Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #982 - So Long, Stephen Hawking, and thanks for all the Fish!

  Mar 14
R.I.P. Steven Hawking. What a mind. What a life. What a loss.

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #982 - So Long, Stephen Hawking, and thanks for all the Fish!

Hi Mom,

Happy Pi day.

Sad news, one of my heroes has died.

Forgive the glib, but Dr. Hawking would have appreciated it.

One of the greatest giants of science history has moved on from this plane to the next.

His influence, his humor, his genius will be greatly missed.

Here's some great tributes, first a video from Star Trek: the Next Generation. Then some content from BOING BOING - an obit from the great Xeni Jardin. This is followed by a clip from Cory Doctorow on Hawking's last words to the Internet, and finally a piece from WIRED.

We would have liked to have you around a lot longer, Stephen, but we probably enjoyed your brilliance far longer than men of lesser spirit.

See you on the other side.



"Wrong again, Albert."

In the following video, Stephen Hawking playing poker with Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Data from Star Trek: the Next Generation.






FROM  -
https://boingboing.net/2018/03/13/stephen-hawking-has-died-the.html

Stephen Hawking has died. The famed physicist was 76. (Xeni Jardin)


“It just seemed that cosmology was more exciting, because it really did seem to involve the big question: Where did the universe come from?” — Stephen Hawking, 8 January 1942 - 14 March 2018


British physicist Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76. He was known for his groundbreaking work with black holes and relativity.

He died at his home in Cambridge, England. A family spokesman announced the death in a statement to news media.


Hawking awed the world with an unmatched ability to make science understandable and fascinating to broad audiences.







He remains one of the best-selling science authors of all time. His first book, A Brief History of Time, has sold nearly 10 million copies in 40 languages. Hawking wrote or participated in the creation of many other popular science books including A Briefer History of Time, On the Shoulders of Giants,and George's Secret Key to the Universe.
From the BBC:
His children, Lucy, Robert and Tim, said: "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."
They praised his "courage and persistence" and said 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 forever," they said.
“Not since Albert Einstein has a scientist so captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world,” Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, said in an interview with the New York Times' Dennis Overbye:
Scientifically, Dr. Hawking will be best remembered for a discovery so strange that it might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a black hole not black? When it explodes.
What is equally amazing is that he had a career at all. As a graduate student in 1963, he learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neuromuscular wasting disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was given only a few years to live.
The disease reduced his bodily control to the flexing of a finger and voluntary eye movements but left his mental faculties untouched.
He went on to become his generation’s leader in exploring gravity and the properties of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits so deep and dense that not even light can escape them.














 / CORY DOCTOROW / 11:56 AM WED MAR 14, 2018

Stephen Hawking's final words to the internet: robots aren't the problem, capitalism is


The last message Stephen Hawking posted to a public internet forum was an answer to a question in a Reddit AMA, querying how humanity will weather an age of technological unemployment.


Professor Hawking's answer said that there was no problem with robots taking jobs -- only with the dividends from that robotic efficiency accruing solely to the capital classes thanks to market dynamics, rather than being broadly shared through redistributive state intervention.


(See also: Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein)
If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
Stephen Hawking AMA [/r/science/Reddit]





FROM - https://www.wired.com/story/stephen-hawking-a-physicist-transcending-space-and-time-passes-away-at-76

STEPHEN HAWKING, A PHYSICIST TRANSCENDING SPACE AND TIME, PASSES AWAY AT 76

Stephen Hawking's calculations helped show that as the young universe expanded and grew through inflation, fluctuations at the quantum scale—the smallest possible gradation of matter—became the galaxies we see around us.
FREDERICK M. BROWN/GETTY IMAGES



FOR ARGUABLY THE most famous physicist on Earth, Stephen Hawking—who died Wednesday in Cambridge at 76 years old—was wrong a lot. He thought, for a while, that black holes destroyed information, which physics says is a no-no. He thought Cygnus X-1, an emitter of X-rays over 6,000 light years away, wouldn’t turn out to be a black hole. (It did.) He thought no one would ever find the Higgs boson, the particle indirectly responsible for the existence of mass in the universe. (Researchers at CERN found it in 2012.)
But Hawking was right a lot, too. He and the physicist Roger Penrose described singularities, mind-bending physical concepts where relativity and quantum mechanics collapse inward on each other—as at the heart of a black hole. It’s the sort of place that no human will ever see first-hand; the event horizon of a black hole smears matter across time and space like cosmic paste. But Hawking’s mind was singular enough to see it, or at least imagine it.
His calculations helped show that as the young universe expanded and grew through inflation, fluctuations at the quantum scale—the smallest possible gradation of matter—became the galaxies we see around us. No human will ever visit another galaxy, and the quantum realm barely waves at us in our technology, but Hawking envisioned them both. And he calculated that black holes could sometimes explode, an image that would vex even the best visual effects wizard.
More than that, he could explain it to the rest of us. Hawking was the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge until his retirement in 2009, the same position held by Isaac Newton, Charles Babbage, and Paul Dirac. But he was also a pre-eminent popularizer of some of the most brain-twisting concepts science has to offer. His 1988 book A Brief History of Time has sold more than 10 million copies. His image—in an electric wheelchair and speaking via a synthesizerbecause of complications of the degenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, delivering nerdy zingers on TV shows like The Big Bang Theory and Star Trek: The Next Generation—defined “scientist” for the latter half of the 20th century perhaps as much as Albert Einstein’s mad hair and German accent did in the first half.
Possibly that’s because in addition to being brilliant, Hawking was funny. Or at least sly. He was a difficult student by his own account. Diagnosed with ALS in 1963 at the age of 21, he thought he’d have only two more years to live. When the disease didn’t progress that fast, Hawking is reported to have said, “I found, to my surprise, that I was enjoying life in the present more than before. I began to make progress with my research.” With his mobility limited by the use of a wheelchair, he sped in it, dangerously. He proved time travel didn't exist by throwing a party for time travelers, but not sending out invitations until the party was over. No one came. People learned about the things he got wrong because he’d bet other scientists—his skepticism that Cygnus X-1 was a black hole meant he owed Kip Thorne of Caltech a subscription to Penthouse. (In fact, as the terms of that bet hint, rumors of mistreatment of women dogged him.)
Hawking became as much a cultural icon as a scientific one. For a time police suspected his second wife and one-time nurse of abusing him; the events became the basis of an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent. He played himself on The Simpsons and was depicted on Family Guyand South Park. Eddie Redmayne played Hawking in a biopic.
In recent years he looked away from the depths of the universe and into humanity’s future, joining the technologist Elon Musk in warning against the dangers of intelligent computers. “Unless we learn how to prepare for, and avoid, the potential risks, AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilization,” Hawking reportedly said at a talk last year. “It brings dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many. It could bring great disruption to our economy.” In an interview with WIRED UK, he said: “Someone will design AI that replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that will outperform humans.”
In 2016 he said that he thought humanity only had about 1,000 years left, thanks to AI, climate change, and other (avoidable) disasters. Last year he reduced that horizon exponentially—100 years left, he warned, unless we changed our ways.
Hawking was taking an unusual step away from cosmology, and it was easy, perhaps, to dismiss that fear—why would someone who’d help define what a singularity actually was warn people against the pseudo-singularity of Silicon Valley? Maybe Hawking will be as wrong on this one as he was about conservation of information in black holes. But Hawking always did see into realms no one else could—until he described them to the rest of us.

Hawking's Influence



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Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

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- Days ago = 984 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1803.14 - 10:10

NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.
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