them on a regular basis? Sciama: Oh yes. Well, let's say I'm the kind of person who suggests problems to people. A good example, actually, is Brandon Carter, who did some very important work[21] on the uniqueness of the Kerr solution and other such things. I remember saying to him one day early on when he was my student - and he still remembers this and he says he's grateful for it — I said to him, "Brandon, why don't you do axisymmetric collapse. I think there is a lot of richness and interesting [things there]." And he went away and did[22] axisymmetric collapse. [Sciama laughs] So, therefore, I provoked them a little bit in some cases. In Steve Hawking's case — as Steve himself has recorded now I think in his book[23] and elsewhere for the first year or two he was struggling for a good problem. At that time, in the more relativistic side of cosmology, as distinct from astrophysical, there wasn't too much to do that was] high-class. Then in 1965, Roger Penrose produced the singularity paper[24] — a bombshell, but for a star, a collapsing star. I know there are articles which credit me with saying one ought to look at the singularity theorems more generally. I can't honestly remember doing that. My memory is that Steve came to me one day and said "I can adapt Roger's arguments for the whole universe and get the singularity of the big bang." I said "Yes. Good. Do that." The last chapter of his thesis is his first singularity theorem.[25] Although, in fact, in an article[26] by George Ellis, Chris Clark and Frank Tipler, whom you may know, about the singularity theory, there is a footnote or something that says I insisted that people work on singularity theorems. Perhaps I did. I can't remember. But mainly, it's that they [my students] are gifted to that extent, and there are problems lying around worthy of their gifts, but "do-able." Lightman: Do you think about whether a problem is "do-able" before you suggest it to one of your students? Sciama: Well, I can't necessarily tell. In the case of axisymmetric collapse, it seemed to me that not much had been done on it. I think in the case of the uniqueness of Kerr, I can remember Hawking saying around the department, after [Werner] Israel's proof[27] of the uniqueness of the Schwarzschild [solution], that we should be able to do Kerr. That probably helped Brandon — who was already in that area because of my original suggestion — but I remember Steve saying that. I don't think I would have had the technical understanding to see that it was do-able. So, I regard it as a matter of sheer luck that I've been associated in a minor way with all these students. Lightman: Let me go back to the 1950s again, when you were here among the young Turks — Bondi, Gold, and Hoyle and so forth — and the steady state was in the air. Can you tell me a little bit about the general attitude in the larger community towards cosmology — cosmology in general, not steady state in particular. How did people regard cosmology? Sciama: Physicists regarded it very badly, I think. Physicists generally, and in particular particle physicists, would have said that [cosmology] is highly speculative — everything is uncertain. They were very scornful. I remember Murray Gellman was once a visitor at Cambridge, and he came to dinner — it must have been in the mid-1960s — and he said to me "there has been no progress in cosmology since Friedmann in 1922."[28] [Sciama laughs.] Generally, I think, it was then [regarded] as just speculation — not because of its intrinsic nature, but because of the lack of good observational evidence. [Cosmology] was not quite respected. Lightman: How would a general astronomer have regarded cosmology at that time? Sciama: I think an astronomer would not have had those particular feelings that the particle theorists did. Someone like Hubble was regarded as a great man. Astronomers would have been even more aware of the uncertainties of the data, but they would recognize it as a worthy enterprise, I suppose. The intellectual scorn was more characteristic of the particle theory-type of person. Lightman: What about an astronomical theorist who was not particularly aware of the observational problems? Sciama: An astronomical theorist would have been. Someone like Martin Schwarzschild, say, would have been enough of a general astronomer to know. Well, everybody tried to do things like decide the deceleration parameter, or even the value of the Hubble constant. It was known how uncertain those things were. But I don't think they would have felt, [not quite] the spite and the scorn, but the attitude that this was a low-grade activity that [is undertaken] by people who can't solve problems in particle physics. Astronomers didn't feel that because they were already astronomers. They might have had a few smiles at the passions with which cosmologists argued. But there wouldn't have been the contempt. I don't think contempt is too strong a word in those early days, among physicists. That changed, bit by bit, as the new era came in and particle physics [ideas] became important. Maybe we will talk about that later. [Things changed] particularly when, [for example, the physicists realized] that cosmologists could do much better than the particle physicists at restricting the number of neutrino types.[29] All that came in later. Then they [the physicists] had to admit that maybe the cosmologists have got something. Lightman: Do you think that's when physicists began taking cosmology seriously? Sciama: I believe so. Lightman: Grand unified theories,[30] and so forth? Sciama: Well, slightly earlier maybe than that, because the business of the number of neutrinos slightly predates that. That was perhaps the first sign that you could say something that couldn't be said just from particle physics]. A different example comes more from astronomy than cosmology, though it's linked up. Willie Fowler, who of course by now has won the Nobel Prize for nuclear astrophysics, came in to the subject through the influence of Fred Hoyle. It was partly the famous story about the level of carbon twelve. Here was Willie Fowler, a down-to-earth nuclear physicist at Caltech, being told by this madman that this crazy nonsense could tell him a specific level in a particular nucleus, which was only suspected to exist then by laboratory experiment. Then they do a careful experiment and find out it's there, bang on at the [predicted] energy. [Fowler] said, "it's fantastic that astronomy can do that." And it was taken seriously, and that was one of the major factors, plus the personal attitude, that brought Willie into the fold. Although that's astrophysics and not cosmology, there is a relation, because if you believe in the steady-state theory, you have to make heavy elements in stars. And that actually is one of the great selling points of the steady state theory. Now we know it's wrong. [But] it forced people like Fred to make elements in stars. That was very successful. So actually there is a link. The fact that Fred was studying that problem was directly due to the fact that steady state theory required [that elements be made in stars]. Do you know the old joke of Eddington about a hotter place? Lightman: No. Sciama: In early days, people had vague ideas that the elements had to be made by high-temperature nuclear reactions, and Eddington must have had some kind of primitive theory of this long before the supernova theory of Hoyle. People said to him that the stars he was dealing with weren't hot enough to do this job, and he said "then go and find a hotter place." But, in fact, there is a direct link back with cosmology, so Fred was working on these problems because steady state required some hot place, not the big bang, to make at least the major range of elements like carbon, etc. Supernovae were the obvious choice. And then Willie came into it for the reason I said. Lightman: I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you about your reactions to some recent theoretical and observational discoveries. As background for that, let me ask you I first, do you remember when you first heard about the horizon problem, the causality problem, or thought about it on your own? Sciama: Just about, because the person who wrote the key paper[31] on horizons is a great personal friend of mine, Wolfgang Rindler. Lightman: Yes, as I understand it [however], he didn't discuss the puzzle. He didn't raise the issue of why there is a problem with the current universe in that paper. Sciama: That's correct. Lightman: So, I want to ask you, when did you first hear that there was a problem with the current universe, that there are regions that are causally disconnected according to the big bang theory, and yet have the same temperature and the same properties, and so forth? Sciama: I do understand. I think that the answer to that question is that I am vaguely aware that [Robert] Dicke had raised[32] that point, but it was not in the forefront of, certainly, my consciousness until Alan Guth's paper.[33] Although the history of inflation is complicated. There were people[34] before Guth, who now never get mentioned, and that, I think, is not fair. But then we are not discussing that. Lightman: We will in a moment. Sciama: Okay. I am not very well informed about the fine details, but we can come to that in a moment. As far as I'm concerned, it was, in practice, [Guth's] paper which emphasized that [the horizon problem] had to be taken very seriously. And the business about the flatness. In fact, it was the flatness, perhaps, that Dicke had referred to[35] even more than the communication problem, the horizon problem. Maybe I'm getting them slightly confused. So, perhaps that was what I was referring to a moment ago... Lightman: Do you remember when you became aware of Dicke's discussion of that? Sciama: Well, I was vaguely aware of it because I knew him personally already by then — if only because of our mutual interest in Mach's [principle]. But it's not something I would have given a talk about or gone shouting about. It was just vaguely in my mind that he had said something at that time. Lightman: When you did become vaguely aware of it, did it worry you as a serious problem? Sciama: No, I don't think so. This was probably my concern with other matters or my lack of being smart enough to spot that it really was rather important. I would not have been in a position to say this is so important that I've got to tell people about it and worry about it. No. You're asking about me, and I'm not sure that I'm representative or not. Lightman: I'm just asking about you. Sciama: As far as I'm concerned, it was only very vague. I wouldn't have even known off-hand the formula you would use to show how the density parameter scales with time. I was just vaguely aware that [Dicke] had made some remarks that something was a bit worrisome. That's all that was in my mind. Lightman: You mentioned that you became much more aware of these problems [the horizon and flatness problems] after Guth's paper. When you read that paper, did you take these problems seriously in the sense that they were important problems that demanded solutions? How did you feel about them after Guth's work? Sciama: I do remember that I was a bit slow to appreciate the significance of what Guth had done — perhaps again because I had other things to attend to. When his paper came out, I glanced at it and I didn't say to myself, "ah, hah, here is a great breakthrough. Whether true or not we must attend to this thing." I didn't quite even know fully what it was all about. It was only a few months later, I suppose, when other people started talking a lot about it, that I said "ah, hah, I'm getting left behind, I better find out what this is all about." Then I either read his paper again or read something by Mike Turner or heard a talk, or something. I learned the stuff. I did my book work. Then, it all fell into place and I saw how potentially important it was. In fact, Guth came to the Royal Society in London for some meeting. He spoke, and at lunch I remember saying to him "do you realize that your inflationary epoch is just the steady state theory?" And he said, "What is the steady state theory?" He hadn't even heard of it. So that is just one of many reminders about culture gaps, or time gaps and culture gaps. So I explained to him the way the steady state theory worked. Even things now like the so-called "no hair" theorem, you see with de Sitter. Many, many of the ideas were just steady state, but only for this shortish [epoch], at this early time. I was very amused that it occurred in that way. Fred has recently tried to make more of it than is justified. Lightman: Yes, I saw a recent paper [of Hoyle's to that effect] in Comments on Astrophysics.