Word: physicists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...scientific meeting in Manhattan, Lowell Wood, a young physicist from California's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, delighted his colleagues (although he did not exactly convince them) with a plan to give the earth a virtually limitless energy supply. He suggested tapping the energy of a mini-black hole in orbit around the planet. From a spacecraft orbiting at a safe distance, pellets would be fired at the hole. This would create so much heat that the energy could be converted into microwaves and beamed down to earth. Even Wheeler, who is now at the University of Texas, and his former student...
...from its fiery birth. Many scientists are all but convinced that black holes lie at the root of many of these awesome events. They are fascinated and somewhat frustrated by the fact that the immense gravity of black holes prevents any escape from them. As a consequence, says Harvard Physicist Larry Smarr, "there are parts of the universe from which, in principle, we cannot get any information...
Black holes apparently come in both economy and giant sizes. The gifted British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has shown mathematically that tiny black holes, dating back to the very origins of the universe, could exist. In the Big Bang, the primordial explosion that created the universe some 15 billion to 20 billion years ago, matter was hurled in all directions. In some places, Hawking says, quantities of matter roughly equivalent to the amount in a mountain may have become compressed enough to collapse, forming what he calls mini-black holes. Their circumference, as measured by their event horizons, could...
Unlike Laplace's dark star, this Einsteinian black hole?the name was not coined by Physicist Wheeler until the 1960s?had far more finality. Since relativity forbids anything to move faster than light, an idea unknown in classic Newtonian physics, escape was impossible. All the energy in the world could not extract an object from a black hole...
Surely, replied the illustrious British astronomer and physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, nature would forbid such a reductio ad absurdum as a star so compressed that sit does not shine. But two other astronomers, Mount Wilson Observatory's Fritz Zwicky and Walter Baade, were more intellectually adventurous...