City Council To Recognize Physics Students For Solving Stephen Hawking Mistake
September 4, 2008
I won't go into the gory details - they'll come out soon enough. I only mention this because it is a perfect example of how smart kids really are, how much more they should be challenged in school, as well as the role that girls can play in physics education in the classroom.
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Comments
Did I miss it, too?
September 4, 2008 by Fred Bortz, 1 year 11 weeks ago
Comment id: 31812
Marshall, please tell us more about the error.
Could it also have been in The Universe in A Nutshell, which I reviewed for some newspapers and then archived the review at the Science Shelf?
(At least the review has a good limerick)
P.S. Congrats on the honor!
Fred Bortz -- Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)
Re: Did I miss it too?
September 5, 2008 by MarshallBarnes, 1 year 11 weeks ago
Comment id: 31820
Dear Fred:
"I've heard all your stories before,"
Hawking scoffed, as he rolled through the door.
"Though a wormhole's sublime,
You won't travel in time.
For you, there's a black hole in store."
I'm not sure who wrote the limerick (was it you?)but although it would seem to relate to the issue at hand, the black hole portion would indicate otherwise. Instead, the connection between the two wormhole mouths is supposed to collapse for a very specific reason, according to Hawking, except when that reason is closely looked at, it's clearly wrong. The ironic thing is that there's 14 other reasons why the same idea wouldn't work that Hawking and everyone else did miss!
The original is in Kip Thorne's book, Black Holes and Time Warps:Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. When I get more time, I'll post a follow-up.
In the meantime, thanks for the congrats. Have a good weakend!
Re (2): Did I miss it too?
September 5, 2008 by Fred Bortz, 1 year 11 weeks ago
Comment id: 31822
Dear Marshall,
That limerick is original with me (and copyrighted, so others should not reproduce it without my consent).
As I recall The Universe in a Nutshell -- it's been a while since I read it -- Hawking discusses that nature seems to protect causality. As I recall, he wasn't confident of the mechanism that would prevent a wormhole from being a conduit to another time. He may have even mentioned more than one.
Or it could be the erroneous statement to which you are referring (but still haven't explained to the inquiring minds of Science Blog)?
My limerick essentially says this: Hawking declares that because nature protects causality, any time travel hypothesis should be consigned to the black hole of failed ideas.
I think his notion of protecting causality is sensible, but that doesn't mean he didn't err in the details of The Universe in a Nutshell.
Fred Bortz -- Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)
RE: Re (2): Did I miss it too?
September 5, 2008 by Anonymous, 1 year 11 weeks ago
Comment id: 31824
Dear Fred:
Sorry about the copyright infringement. I didn't see the fine print. For future reference, you should place a (c) beside anything like that limerick if you want to be sure that no one copies it.
As for Hawking's contention for the protection of causality, he's since backed away from his original chronology protection conjecture because he couldn't find a physical basis for it. Which is just as well since all the examples that I ever read, that he used to argue for, were wrong.
I never read the Universe in a Nutshell, so I can't comment on what he wrote about there. I've read other comments that he's made, for example his article on time machines in an issue of Astronomy one time, and lecture transcripts.
As for the mistake that the kids caught - I'm letting the drama build a little, but I'll say this much, it is no fluke. Instead it is the beginning of a sunami of revelations concerning the inadequacies exhibited by some of the world's biggest minds in physics to be able to properly ascertain and compute accurately the problems concerning time and temporal modification possibilities as they exist in abstract and advanced concept models today.
Big claims, yes. If there wasn't something to them, however, the proclamations wouldn't be getting hadn't out next week. This overall scheme has been in the planning for well over a year, so I'm going to let it play itself out at my own pace. However, all the details will be available soon enough, to be followed by more revelations that will last well into next year. What you're witnessing now is the rocking of a tipping point - the progression through the butterfly diagram of a Rene Thom catastrophe. Once it all starts to happen, it will be as shocking to everyone else as it was to me when I first started to discover these things. That was five years ago, or so.
All I can say for now is stay tuned...
Copyright infringement -- no big deal here, but...
September 5, 2008 by Fred Bortz, 1 year 11 weeks ago
Comment id: 31826
Thanks, Marshall,
I'm waiting the unfolding of your surprise with bated breath. (Fishermen might wait for it with baited breath :) )
As for copyright infringement, here's some useful advice for everyone. A published piece of original writing has an inherent copyright, even if the author hasn't filed for it. If memory serves, it lasts for 75 years after the author's death. (Talk about "deathless prose"!)
If I filed a copyright on every review I've written, it would cost too much money and require too much trouble. But if I wanted to sue for infringement, I'd have a stronger case if I had filed for a formal copyright.
As a general principle, if you want to quote from anything you see on the web, you need to follow the principles of fair use, regardless of whether there is a copyright notice.
There are explicit guidelines as to how much of a piece you can quote and still call it fair use, and they are not easily summarized for all cases. But most people can apply common sense and get it mostly right.
For a poem, the limits on fair use are quite tight, even if that poem is part of a larger work. Quoting a whole poem requires permission.
A helpful story: In Beyond Jupiter: The Story of Planetary Astronomer Heidi Hammel, my manuscript quoted four lines from a Grateful Dead song that were particularly relevant to Heidi's approach to life. The publisher reduced it to two lines, which made it fair use. Had we kept all four lines, the permissions fee would have been beyond what we could justify.
In this case, it behooves me to make my copyright notice more prominent, but the inherent copyright offers me some small amount of protection nonetheless.
Fred Bortz -- Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)