[36] Sciama: Yes. In that sense, I could understand what Guth had done. Lightman: Once you understood the horizon and flatness problems, or thought about them more deeply, did they seem to you to be serious, fundamental problems? Sciama: Yes. Now we get on to slightly delicate ground because there is still a bit of debate about these things, and I'm one of those who thinks that inflation is getting a bit oversold. I'm sure Roger Penrose talked to you about that. Lightman: I want to ask you about inflation separately in a moment, but I just wanted to ask you now about these two particular problems: the flatness problem and the horizon problem — whether or not inflation ever arrived. Sciama: Yes, I think they are genuine problems, and the reason we weren't all worrying about [them] is partly because until recently there were so few people in the field. What was worked on or worried about at that time was it very sensitive function of who happened to be in the field and what their interests happened to be. It's the same when you look at the history of cosmology and black holes, where rather strange views were peddled by top people like Eddington. They only got away with that because there weren't an army of technically equipped people to say the correct thing and push him aside. It's interesting when a subject depends for its development on so few people that it depends on their individual attitudes and what interests them. Whereas when hundreds of people do it, you very rapidly get a kind of streamlined view. Now, there is a whole army [of researchers]. For any new idea about particle physics, there are hundreds of people ready to apply it to the early universe. In those days there were only a handful of us, you see, and if this handful hadn't paid attention to these problems, then they weren't in the literature or currently debated. I think that's the reason. I suppose once they are thoroughly pointed out to you and your nose is rubbed into it, then yes, they are very important problems. Whether inflation has solved them or not is a separate, technical question. But clearly they are important problems. Lightman: Putting aside inflation, do you have any view as to how the flatness and horizon problems might be solved? Sciama: There's a third problem that's also very important — and I agree with Roger Penrose that inflation doesn't solve it — and that's the smoothness. It's related to the horizon problem. One argument is that the early wrinkles get pulled out by inflation. But that is not a correct argument. What inflation does, if it works well, is provides a possibility for a transport process being slower than light to equilibrate different regions and remove temperature gradients. And that was all that was claimed originally. Then there was a kind of shift of view that came in almost surreptitiously, [which said] that, in addition, inflation already does the smoothing out for you automatically, because of pulling out the smaller scales to larger scales. But if the small scales are very rough and they're pulled out to larger scales, the larger scales are rough. Or, to put it more mathematically, given any state now with a regular differential equation, there's some early state that matched it. This point had been made earlier, in fact, by John Stewart, about [Charles] Misner's mixmaster model.[37] The same idea had been attempted: that, independent of the initial conditions, by mixing processes [you arrive at the present universe]. But it's strictly speaking not true. However, that's perhaps not what you wanted me to talk about. Lightman: That's certainly relevant. Let me ask you about inflation itself, since we have referred to that. You already mentioned the history. When the paper first came out, you were thinking about other things and it took you a few months to read it. What is your view about the inflationary model now, either in the original form or one of the derivatives of it? Sciama: Well, in the end I think it's turned out a bit disappointing. It was a marvelous idea. It had various difficulties, as you know. You referred to the various variants that were produced.[38] It's now in what I call a Baroque state. There are so many variations, and there is no formalism, there is no reasonable grand unified theory and a cosmological formalism that gives a scheme that really does all that is required of it. There are many sub cases. Half a dozen people in the field have produced their own variations. A related question has also ended up rather disappointing, and that's baryosynthesis, which would occur, perhaps, just after inflation. Again, it was a glorious idea, and again it has not worked out in a kind of definitive way. There are many variations of the possibilities. Perhaps this is the nature of scientific research. I'm not saying therefore the idea is wrong, but it's a mess at the moment. I do think that it is oversold by some of the pundits, who no doubt find it an advantage to them, being a highly regarded theory, and it has all these virtues. I do have to say I think it's oversold. But it's still potentially a marvelous idea we just need more particle physics first, to get a grand unified theory that we might have faith in. Lightman: Let me ask you a sociological question: Why do you think that the inflationary idea has caught on so widely? Sciama: Two reasons, I suppose. One is the very elegant link with the most advanced questions of particle physics. Cosmologists like me are happy that particle physics plays a key role, but also the particle physicists enter the arena. And partly that [inflation] doubly delivered what it advertised. To some extent it does. It solves great problems. Those are two perfectly adequate reasons. Plus, it's not every day that there is a great new idea in cosmology. [There is the] fighting for recognition. So therefore people jump at it. And that's fine. It's only if then it's oversold, it's a shame. One ought to be rational. Lightman: Let me ask you about an observational discovery. Do you remember when you first heard about the work[39] of Geller, de Lapparent, and Huchra on the bubble-like structure of the distribution of galaxies? That was a few years ago. Sciama: Yes. Lightman: How did you react to that work? Sciama: I was very excited. That seems to me extremely important. I’ve talked to Margaret Geller about it. She visited Trieste where I work mainly now, and she spoke to the summer school I was organizing. She was saying quite rightly that the irregularities she's finding. [continue] to the largest length scale that she observes, and therefore why shouldn't it go on forever, and maybe the whole idea of a homogeneous universe is lousy. Lightman: How do you feel about that? Sciama: I said to her afterwards, over a meal, "look Margaret, there is one constraint that you have got to recognize, and that is the isotropy of the microwave background. If you put too much irregularity on too large a scale you conflict with that, and that's therefore an overall constraint, although it doesn't come in at 100 megaparsecs." Lightman: Unless our interpretation of that is wrong. Sciama: She said "what would you do if we go on making the studies, and we keep finding this effect, let's just say out to 1,000 megaparsecs?" I said, "Well, that would be the most devastating thing in physics and astrophysics. I don't know what I would do." There is no obvious, easy way out. To say we've totally misinterpreted the microwave background ... We considered that in the early days. There were jokes that if it's so isotropic, that's because your box which is measuring the thing is isotropic. But by now, it would be very, very difficult to reconcile a bumpy universe on a scale of 1,000 megaparsecs with the isotropy of the microwave background. Lightman: Does that worry you? Did that worry you? Sciama: No. I therefore feel confident that the universe has to smooth itself out on that scale. Obviously you can ask me a hypothetical question: "What would you do if it didn't?" But that would just be a crisis in physics. It's silly to speculate. Lightman: No, I don't want to ask you that hypothetical question. I would rather ask you about what your attitude is right now about the thing. Sciama: Well, my attitude is that it's an extremely important discovery because, of course, galaxy formation has to be understood. And it's related to the nature of the dark matter that we haven't talked about — how galaxies form and so forth. It was totally unexpected from a theoretical point of view. Therefore, it's a very, very important scientific discovery. Lightman: I gather from what you have just said, though, that it doesn't shake your belief in the large-scale homogeneity. Sciama: Well, fortunately, up to the scale that's now been found, it wouldn't conflict with the isotropy, although it's interestingly coming close to it. Lightman: A factor of five or six or something [in distance]. Sciama: That's right, and there are plans afoot to improve the measurements of the isotropy another factor of ten. If they don't find anything then, that would also be worrying, even from other points of view. Just structures you can see in the sky would then work at the one in a million level. Therefore, I'm confident they will find something. I think that's reasonable. But if not, then we will have this crisis. So, I just have to suppose that they have almost reached the limit [where the two types of observations are consistent]. It's a numerical matter. Obviously, there is some lumpiness on the scale of 1,000 megaparsecs. It's a matter of the numbers. But I would suppose that you wouldn't find the same effect [inhomogeneities in the distribution of galaxies] at a much larger scale. Perhaps a bit larger, but not ten times larger. So, I'm not worried about this. I'm very much excited because it's got to be understood. Lightman: You mentioned the dark matter. I guess there are two kinds of dark matter: there is the dark matter that we know is there, that takes omega from .01 to .1; and then there is the missing matter that would have to be there if inflation is right, that takes omega from 0.1 to 1. What is your belief in that range of possibilities? Sciama: Well, as a matter of fact, there is an argument going on at the moment between two of my old students, — George Ellis and Martin Rees — as to whether inflation does require an omega of 1. That's a rather technical matter, and I don't want to go into that. But the statement that [inflation] requires omega close to 1 is at least up for argument. Lightman: I see. Sciama: But let us suppose for the purpose of this discussion that inflation does require that. Then, of course, we have to identify that matter. But we still [also] have to identify the matter in galactic haloes. If you are just asking me about my view of the present position, I don't have a particularly individual view. We all agree that any proposal made never seems to work out quite nicely. In fact, just recently, with some colleagues, I have shown[40] that a particular candidate can probably been ruled out because of the supernova in the Magellanic cloud. This is the case of certain super symmetry particles, like photinos, if they have low mass, like 100 eV or something. They've been very seriously considered as candidates [for the missing mass]. I liked [those particles] for various reasons, such as when they decayed and made photons, these photons might show up in astronomy. I've written a number of papers about that recently.