Word: hawkinge
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For days the scientific grapevine had been buzzing with the news that Stephen Hawking, the brilliant physicist whose disease has put him in a wheelchair, heir to the revered Cambridge professorship once held by Isaac Newton, would be making a big announcement at a conference in Dublin, Ireland. Sure enough...
In making that announcement, Hawking recanted a position he had held for nearly 30 years. He also pulled the rug out from under a generation of science-fiction fans, declaring dead a favorite plot device. "There is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes," he said...
But in the mid-'70s, Hawking threw a theoretical monkey wrench into the works. It was known that empty space is bubbling with "virtual particles"--pairs of particles and antiparticles that spontaneously appear out of nowhere, then annihilate each other and vanish. That happens so fast the particles can hardly...
Others have tackled that conundrum and solved it to their satisfaction using various mathematical stratagems. But, says Juan Maldacena, a string theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., who has worked on the question, "what wasn't done was to explain precisely what was wrong with Hawking...
Whether he's right is another question. Many of the scientists present in Dublin last week were skeptical of his solution and said they would need to study it much more carefully before passing judgment. Says Preskill: "The mechanism he has in mind may not be so revolutionary." Nevertheless, Hawking...