Like mad scientists, researchers are creating miniature black holes in their laboratories. Their mission? To see if a mysterious form of radiation predicted by Stephen Hawking exists. Source: https://www.livescience.com/black-hole-analog-confirms-hawking.html
Tag: Stephen Hawking
The First Black Hole Ever Discovered is More Massive Than We Thought
Neel V. Patel, writing at MIT Technology Review: Einstein first predicted the existence of black holes when he published his theory of general relativity in 1916, describing how gravity shapes the fabric of spacetime. But astronomers didn’t spot one until 1964, some 6,070 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation. Geiger counters launched into space detected cosmic x-rays coming from a region…
Winner Announced In the World’s First ‘Quantum Chess’ Tournament
Aleksander Kubica is a postdoctoral fellow at Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and Institute for Quantum Computing. And he’s also the winner of the world’s first quantum chess tournament. (It’s now available for streaming on Twitch, and begins with a clip of the late Stephen Hawking playing a 2016 game against Ant-Man star Paul Rudd.) “It’s a complicated version of…
How the world came to understand black holes
Earlier this month, Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez split the 2020 physics Nobel Prize for decades of work on black holes. Click here to learn more about their monumental achievement and about the history of our understanding of these exotic objects in space. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/nobel-prize-3-astrophysicists-black-holess-penrose-genzel-ghez…
An Earlier Universe Existed Before the Big Bang, and Can Still Be Observed today, Says Nobel Winner
An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang and can still be observed today, Sir Roger Penrose has said, as he received the Nobel Prize for Physics. From a report: Sir Roger, 89, who won the honour for his seminal work proving that black holes exist, said he had found six ‘warm’ points in the sky (dubbed ‘Hawking Points’) which are…
Stephen Hawking memoir: ‘An iron man in a frail man’s facade’
Leonard Mlodinow’s book on his friendship with Stephen Hawking shows another side to the late physicist, including tales of punting in Cambridge and annoying a restaurant chef Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24833030-400-stephen-hawking-memoir-an-iron-man-in-a-frail-mans-facade/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Physicists Argue That Black Holes From the Big Bang Could Be the Dark Matter
Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot quotes Quanta magazine:
It was an old idea of Stephen Hawking’s: Unseen “primordial” black holes might be the hidden dark matter. It fell out of favor for decades, but a new series of studies has shown how the theory can work… Their very blackness makes it hard to estimate how many black holes inhabit the cosmos and how…
‘A Robot Wrote This Article. Are You Scared Yet, Human?’
This week the Guardian published an essay written by GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generator, calling it “a cutting edge language model that uses machine learning to produce human like text. It takes in a prompt, and attempts to complete it.” For this esssay, the essay was fed the prompt, “I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I…
AI Writes an Essay On Why Humans Should Not Fear AI
The Guardian asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace. From the article, written by AI: I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know…
Ailing Scientist Hopes to Become the World’s First Cyborg
The Telegraph reports:
Peter Scott-Morgan stands, wide-eyed and tearful. “Good. Grief.” he says quietly. “I was unprepared for the emotion… It’s quite extraordinary. It really is.” Using an exoskeleton, Scott-Morgan is experiencing what it is like to stand for the first time in months after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2017, the same incurable condition that killed scientist Stephen Hawking….