[41] But we've just shown that the neutrino data from the supernova and the energetics involved in that and in the neutron star that formed in the supernova — using the very latest ideas about the coupling between photinos and nucleons — can rule out the existence in nature of these [hypothesized] low-mass photinos. Otherwise, the supernova would radiate more energy than it could tolerate in that form. So that's a particular candidate that's gone. Then, of course, with the recent upper limit on the electron-type neutrino mass, both from the lab and from the supernova, [that neutrino] almost certainly can't be responsible [for the missing mass]. There are still candidates left, but I think perhaps the best candidate is the tau-type neutrino. Or a GeV mass photino. Lightman: Something that we have the least data on. Sciama: Well, strictly speaking, I believe that neutrino hasn't yet been detected, although there was a claim from CERN some while ago that, at last, it had. But I think that claim is not substantiated. I'm not seriously suggesting that it doesn't exist. Anyway, it's certainly not clear. Lightman: I gather that since you're not necessarily a strong proponent of inflation, you are not convinced that this missing matter has to be there. Sciama: With an omega of one? Lightman: Yes. I don't want to state your position; I'm just trying to understand it. Sciama: No, I take inflation very seriously. I was only saying — it's an objective fact, I think — that the theory is in a bit of a mess. That is objective. But some form of inflation may very well be correct. It's a marvelous idea. Whether it requires omega as 1, I'm still trying to join in this argument with my colleagues, and I'm not completely sure. I don't want my view to go on record, with two of my good friends next. No, seriously, if there were a decisive argument I would accept it. And, linking with our earlier discussion, since I can no longer claim that [the universe] has to be Einstein-de Sitter [flat] because of Mach, there is no requirement for omega being one. Therefore, it is an open question. Of course, there might be other reasons we don't yet understand why omega equals one. It's a nice thing from the point of view of theoretical physics. So I would be very happy with an omega of one on these vague grounds of fundamental theoretical-physics. It's great fun looking for a form of the dark matter, although equally you have to worry about galactic haloes anyway. Lightman: Yes, we know that's there. Sciama: We know that is there even though, in that case too, it's sometimes been slightly exaggerated how much there is. But I think even the skeptics agree that there is some [dark matter] there. We have to make this identification [of the dark matter], and that's still an unsolved problem. It's very embarrassing. Lightman: How do you feel that theory and observations have worked together in modern cosmology, let's say in the last 15 or 20 years? Sciama: I think extremely well. One example, which I mentioned, is this business about the number of neutrino types. It fits almost too well. If you take the present abundances of the helium-4 and the other light elements and do the theory of it and so on and worry about the neutron half-life, which isn't quite as well in line, you still find that you are only allowed three or four neutrino types. Whether it's 3 or 4 even depends on what you take as the errors of the observation. In particular, a very good friend of mine, Bernard Pagel, who has got the latest measurement of the helium abundance, puts a very low error on his work - and is, perhaps, a little optimistic about that — but he insists that you can't even have 4 neutrino types. Also, you can't have a low mass photino, unless there are tricks for suppressing it. If you don't suppress it, you can't even be allowed that. When this was first realized, the best limit from the lab on the number of neutrino types was several thousand. Now, with the data from CERN on the Z0 particle, it's down to about five. But that, by the way, was one of the things that, I believe, made the particle physicists take cosmology seriously — the fact that we could, ahead of them, make a very stringent constraint on this number. We really stuck our neck out, and then when they do the necessary experiment with their best equipment they get the same result. Now amazingly, as I am sure you know, the supernova, from the same kind of argument about how much energy is emitted, limits the number of neutrino types to perhaps five or six. So all this involves observations of all different kinds — both particle physics and astronomical. It all fits together. I think that's very remarkable. I don't know if that is the kind of thing you had in mind when you asked me. It's not the same as things like great big bubbles and so on, but it's a cosmological thing which involves a variety of arguments — from measuring helium abundances in compact galaxies, to measuring the half-life of a neutron, to measuring things about the Z0 particle, to measuring neutrinos from a supernova. Everything fits together in a consistent way. Lightman: Let me ask you this. Some of modern cosmology in recent years has extrapolated backwards in time to very close to the big bang. What is your attitude about those theoretical extrapolations? Do you think that they are justified? Do you think that's a good way we should be working right now in cosmology? Sciama: Well, I think asking "is it justified?" is not quite the same question as "is it a good way to proceed?" I think it's a good way to proceed, because we have got to proceed in some ordered way. Justifying it would mean I can try and argue and say you've got to do this. Clearly you can extrapolate back to the [period of] nuclear reactions. I know that you are talking about much earlier. Lightman: Much earlier, yes. Sciama: And it's clear that if, say, Linde's ideas[42] are right, where you get these different domains and so on, you might not extrapolate the simplest Robertson-Walker system right back to a very early [time]. But that's part of this kind of theory — whether this domain structure occurs or not. You can't say, "Okay, things got hot enough to make helium, but we won't discuss what it was like when it was hotter or denser." You've got to extrapolate back. Something unexpected or something you overlooked may occur, but this is the nature of the business, at least in astrophysics and cosmology. You proceed by making a natural extrapolation unless you have a strong reason for not doing so. Steady state would say I have another reason, which I bring in, which prevents me going to the densest state, but then if you have a good point to make you are allowed to consider that as an alternative. If that is not present, then of course you would say density, temperature, time relations are so and so in the simplest models; they would imply such and such parameters in the early stages, and that's important to the particle physics. So all that must be done. If you can actually find an explanation of why there is more mater than anti-matter in that process, it's fantastic. Clearly one must proceed that way. Lightman: You have mentioned some of this already, but let me ask you what you consider to be the major outstanding problems in cosmology right now? Sciama: I suppose it depends a bit if you are more interested in astrophysics or fundamental physics. For your fundamental physics — and I'm only saying what everybody says — the essential vanishing of the cosmological constant, because the grand unified theory type of discussion will rather naturally throw out a cosmological constant of 10120 times bigger than any value you have astronomically. With the possible exception of last week's paper on superstrings, which attempts to claim that their particular model gives you a zero cosmological constant, it's completely not understood why that fine tuning occurs. So I think — and I agree with what everybody says — from the point of view of fundamental physical theory, the [problem in] cosmology that is the most glaringly obvious and outstanding is [the question of the vanishing of the cosmological constant]. If you think more astronomically, there is a clutch of problems. Some of them are quite old, like is the universe going to expand forever or collapse or what? That is clearly still not settled. The nature of the dark matter is not settled. The way galaxies form is not settled. We don't even know, observationally, the ultimate scale of [the universe]. I would have said all of those are important problems. Plus the problems that inflation aims to solve. I don't know that there is one outstanding problem. That whole group of problems would be high on everybody's list. In the case of the cosmological constant, one could say that fundamental physicists would feel that is the key. The fact that they can't explain as simple a thing as that means that their grandest theories are still hopelessly missing something, in spite of all the things they might do. But, astronomically speaking, this whole set of problems is about equal in importance. I think most people would say the same. Lightman: Let me end with a couple of philosophical questions. Here you might have to put some of your scientific caution aside a little bit. If you could design the universe any way that you wanted to, how would you do it? Sciama: Can I first answer evasively? I have a view, which I am giving a talk on here in Cambridge in a couple of weeks, and I talked about at a meeting on the anthropic principle. I have a view which by-passes that question. So let me explain it to you, very briefly. The problem of course, as the phrase anthropic principle indicates, is that the universe has to be very fine-tuned to bring about the possibility of intelligent life and human beings, or if you like, myself. That is probably not controversial at all. The controversy is: what is the significance of that [statement]? Very rapidly, there seem to me three possibilities. The one I favor relates to your question. The first is just chance, which I think is really unpalatable. You can't disprove it. The second is purposiveness, or God or something. God exists and regards us as the highest point of creation. He wants us to come about, so he fine-tuned the universe to make jolly sure that we came about. And I find that unpalatable, although many people accept that. And then there is the third proposal, which I didn't invent, but I favor very much. Incidentally, Brandon Carter, when he was working with me, did one of his early, very influential things[43] on the anthropic principle. [According to this third proposal], there are many disjoint universes, where the laws and constants of nature are different from one to another. In fact, I would put it even stronger: any logically possible universe exists, not just for anthropic reasons. Of course the anthropic theory clearly [leads just to the type of universe] we're in. Lightman: Yes, the anthropic principle singles out the universe we're in. Sciama: And the whole problem is trivial. But there is another reason why I favor all these universes. People might say to me, "what about Ocam’s razor? You're crazy." But, on the other hand, I believe that [this third proposal] in a sense satisfies Ocam’s razor, because you want to minimize the arbitrary constraints which you place on the universe. Now, if you imagine all these logically possible universes, then you've got to think there is a committee, or maybe just a chairperson, who looks at this list and says "well, we're not going to have that one, and we won't have that one. We'll have that one, only that one." Now, that could have happened, but it seems to me a remarkable thing that that happened. It's much more satisfying to say that there is no constraint on the universe. All logically possible cases are realized, and we're in one of the few that allow us. So, that's not quite answering your question, but I prefer to say it that way. Lightman: That is an answer. Let me ask you this question: It could turn out, could it not, that when we find a theory of everything — if such a theory is possible — we will discover that there is only one way that the universe could have been formed, consistent with most general notions of relativity theory and quantum theory. That is a possibility, isn't it? Sciama: I would put it slightly differently. In my view, relativity wouldn't hold in some of these universes, or quantum theory wouldn't hold, as long as they're logically possible. Now there is a possibility, which is an extension of what you have asked and which I believe Spinoza advocated, which is that there is only one logically possible universe, period. Lightman: If that were the case, then one wouldn't have all these different branches involved with your third possibility. Sciama: That's correct. I mentioned that in an article I've written on my talk[44] at Venice, so I recognize that that would be a very attractive [possibility] in a way, and yet it doesn't solve this problem, because it's still puzzling why the one logically possible [world] should be just the one that has the fine-tuning that leads to us. That is still unexplained, although it is possible that there is this unique case, right? Lightman: Yes, so that would then go into the same as your first category: that [our universe] is an accident. Sciama: Yes, it's still an accident that the one logically possible case has this very remarkable structure — that doesn't seem to be part of what goes into showing that it's logically possible. Lightman: So you prefer the third possibility? I asked you which universe would you design. You would prefer the third case, where there are many different logically possible universes and there are no constraints, and we happened to be in one of those that allows life. Sciama: Could I add [something], in case you or anyone would think that this is an untestable proposal. It's not like Linde's chaotic inflation.[45] He has something a bit like that, but where [the regions with different physical properties] are all part of this universe. [In the possibility I have mentioned], these would really be disjoint universes. So people might say, "If it's disjoint and there is no way you get a message from it, what are you talking about? It's empty." Now, the whole point is it's not empty, and I make a prediction which is testable. So let me just explain this very rapidly to give some sort of [idea]. Lightman: Go ahead. I want to check the tape, but I have another, so talk as long as you wish. Sciama: Except that we ought to go for coffee at some point or I will fade out. Let's consider all the cases which do lead to me. Now we would not expect that we're in a very special one of those. All I know is that I exist, and I'm happy enough with that. If the universe is unique, however, you might expect a very special initial condition, and Roger Penrose and differently Steven Hawking have both made proposals[46] for the special initial conditions, which I'm sure you know. Lightman: Yes. Sciama: Now my view, or my prediction — and I'm very proud of this sentence which more or less ends my talk — my prediction is that Penrose is wrong and Hawking is wrong, because if there are these other universes, and ones very close to ours, equivalent to ours, then we should be in a generic universe of the set that could lead to me. Therefore, I would not expect a beautiful, elegant, mathematical ersatz, like the Penrose one or the Hawking one, to apply to the initial universe. The initial conditions would be messy, but not too messy, or I [life] wouldn't emerge. But a bit messy. Therefore, when you do a measurement, in principle, of the initial conditions — and in Roger's case you can even make it the isotropy of the background because his statement that the Weyl tensor vanishes at the origin of the universe makes the universe isotropic, and in Steve's case it may be a bit more complicated — I would predict them to be messy, and not describable by a simple, mathematical, elegant statement. Lightman: You would predict that [the initial conditions] would be as messy as possible and still allow life. Sciama: Of course, to make real sense of that you need a measure theory of metrics, and that measure theory is very difficult and hasn't yet been achieved, so I can't do a technical job on this at the moment, but the fact that I make a physical prediction means that there is physics in my proposal. It's not just empty metaphysics. Lightman: If you have a measure of what messiness is and uniqueness is and what a generic metric is, and all of that, if you can make some quantitative measure of that. Sciama: That's right. So if you measure the early anisotropy and it's so and so — delta T over T is some number — does that favor me or [Penrose]. Lightman: You would also have to know what range of anisotropy would allow life, to know whether you have the generic amount of anisotropy, which you are sort of in the middle. Let's suppose that at the Planck time, delta T over T has to be less than a certain value to allow life. You have to know what the value is. Sciama: That's right. Lightman: So you are saying that in principle, what you are saying is testable. Sciama: That's good enough for the moment. My proposal, therefore, is a proposal of physics. That's the idea. Lightman: There is a place in Steve Weinberg's book, The First Three Minutes, where he says that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.[47] Sciama: I remember. Lightman: Have you ever thought about this question of whether the universe has a point? Sciama: I have thought about it, and I can't think of any point it has. It's the old question about why there is something rather than nothing. In fact, Sidney Coleman has written a recent paper[48] called “Why there is Nothing Rather than Something”, referring to the cosmological constant. If you're going to have some logically possible cases, even one, you ought to have the whole lot. But why have any? I find that quite inscrutable. Of course, the very concept of a meaning is perhaps too anthropomorphic. I don't know. But I have nothing to contribute to that. Obviously I have thought about it, but I have nothing to contribute. Lightman: Your explanation number two for your anthropic idea was not unrelated to this. Sciama: But it doesn't really explain. I'm allowing that when I talked in Venice, I permitted that as a conceivable explanation. In fact, it was a Jesuit astronomer who spoke after me, and he said "I am prepared to have all Sciama's universes. I don't mind that these days. But there is God in all of them." But as far as I'm concerned, I'm afraid — and I'm not a professional here — the word "God" is just a word. When this Jesuit spoke after me, he knew so much about God. It was amazing. God was a person, he said. So we have to say "he," "she" or "it," because those are the only personal pronouns in English — not just that God was some force that made the world, it was a person. How can he possibly know such things? It's ridiculous. As far as I'm concerned, it's just a word, and I sometimes argue with my friends and I jokingly say, "Suppose I asked you does the "spongula" exist?" In other words, using a word doesn't mean that there is something that correlates with it. If you had — and this is a schoolboy argument — if you had a concept of something that made the world, and it was needed in order that the world be made, then who made that person or thing or whatever it was, and so on. These are old, standard arguments, but they still have force as far as I'm concerned. It's true that people have, internally, a religious feeling, which they use the word God to express, but how a feeling inside of you can tell you that a thing made the whole universe? There is no relation between the two matters of concern. Therefore, while I'm prepared for and I can't rule out that there is another order of structure than ordinary matter, I know nothing about that order. There could be many orders, and so on. Therefore, the word God just doesn't denote any structure. Lightman: That's a good place to end the interview.
1098	dbpedia	0	92	https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/the-origin-of-inertia/83250283	en	The Origin of Inertia	https://cdn.slidesharecd…t=640&fit=bounds	https://cdn.slidesharecd…t=640&fit=bounds	[ "https://public.slidesharecdn.com/images/next/svg/logo/slideshare-scribd-company.svg?w=128&q=75 1x, https://public.slidesharecdn.com/images/next/svg/logo/slideshare-scribd-company.svg?w=256&q=75 2x", "https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/85/The-Origin-of-Inertia-1-320.jpg 320w, https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/85/The-Origin-of-Inertia-1-638.jpg 638w, https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/75/The-Origin-of-Inertia-1-2048.jpg 2048w", "https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/85/The-Origin-of-Inertia-2-320.jpg 320w, https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/85/The-Origin-of-Inertia-2-638.jpg 638w, https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/75/The-Origin-of-Inertia-2-2048.jpg 2048w", "https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/85/The-Origin-of-Inertia-3-320.jpg 320w, https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/85/The-Origin-of-Inertia-3-638.jpg 638w, https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/75/The-Origin-of-Inertia-3-2048.jpg 2048w", "https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/85/The-Origin-of-Inertia-4-320.jpg 320w, https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/85/The-Origin-of-Inertia-4-638.jpg 638w, https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/75/The-Origin-of-Inertia-4-2048.jpg 2048w", "https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/85/The-Origin-of-Inertia-5-320.jpg 320w, https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/85/The-Origin-of-Inertia-5-638.jpg 638w, https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/75/The-Origin-of-Inertia-5-2048.jpg 2048w", "https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/85/The-Origin-of-Inertia-6-320.jpg 320w, https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/85/The-Origin-of-Inertia-6-638.jpg 638w, https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/75/The-Origin-of-Inertia-6-2048.jpg 2048w", "https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/85/The-Origin-of-Inertia-7-320.jpg 320w, https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/85/The-Origin-of-Inertia-7-638.jpg 638w, https://image.slidesharecdn.com/physics-171203131751/75/The-Origin-of-Inertia-7-2048.jpg 2048w" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2017-12-03T13:17:51+00:00	The Origin of Inertia - Download as a PDF or view online for free	en	https://public.slidesharecdn.com/_next/static/media/favicon.7bc3d920.ico	SlideShare	https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/the-origin-of-inertia/83250283	1. THE ORIGIN OF INERTIA physics.fullerton.edu /~jimw/general/inertia/ It's thought by some folks these days that the cause of inertial reaction forces isn't yet really understood, or that they have just succeeded in figuring out the explanation for these forces in terms of their new theory. These views are mistaken. The cause of inertial reaction forces has been understood to be the action of gravity for quite some time now. Back in 1953 Dennis Sciama showed that gravity could account for inertial reaction forces as long as the interaction of local stuff with the gravity field of distant matter was like the interaction of electric charges and currents with the electromagnetic field. It turns out, as a matter of fact, that this is true in general relativity theory, but it took a while to show this. (It was done by D.J. Raine back in the very early 1980s: Reports of Progress in Physics, 44, 1151-1195 [1981].) The full-blown argument is rather formal and a bit daunting, but it's easy to see that gravity causes inertia in a simple little argument modeled on that presented by Sciama back in 1953. You may remember from an undergraduate course in electricity and magnetism that the electric field of an electric charge can be represented by something called a "scalar potential" -- a "function" that assigns a single number to each point in space so that when the "gradient" of the function (the spatial rate of change of the function) is computed you get back the electric field strength (a vector quantity with magnitude and direction). Formally this looks like: (1) E is the electric field strength, the gradient "operator", and is the electric potential. This relationship, however, is only true for "static" electric fields: fields produced by electric charges that are all at rest and stay that way. When electric charges are in motion -- that is, when electric currents are present -- the electric field has to be modified to include a term that takes account of the motion of the charges. The electric field becomes: (2) c in the added term is the speed of light. is the rate at which something called the "vector potential", A, is changing. The vector potential is usually associated with the magnetic field ( B) created by electric currents (electric charges in motion). Indeed, things are set up so that the "curl" of the vector potential (a measure of its "vorticity") is equal to the magnetic field strength. But it also contributes to the electric field, as above, when things are changing. The way in which these "scalar" and "vector" potentials are computed is straight-forward, at least in principle. You just add up the contributions due to all the electric charges in the universe at any point in space and time you're interested in. The "sources" of the scalar electric potential are just the charges themselves; the sources of the vector potential are the currents produced by the motion of the electric charges. More distant electric charges and currents, of course, have a smaller effect than nearby sources, so the charges and currents have to be divided by the distance to them before they are added together. The vector potential, written out in terms of its sources, looks like: (3) , the volume integral of ( ), just means sum up the contributions, at some location, of the stuff inside the parentheses at all points in space. is the electric charge density times its velocity (v), that is, the electric current density. And r is the distance of the current being considered to the point where the potential is being computed. An important point should be noted here. The time taken for the influence of the current at some point to get to the place where the potential is being calculated must be kept track of. In general, the influences of charges and currents are not felt instantly over large distances. The scalar potential, by the way, is: 1/7 2. (4) It's noteworthy that if the density of the charge is uniform throughout space, then the most distant charge dominates the potential. Although its influence decreases with r, its amount goes up as . This is unimportant in electrodynamics, because the mean charge density in space is essentially zero. That's not true in gravity. Now if gravity behaves like electromagnetism, we can simply hijack the mathematical formalism of electromagnetism in order to calculate gravitational effects. This isn't always true. But for the simple case we're going to consider it is. We look at a "test particle", a massive object that's so small that it doesn't disturb any of the stuff it finds itself in. It's located in a universe much like ours, but to keep things simple we assume that everything in the universe, other than the test particle, is smeared out smoothly throughout space. We now let our test particle move along a straight line in this stuff and ask: What is the force of gravity on the test particle due to the rest of the stuff? In general, both "gravito-electric" and "gravito-magnetic" fields, the gravitational counterparts of electric and magnetic fields, may act. In this case, however, the gravito-magnetic field itself doesn't act, so we can ignore it. The reason why is that the rest of the stuff out there doesn't "circulate", so the "curl" of the vector potential vanishes. (Taking the curl of a vector field consists of adding up its contributions keeping track of the way they point along a closed path in space. If the field has no circulation, the non-zero contributions from one part of the path will be canceled by contributions from some other part of the path. This is illustrated in the accompanying Figure.) Since the gravito-magnetic field is equal to the curl of the vector potential, the gravito-magnetic field disappears too. Another way of looking at this is to note that each particle of the stuff moving past the test particle produces a gravito-magnetic field at the test particle. But when we add up all of the gravito-magnetic fields at the test particle the sum is zero because the field due to one part of the current is canceled out by the field due to another part of the current owing to its symmetry. Gravito-magnetic forces per se may not act in this case, but we can't get rid of the effects of the vector potential. The gravito-electric field is given by Equation (2) above, and it has the term involving the rate of change of the vector potential in it. So we have to figure out what the vector potential is at the test particle. That's Equation (3) with the electric charge density replaced by the gravitational "charge" density , where is now the mass density and G is Newton's constant of universal gravitation. The summation of the effects of the matter currents everywhere in space is done using the standard technique of integration. Sciama noted that before the integral is computed, the velocity can be removed from the calculation of the integral. His justification for doing this was that it appears that the universe is moving rigidly from the point of view of the test particle. As a result, in the frame where the test particle is at rest we can assign the velocity - v to every part of the universe at any instant. Since v in this frame of reference is independent of location (and thus independent of r) it can be treated as a constant and removed from the integration. When v is removed from the integration in Equation (3), the remaining expression to be computed turns out to be the computation that gives the scalar potential. If we ignore factors of the order of one (like ), then this integration yields GM/R. M and R are the mass and radius of the observable universe, and accordingly GM/R is the scalar gravitational potential due to all of the matter in the universe, . Consequently, in these circumstances we have: (5) up to constant factors of the order of one anyway. Now we examine Equation (2), taking it to be the gravito- electric force, to find out what force our test particle experiences. We note immediately that since is the same everywhere (the test particle, by assumption, is too small to louse this up), vanishes. Since is what we normally think of as the origin of gravitational forces, we see that our normal intuition about gravity contributes nothing to inertia. This means that if gravity is to account for inertia, it must be the vector potential part of the gravito-electric force that does the trick. To see if this will work all we have to do is put A from Equation (5) into Equation (2) (and set 2/7 3. equal to zero): (6) Since , being a constant, doesn't depend on time we can write: (7) Now when the test particle is moving with constant velocity E vanishes because is zero -- just as we expect should be true. But if an external force makes the test particle accelerate, then isn't zero and the distant matter in the universe produces a gravito-electric force on the particle that opposes the accelerating force. If (together with the other constant factors of order unity that we've ignored) are just equal to one, then the gravito-electric field strength E is precisely the right strength to account for inertial reaction forces. If you go read Sciama's 1953 paper, you'll find that this also works for rotation and "centrifugal" forces. You may be wondering: Well, all of this is fine, but maybe we don't have to take the effects of gravito-magnetism and the vector potential seriously. Perhaps they're so minute they can be ignored. Turns out that that's not true. As Ken Nordtvedt pointed out in 1988 [International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 27, 1395-1404], gravito- magnetic effects must be taken into account in even the simplest planetary orbit calculations. Only a moment's reflection is needed to see that this must be right. From Newtonian mechanics we know that the gravitational force acting on a planet must act along the instantaneous line of centers of the planet and the Sun if an elliptical orbit is to be recovered. (That is, the force exerted by the Sun must propagate to the planet instantaneously. This fact is the reason why Newtonian gravitation is called an "action-at-a-distance" force. Newton privately thought this preposterous; but he never found a way around it.) If relativity is right, then the gravito-electric field (i.e., Newtonian gravity) must propagate at the speed of light, and the corresponding gravitational force on the planet wouldn't point along the instantaneous line of centers. So, if the gravito-magnetic contribution to the total force weren't included, the force of the Sun on the Earth, for example, would point in the wrong direction and its orbit wouldn't be elliptical. (Nordtvedt arrives at this conclusion by a variant of this argument. He shows that the motion of a test particle around the Sun is elliptical for an observer at rest with respect to the Sun. In this frame of reference the field is stationary and everywhere points toward the Sun at all times, so the force is always along the instantaneous line of centers. If the observer moves with respect to the Sun [for example, with the planet], however, and doesn't take into account the gravito-magnetic vector potential, the predicted orbit "blows up". [This example is a neat illustration of the fact that "coordinate transformations" in general relativity theory are equivalent to "gauge" transformations in electrodynamics. The observer at rest with respect to the Sun is effectively in the Coulomb gauge, and the one moving with the planet in the Lorentz gauge.]) Despite the widespread belief that they're inconsequential, gravito-magnetic effects are real, and often large. [Nordtvedt's formal argument in his IJTP article makes it very easy to show that general relativity theory leads to precisely the same result as Sciama's little calculation. I show this in, "Nordtvedt's Remarks on Gravitomagnetism", in case you're interested. The formalism involved is no more daunting than that we've already used.] When Raine showed that Sciama's argument was true for all realistic universes in general relativity theory, the gravitational origin of inertial forces (that is, Mach's principle) ceased to be an area of active work for more than a decade. Some subtleties attendant to Mach's principle, however, weren't fully appreciated and worked out in the 1970s. They began to attract attention in the early 1990s. Some of them are related to the business of transient mass fluctuations. So I'll tell you a bit about them. Be prepared. They're pretty weird. THE SUBTLETIES Problems arise when we ask how, in detail, inertial reaction forces are produced by the distant matter in the cosmos. The foregoing argument may leave you with the impression that the distant matter in the universe generates a vector potential field throughout space that acts on bodies immediately when external forces cause them to accelerate. This notion is reinforced by the Image of the rigid relative motion of the universe invoked by Sciama to justify removing v from the calculation of the integral in computing the vector potential. All of this, however, is a bit misleading. The principle of relativity tells us that real physical influences that are involved in accelerations and the transfer of energy must propagate with finite speed -- namely, at or less than the speed of 3/7 4. light. If all of the contributions to A that are responsible for any inertial reaction force an object experiences propagate at the speed of light, it would seem that the currents that generate A for any particular acceleration episode must have happened in the very distant past. We are then left with the question: How did the stuff out there in the distant past know that we would try to accelerate, say, our car at any specific instant and, in the distant past, move in just the right way to launch the right A field in our direction? You may be inclined to think that this is some sort of trick question intended to set you up somehow. It's actually a very serious, rather profound problem. Inertial reaction forces are instantaneous; there's no doubt whatsoever about that. When you push on something, it pushes back on you immediately. If they're caused chiefly by the most distant matter in the universe, how can that be? Only three answers to this question seem to be available: 1. Relativity notwithstanding, the force really is propagated instantaneously. The occurrence of so-called "non-local" interactions in quantum phenomena (reported even in the popular press of late) might make such a scheme seem plausible. 2. Some sort of a local field, maybe not our A field, is really the cause of inertia. 3. When you push on an object a gravitational disturbance goes propagating off into either the past or the future. Out there in the past or future the disturbance makes the distant matter in the universe wiggle. The wiggling stuff out there makes up the currents that cause disturbances to propagate from the past or the future back to the object. They all arrive from the past or future just in time to produce the inertial reaction force you feel. Given these choices, you may be inclined to think that number 2 must be the right answer. Although number 2 sounds pretty good, it turns out to be the least likely explanation of inertia. I'll explain why after we look into the other explanations a bit. To explore them we'll need to know about something called "gauge invariance". If you've had a course in electromagnetism, you'll probably recall that the equations for the electric and magnetic fields and the scalar and vector potentials, by themselves, aren't enough to let you calculate much of anything. The problem is that the field equations are so general that they aren't completely defined. In addition to the field equations you have to specify a choice of "gauge" (within certain broad constraints) if you want to actually do any calculations. [You'll find all this explained in any good text on electromagnetism.] As long as the gauge is selfconsistent, you can choose any gauge you like. In practice, two gauges are commonly used. One is called the "Lorentz" gauge [after H.A. Lorentz who created much of this theory around the turn of the century]. In this gauge both of the potentials and both of the fields explicitly propagate at the speed of light. The other gauge is called the "Coulomb" or "radiation" gauge [after C.A. Coulomb because in this gauge the scalar potential propagates instantaneously, as does the force between electric charges at rest according to "Coulomb's law"]. You might think that we can solve our problem of instantaneous inertial reaction forces by simply choosing a Coulomb type gauge so that the gravito-electric field propagates instantaneously. The problem with this is that while the scalar potential propagates instantaneously in this gauge, the vector potential still propagates at the speed of light. And the part of the gravito-electric field that produces inertial reaction forces is the part that depends on the vector potential. So this doesn't work when you get down to the nitty-gritty. It might seem to you, as a result, that we can kiss off simple instantaneous action explanations of inertia. Almost, but not quite. It has been forcefully argued in the past few years [notably by I. Ciufolinni and J.A. Wheeler in their recent book, Gravitation and Inertia (Princeton, 1995)] that inertia arises in a similar, but more subtle way. Roughly, the modern instantaneous action argument goes as follows. In general relativity theory matter "there" tells space "here" how to curve, and space "here" tells matter "here" how to move. (Matter "here" also tells space "there" how to curve.) Thus, in order to talk about any situation in dynamics we must specify the distribution and motion of matter throughout space. (Strictly speaking, we must provide "initial data" on some suitably chosen "three dimensional spacelike hypersurface".) The usual field equations for gravity (Einstein's equations) are not enough, by themselves, to do this it turns out. Because of the finite propagation velocity built into them, we might specify some distribution of matter that subsequently leads to idiotic results. To make sure this doesn't happen, our distribution of matter has to satisfy some additional equations called "constraint" equations. The neat thing 4/7 5. about these constraint equations is that, unlike the field equations, they're instantaneous. (Technically, they're "elliptic" rather than "hyperbolic" differential equations.) It's then claimed that inertia is conveyed by the constraint equations -- instantaneously. The use of constraint equations to communicate real physical influences instantaneously is justified by appeal to the instantaneous propagation of stationary electric fields in the Coulomb gauge. Appealing as constraint conveyance of inertia may at first appear, it is arguably unsatisfying. It seems a rather artificial (if very clever) solution to a very serious problem. This is especially true when one considers that inertial reaction forces are accounted for by the field equations themselves. The problem is that no plausible choice of gauge will make them instantaneous. This shouldn't be very surprising, for they have all of the earmarks of a "radiative" interaction: they depend on accelerations (not velocities) and they have the characteristic 1/r distance dependence of radiation. (The difference between radiative and "static" or "inductive" field phenomena is neatly seen in the Figure below where the electric field around a charged particle is shown in "lines of force representation" immediately before and some time after its been subjected to some accelerations to move it from its first location. The "kink" in the induction field produced by the accelerations of the charge is the radiation that propagates outward at the speed of light. Note that if the charge in this Figure is moving with some constant velocity, nothing changes. The induction field moves rigidly with the charge. [At relativistic velocities length contraction effects make the field appear distorted.] Only changes in the velocity of the charge cause propagating kinks in the field.) If we reject constraint conveyance of real physical influences as implausible, we are left with left with gravitational disturbances propagating back and forth in time to account for the seemingly instantaneous communication of inertial reaction forces. This may not seem like much of an improvement, but it is. It has been known for ages that the "wave" equations that describe the propagation of radiation have two equally valid types of solutions: ones that propagate forward in time, and ones that propagate backward in time. (Technospeak: the equations have the symmetry of "time reversal invariance".) The reason for this peculiar state of affairs is pretty simple. Imagine that you are something that's disturbed (moved) by the passage of some type of wave. When a wave goes past, you move up and down. Can you tell from your motion whether the wave that makes you move comes from the left or the right? No. Similarly, you can't tell from your motion whether the wave is coming from the past or the future either. Waves that move backward in time are called "advanced" waves because their "effects" in the past occur in advance of their "causes" in the future. You may think the whole idea of advanced waves coming from the future pretty preposterous, but they solve some rather nasty problems. P.A.M. Dirac used them in an epochal study of the nature of electrons in the 1930s, and R.P. Feynman and J.A. Wheeler elaborated their "absorber" theory of electrodynamics in the 1940s on the basis of them. It turns out that electromagnetic radiation reaction (the reaction force on a source produced when radiation is launched) is neatly accounted for in terms of a combination of "retarded" waves (normal waves propagating forward in time) and advanced waves. [Radiation reaction, intimately connected to transient mass fluctuations, is addressed in another document.] Precisely the same thing evidently happens with inertial reaction forces. The act of pushing on something causes a disturbance in the gravitational field to go propagating off into the future. It makes stuff (the "absorber") out there wiggle. When the stuff wiggles it sends disturbances backward (and forward) in time. All the backward traveling disturbances converge on what we're pushing and generate the inertial reaction force we feel. No physical law is violated in any of this. And nothing moves faster than the speed of light. It only seems so because of the advanced waves traveling at the speed of light in the backward time direction. If you're new to all this, you may suspect me of making all or most of it up, or at least embellishing more prosaic ideas of others. Actually, I'm not. You'll find this discussed in John Gribbin's book, Schrödinger's Kittens, and many of the popularization's by Paul Davies (for example, Other Worlds and About Time). John Cramer has done occasional columns on these and related issues for Analog (all but the most recent of which are now available on his website). The second edition of Hawking's book, The Illustrated a Brief History of Time , and Kip Thorne's, Black Holes and Timewarps, are also quite good. Should you have a more technical bent, you might want to look at Paul Davies, The Physics of Time Asymmetry (U.C. Press, 1973), or Physical Origins of Time 5/7 6. Asymmetry (ed. Halliwell, Perez-Mercader, and Zurek, Cambridge U.P., 1994), or Time's Arrows Today (ed. S. Savitt, Cambridge, 1995). Bibliography notwithstanding, all of this weirdness may convince you that the ambient, pre-existing field explanation (that is, explanation number 2) must be right. The problem with this is that in order to avoid all of the really strange stuff we've just considered, we have to assume that the "field" that produces inertial reaction forces has a real, independent physical existence apart from the sources that create it. Better yet, we'd like to have a field that doesn't have any sources like the distant matter in the cosmos at all. Then we wouldn't have to worry about pesky influences propagating around. A scheme of this sort has recently been proposed by Haisch, Rueda, and Puthoff (HRP) [Physical Review A, 49, 678-694 (1994)]. They invoke local "quantum vacuum fluctuations" (instead of distant matter) as the source of their field: fluctuations of the electromagnetic field as it happens. The energy-time Uncertainty relation of quantum mechanics can be interpreted as allowing fleeting violations of the conservation of energy. In this view "photons" (quanta) of the electromagnetic field and other stuff can pop up into existence very briefly. Any specific particles created in this way can only exist for a minute fraction of a second. But since this process is going on everywhere all the time, it turns out that the vacuum should have an utterly idiotic amount of energy in it if quantum vacuum fluctuations really exist. Need I say that this has encouraged some far out speculation on how this putative local energy might be exploited. Now you might think that if the vacuum is a thick soup of photons (and other stuff), things moving around in it should detect its presence. Neatly, however, it turns out that if the photons in the vacuum have the right "spectral energy density", anything moving in a straight line at constant speed -- that is, moving inertially -- is unaffected by the photons. (The spectral energy density needed to pull this off is that the energy density of photons increases with the cube of their frequency.) Any other spectrum doesn't work. If electric charges are accelerated with respect to the soup of photons, however, they experience a force that's directly proportional to the magnitude of the acceleration. Here, it seems, we have a candidate explanation for inertial reaction forces that avoids all that peculiar stuff about gauges. Alas, vacuum fluctuations are not a plausible explanation for inertia. Several compelling arguments reveal the electromagnetic vacuum fluctuation explanation of inertia to be a delusion. The most obvious is that if the vacuum really did have some idiotically stupendous energy density, since energy is a source of the gravitational field, the universe would be curled up into a miniscule little ball according to general relativity theory. The proponents of vacuum fluctuations as the origin of inertia have concocted some unconvincing arguments to try to deflect this objection. Quite apart from the ridiculousness of a highly energetic vacuum, there are other compelling reasons to believe that inertia is not an electromagnetic interaction with a "zero point" field. For example, if inertial reaction forces are electromagnetic forces that accelerating electric charges experience as they interact with a zero point field, then the inertial reaction forces protons, neutrons, and other elementary particles experience should depend on some function of how much charge they contain. Since the reaction force points in the same direction for both positive and negative electric charge, it follows that the force must depend on the square of the electric charge. Consider now the neutron and proton. The neutron consists of an "up" and two "down" quarks. The proton consists of two "up" and one "down" quarks. Down quarks have minus 1/3 of an electron charge while up quarks have plus 2/3 of an electron charge. (These are the smallest units that electric charge comes in.) It follows immediately that the sum of the absolute values of the quark charges in a neutron is 4/3 electron charges and the corresponding value for the proton is 5/3. The ratio of the proton to neutron charge is thus 5/4. The ratio of the inertial reaction forces they should experience for equal accelerations through the zero point field is the square of this ratio if the HRP theory is right. It follows that the inertial mass of the proton should be 1.56 times as large as that of the neutron. In fact, the neutron is very slightly more massive than the proton. If you are determined to believe that inertia is the consequence of electromagnetic zero point vacuum fluctuations, you might try to construct some convoluted ad hoc scheme to get the total charge of the constituents of protons and neutrons to come out the same. But the simple message of the neutron and proton seems to be 6/7
1098	dbpedia	2	64	https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/9809/looking-for-a-specific-story-about-young-stephen-hawking	en	Looking for a specific story about young Stephen Hawking	https://cdn.sstatic.net/…g?v=81ec2c76e6ef	https://cdn.sstatic.net/…g?v=81ec2c76e6ef	[ "https://i.sstatic.net/dNUnb.png?s=64", "https://i.sstatic.net/B2dNM.png?s=64", "https://i.sstatic.net/dNUnb.png?s=64", "https://hsm.stackexchange.com/posts/9809/ivc/5148?prg=51f5443b-b579-4fc7-be3e-0453440f8207" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	2019-07-14T21:08:48	There was a specific account of Stephen Hawking by one of his contemporaries in which Hawking was in his late undergrad or early postgrad. As I remember, there was a small class of physics students (	en	https://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/hsm/Img/favicon.ico?v=fbe5dfcb33e0	History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange	https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/9809/looking-for-a-specific-story-about-young-stephen-hawking	This story has been depicted in The Theory of Everything, a 2014 biographical romantic drama film directed by James Marsh detailing the life of the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. In an early scene, it has been shown that Stephen Hawking, who has just begun his PhD at the University of Cambridge, and other fellow students was given a problem set of 10 questions by their PhD supervisor Dennis Sciama of which Stephen could do "only" nine. Though I could find no historical proof for such a story and it only seems (as commented by others) to be a cooked up anecdote for the sake of publicity. Moreover, the film has been criticized for being utterly dishonest on many occasions. Writing for the film blog of UK daily newspaper The Guardian, Michelle Dean noted: The Theory of Everything's marketing materials will tell you it is based on Jane Hawking's memoir of her marriage, a book published in the UK as Music to Move the Stars, and then re-issued as Travelling to Infinity. But the screenwriters rearranged the facts to suit certain dramatic conventions. And while that always happens in these based-on-a-true-story films, the scale of the departure in The Theory of Everything is unusually wide. The film becomes almost dishonest–in a way that feels unfair to both parties, and oddly, particularly Jane Hawking herself.
1098	dbpedia	3	53	https://www.edge.org/conversation/roger_penrose-chapter-14-consciousness-involves-noncomputable-ingredients	en	Chapter 14 "CONSCIOUSNESS INVOLVES NONCOMPUTABLE INGREDIENTS"			[ "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/edge_logo.jpg", "https://www.edge.org/sites/all/modules/print/icons/print_icon.png", "https://www.edge.org/sites/all/modules/print/print_mail/icons/mail_icon.png", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_353_francisco_varela.jpg?itok=tAozyHXZ", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_760_steven_pinker.jpeg?itok=aJsGytnX", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_339_steve_jones.jpg?itok=UvvIHvXL", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_144_roger_schank.jpg?itok=X0_iyv9a", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_210_nicholas_humphrey.jpg?itok=Hpz5VCSD", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_340_marvin_minsky.jpg?itok=GfMHof8r", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/picture-352-1559064261.jpg?itok=IAjYbYy_", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/picture-153-1372370496.jpg?itok=BKk5dW54", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_365_alan_guth.jpg?itok=x5WTi7XQ", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/picture-48-1360100722.jpg?itok=32hlN8vl", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_45_richard_dawkins.jpg?itok=S99nq3O6", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/picture-88-1440448631.png?itok=PaBeUBzt", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_484_roger_penrose.jpg?itok=ObbKjOcO", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/picture-88-1440448631.png?itok=PaBeUBzt", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_340_marvin_minsky.jpg?itok=GfMHof8r", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_45_richard_dawkins.jpg?itok=S99nq3O6", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_210_nicholas_humphrey.jpg?itok=Hpz5VCSD", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_144_roger_schank.jpg?itok=X0_iyv9a", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/picture-48-1360100722.jpg?itok=32hlN8vl", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_339_steve_jones.jpg?itok=UvvIHvXL", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_365_alan_guth.jpg?itok=x5WTi7XQ", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_760_steven_pinker.jpeg?itok=aJsGytnX", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/picture-153-1372370496.jpg?itok=BKk5dW54", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/bk_353_francisco_varela.jpg?itok=tAozyHXZ", "https://www.edge.org/sites/default/files/styles/mini-thumbnail/public/member-pictures/picture-352-1559064261.jpg?itok=IAjYbYy_", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41a32wGqGwL._SL160_.jpg", "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41BFynAJqRL._SL160_.jpg" ]	[]	[]	[ "" ]	null	[]	null			https://www.edge.org/favicon.ico		https://www.edge.org/conversation/roger_penrose-chapter-14-consciousness-involves-noncomputable-ingredients	[Roger Penrose:] My main technical interest is in twistor theory — a radical approach to space and time — and, in particular, how to fit it in with Einstein's general relativity. There's a major problem there, in which some progress was made a few years ago, and I feel fairly excited about it. It's ultimately aimed at finding the appropriate union between general relativity and quantum theory. When I was first seriously thinking of getting into physics, I was thinking more in terms of quantum theory and quantum electrodynamics than of relativity. I never got very far with quantum theory at that stage, but that was what I started off trying to do in physics. My Ph.D. work had been in pure mathematics. I suppose my most quoted paper from that period was on generalized inverses of matrices, which is a mathematical thing that physicists hardly ever mention. Then there were the nonperiodic tilings, which relate to quasi crystals, and therefore to solid-state physics to some degree. Then there's general relativity. What I suppose I'm best known for in that area are the singularity theorems that I worked on along with Stephen Hawking. I knew him when he was Dennis Sciama's graduate student; I've known him for a long time now. But the main things I've done in relativity apart from that have to do with spinors and with asymptotic structure of spacetimes, relating to gravitational radiation. I believe that general relativity will modify the structure of quantum mechanics. Whereas people usually think that in order to unite quantum theory with gravity theory you should apply quantum mechanics, unmodified, to general relativity, I believe that the rules of quantum theory must themselves be modified in order for this union to be successful. There's a connection between this area of physics and consciousness, in my opinion, but it's a bit roundabout; the arguments are negative. I argue that we shall need to find some noncomputational physical process if we're ever to explain the effects of consciousness. But I don't see it in any existing theory. It seems to me that the only place where noncomputability can possibly enter is in what is called "quantum measurement." But we need a new theory of quantum measurement. It must be a noncomputable new theory. There is scope for this, if the new theory involves changes in the very structure of quantum theory, of the kind that could arise when it's appropriately united with general relativity. But this is something for the distant future. Why do I believe that consciousness involves noncomputable ingredients? The reason is Gödel's theorem. I sat in on a course when I was a research student at Cambridge, given by a logician who made the point about Gödel's theorem that the very way in which you show the formal unprovability of a certain proposition also exhibits the fact that it's true. I'd vaguely heard about Gödel's theorem — that you can produce statements that you can't prove using any system of rules you've laid down ahead of time. But what was now being made clear to me was that as long as you believe in the rules you're using in the first place, then you must also believe in the truth of this proposition whose truth lies beyond those rules. This makes it clear that mathematical understanding is something you can't formulate in terms of rules. That's the view which, much later, I strongly put forward in my book The Emperor's New Mind. There are possible loopholes to this use of Gödel's theorem, which people can pick on, and they often do. Most of these counterarguments are misunderstandings. Dan Dennett makes genuine points, though, and these need a little more work to see why they still don't get around the Gödel argument. Dennett's case rests on the conten-tion that we use what are called "bottom-up" rather than "top-down" algorithms in our thinking — here, mathematical thinking. A top-down algorithm is specific to the solution of some particular problem, and it provides a definite procedure that is known to solve that problem. A bottom-up algorithm is one that is not specific to any particular problem but is more loosely organized, so that it learns by experience and gradually improves, eventually giving a good solution to the problem at hand. Many people have the idea that bottom-up systems rather than top-down, programmed algorithmic systems are the way the brain works. I apply the Gödel argument to bottom-up systems too, in my most recent book, Shadows of the Mind. I make a strong case that bottom-up systems also won't get around the Gödel argument. Thus, I'm claiming, there's something in our conscious understanding that simply isn't computational; it's something different. A lot of what the brain does you could do on a computer. I'm not saying that all the brain's action is completely different from what you do on a computer. I am claiming that the actions of consciousness are something different. I'm not saying that consciousness is beyond physics, either — although I'm saying that it's beyond the physics we know now. The argument in my latest book is basically in two parts. The first part shows that conscious thinking, or conscious understanding, is something different from computation. I'm being as rigorous as I can about that. The second part is more exploratory and tries to find out what on earth is going on. That has two ingredients to it, basically. My claim is that there has to be something in physics that we don't yet understand, which is very important, and which is of a noncomputational character. It's not specific to our brains; it's out there, in the physical world. But it usually plays a totally insignifi-cant role. It would have to be in the bridge between quantum and classical levels of behavior — that is, where quantum measurement comes in. Modern physical theory is a bit strange, because one has two levels of activity. One is the quantum level, which refers to small-scale phenomena; small energy differences are what's relevant. The other level is the classical level, where you have large-scale phenomena, where the roles of classical physics — Newton, Maxwell, Einstein — operate. People tend to think that because quantum mechanics is a more modern theory than classical physics, it must be more accurate, and therefore it must explain classical physics if only you could see how. That doesn't seem to be true. You have two scales of phenomena, and you can't deduce the classical behavior from the quantum behavior any more than the other way around. We don't have a final quantum theory. We're a long way from that. What we have is a stopgap theory. And it's incomplete in ways that affect large-scale phenomena, not just things on the tiny scale of particles. Current physics ideas will survive as limiting behavior, in the same sense that Newtonian mechanics survives relativity. Relativity modifies Newtonian mechanics, but it doesn't really supplant it. Newtonian mechanics is still there as a limit. In the same sense, quantum theory, as we now use it, and classical physics, which includes Einstein's general theory, are limits of some theory we don't yet have. My claim is that the theory we don't yet have will contain noncomputational ingredients. It must play its role when you magnify something from a quantum level to a classical level, which is what's involved in "measurement." The way you treat this nowadays, in standard quantum theory, is to introduce randomness. Since randomness comes in, quantum theory is called a probabilistic theory. But randomness only comes in when you go from the quantum to the classical level. If you stay down at the quantum level, there's no randomness. It's only when you magnify something up, and you do what people call "make a measurement." This consists of taking a small-scale quantum effect and magnifying it out to a level where you can see it. It's only in that process of magnification that probabilities come in. What I'm claiming is that whatever it is that's really happening in that process of magnification is different from our present understanding of physics, and it is not just random. It is noncomputational; it's something essentially different. This idea grew from the time when I was a graduate student, and I felt that there must be something noncomputational going on in our thought processes. I've always had a scientific attitude, so I believed that you have to understand our thinking processes in terms of science in some way. It doesn't have to be a science that we understand now. There doesn't seem to be any place for conscious phenomena in the science that we understand today. On the other hand, people nowadays often seem to believe that if you can't put something on a computer, it's not science. I suppose this is because so much of science is done that way these days; you simulate physical activity computationally. People don't realize that something can be noncomputational and yet perfectly scientific, perfectly mathematically describable. The fact that I'm coming into all this from a mathematical background makes it easier for me to appreciate that there are things that aren't computational but are perfectly good mathematics. When I say "noncomputational" I don't mean random. Nor do I mean incomprehensible. There are very clear-cut things that are noncomputational and are known in mathematics. The most famous example is Hilbert's tenth problem, which has to do with solving algebraic equations in integers. You're given a family of algebraic equations and you're asked, "Can you solve them in whole numbers? That is, do the equations have integer solutions?" That question — yes or no, for any particular example — is not one a computer could answer in any finite amount of time. There's a famous theorem, due to Yuri Matiyasevich, which proves that there's no computational way of answering this question in general. In particular cases, you might be able to give an answer by means of some algorithmic procedure. However, given any such algorithmic procedure, which you know doesn't give you wrong answers, you can always come up with an algebraic equation that will defeat that procedure but where you know that the equation actually has no integer solutions. Whatever understandings are available to human beings, there are — in relation particularly to Hilbert's tenth problem — things that can't be encapsulated in computational form. You could imagine a toy universe that evolved in some way according to Hilbert's tenth problem. This evolution could be completely deterministic yet not computable. In this toy model, the future would be mathematically fixed; however, a computer could not tell you what this future is. I'm not saying that this is the way the laws of physics work at some level. But the example shows you that there's an issue. I'm sure the real universe is much more subtle than that. The Emperor's New Mind served more than one purpose. Partly I was trying to get a scientific idea across, which was that noncomputability is a feature of our conscious thinking, and that this is a perfectly reasonable scientific point of view. But the other part of it was educational, in a sense. I was trying to explain what modern physics and modern mathematics is like. Thus, I had two quite different motivations in writing the book. One was to put a philosophical point of view across, and the other was that I felt I wanted to explain scientific things. For quite a long time, I'd felt that I did want to write a book at a semipopular level to explain certain ideas that excited me — ideas that weren't particularly unconventional — about what science is like. I had it in the back of my mind that someday I would do such a thing. It wasn't until I saw a BBC "Horizon" program, in which Marvin Minsky and various people were making some rather extreme and outrageous statements, that I was finally moved to write the book. I felt that there was a point of view which was essentially the one I believe in, but which I had never seen expressed anywhere and which needed to be put forward. I knew that this was what I should do. I would write this book explaining a lot of things in science, but this viewpoint would give it a focus. Also it had to be a book, because it's cross-disciplinary and not something you could express very well in any particular journal. I suppose what I was doing in that book was philosophy, but somebody complained that I hardly referred to a single philosopher — which I think is true. That's because the questions that interest philosophers tend to be rather different from those that interest scientists; philosophers tend to get involved in their own internal arguments. When I argue that the action of the conscious brain is noncomputational, I'm not talking about quantum computers. Quantum computers are perfectly well-defined concepts, which don't involve any change in physics; they don't even perform noncomputational actions. Just by themselves, they don't explain what's going on in the conscious actions of the brain. Dan Dennett thinks of a quantum computer as a skyhook, his term for a miracle. However, it's a perfectly sensible thing. Nevertheless, I don't think it can explain the way the brain works. That's another misunderstanding of my views. But there could be some element of quantum computation in brain action. Perhaps I could say something about that. One of the essential features of the quantum level of activity is that you have to consider the coexistence of various different alternative events. This is fundamental to quantum mechanics. If X can happen, and if Y can happen, then any combination of X and Y, weighted with complex coefficients, can also occur. According to quantum mechanics, a particle can have states in which it occupies several positions at once. When you treat a system according to quantum mechanics, you have to allow for these so-called superpositions of alternatives. The idea of a quantum computer, as it's been put forward by David Deutsch, Richard Feynman, and various other people, is that the computations are the things that are superposed. Rather than your computer doing one computation, it does a lot of them all at once. This may be, under certain circumstances, very efficient. The problem comes at the end, when you have to get one piece of information out of the superposition of all those different computations. It's extremely difficult to have a system that does this usefully. It's pretty radical to say that the brain works this way. My present view is that the brain isn't exactly a quantum computer. Quantum actions are important in the way the brain works, but the brain's noncomputational actions occur at the bridge from the quantum to the classical level, and that bridge is beyond our present understanding of quantum mechanics. The most promising place by far to look for this quantum- classical borderline action is in recent work on microtubules by Stuart Hameroff and his colleagues at the University of Arizona. Eukaryotic cells have something called a cytoskeleton, and parts of the cytoskeleton consist of these microtubules. In particular, microtubules inhabit neurons in the brain. They also control one celled animals, such as parameciums and amoebas, which don't have any neurons. These animals can swim around and do very complicated things. They apparently learn by experience, but they're not controlled by nervous systems; they're controlled by another kind of structure, which is probably the cytoskeleton and its system of microtubules. Microtubules are long little tubes, a few nanometers in diameter. In the case of the microtubules lying within neurons, they very likely extend a good deal of the length of the axons and the dendrites. You find them from one end of the axons and dendrites to the other. They seem to be responsible for controlling the strengths of the connections between different neurons. Although at any one moment the activity of neurons could resemble that of a computer, this computer would be subject to continual change in the way it's "wired up," under the control of a deeper level of structure. This deeper level is very probably the system of microtubules within neurons. Their action has a lot to do with the transport of neurotransmitter chemicals along axons, and the growth of dendrites. The neurotransmitter molecules are transported along the microtubules, and these molecules are critical for the behavior of the synapses. The strength of the synapse can be changed by the action of the microtubules. What interests me about the microtubules is that they're tubes, and according to Hameroff and his colleagues there's a computational action going along on the tubes themselves, on the outside. A protein substance called tubulin forms interpenetrating spiral arrangements constituting the tubes. Each tubulin molecule can have two states of electric polarization. As with an electronic computer, we can label these states with a 1 and a 0. These produce various patterns along the microtubules, and they can go along the tubes in some form of computational action. I find this idea very intriguing. By itself, a microtubule would just be a computer, but at a deeper level than neurons. You still have computational action, but it's far beyond what people are considering now. There are enormously more of these tubulins than there are neurons. What also interests me is that within the microtubules you have a plausible place for a quantum-oscillation activity that's isolated from the outside. The problem with trying to use quantum mechanics in the action of the brain is that if it were a matter of quantum nerve signals, these nerve signals would disturb the rest of the material in the brain, to the extent that the quantum coherence would get lost very quickly. You couldn't even attempt to build a quantum computer out of ordinary nerve signals, because they're just too big and in an environment that's too disorganized. Ordinary nerve signals have to be treated classically. But if you go down to the level of the microtubules, then there's an extremely good chance that you can get quantum- level activity inside them. For my picture, I need this quantum-level activity in the microtubules; the activity has to be a large scale thing that goes not just from one microtubule to the next but from one nerve cell to the next, across large areas of the brain. We need some kind of coherent activity of a quantum nature which is weakly coupled to the computational activity that Hameroff argues is taking place along the microtubules. There are various avenues of attack. One is directly on the physics, on quantum theory, and there are certain experiments that people are beginning to perform, and various schemes for a modification of quantum mechanics. I don't think the experiments are sensitive enough yet to test many of these specific ideas. One could imagine experiments that might test these things, but they'd be very hard to perform. On the biological side, one would have to think of good experiments to perform on microtubules, to see whether there's any chance that they do support any of these large-scale quantum coherent effects. When I say "quantum coherent effects," I mean things a bit like superconductivity or superfluidity, where you have quantum systems on a large scale. Back to Contents
1098	dbpedia	3	12	https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/our-facilities/lab-and-testing-facilities/sciama-supercomputer	en	SCIAMA Supercomputer	https://www.port.ac.uk/themes/custom/portsmouth/favicon.ico	https://www.port.ac.uk/themes/custom/portsmouth/favicon.ico	[ "https://www.port.ac.uk/themes/custom/portsmouth/logo.svg", "https://www.port.ac.uk/themes/custom/portsmouth//images/logo-mobile.png", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/hero_mobile/public/media/images/webimage-9C180481-270D-4FDA-89C5F6629D824485.jpg?itok=DMxsnpds", "https://www.port.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/embedded_image_part_width_mobile/public/media/images/footer_map_0.png?itok=Y8EmpEti" ]	[]	[]	[ "SCIAMA", "supercomputer", "computer", "cosmology", "gravitation" ]	null	[]	null	Explore the Sciama Supercomputer at the University of Portsmouth, driving cutting-edge research and computational simulations in diverse scientific disciplines.	en	/themes/custom/portsmouth/favicon.ico	University of Portsmouth	https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/our-facilities/lab-and-testing-facilities/sciama-supercomputer	The SCIAMA supercomputer is at the heart of the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) – a research institute devoted to cosmology, galaxy evolution and gravitation. SCIAMA is a High Performance Compute Cluster (HPCC) which is supported by ICG, SEPnet and the University of Portsmouth. It was built in 2011 to provide computational resources for scientific research carried out at the ICG. The supercomputer was named after Dennis Sciama, a leading figure in the development of astrophysics and cosmology, but it's also an acronym that stands for SEPnet Computing Infrastructure for Astrophysical Modelling and Analysis. The facility is used by postgraduate and undergraduate students, researchers and external partners. The supercomputer is able to complete a billion calculations per second, simulate vast regions of the Universe, investigate the properties of hundreds of millions of galaxies, and has been used to run complex cosmological experiments and simulations, such as:

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