Earth and Space News: Stephen Hawking Brief Answers to Big Questions

Showing posts with label Stephen Hawking Brief Answers to Big Questions. Show all posts

Thursday, December 27, 2018

Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Proactive Involvement

Summary: Proactive involvement culls last, takeaway place amid 10 queries collected by theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking in Brief Answers to Big Questions.

Stephen Hawking's "spark of enquiry and wonder" impelled him toward proactive involvement in understanding nature: Stephen Hawking @Stephen Hawking, via Facebook April 12, 2016

Proactive involvement, as the last of 10 asked and answered questions by a world-renowned theoretical physicist, associates action and activism with awareness in the last work for Bantam Books Oct. 15, 2018.

Stephen Hawking (Jan. 8, 1942-March 14, 2018) bases Chapter 10 in Brief Answers to the Big Questions upon the query "How Do We Shape the Future?" The co-author, with Thomas Hertog at the University of Leuven, Belgium, of the posthumous A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation? April 27, 2018, considers informed ingenuity. Hawking designates Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879-April 18, 1955) a role model who "revolutionized our understanding of space, time, energy and matter" through "intuition, originality, brilliance."

Imagination enabled the Nobel Laureate to expose underlying structures and extract reality from appearances to elucidate special relativity theory from envisioning light as a frozen wave.

Laser Interferometer Gravitation-Wave Observatory experiments, particle accelerators, space telescopes and supercomputers furnish "greater tools for discovery" that Einstein-like imagination, ingenuity and inquisitiveness funnel in survival-friendly fashions.

Hawking gleaned from getting clockwork and electric toy trains into pieces and back together again that "If you know how something works, you can control it." The Princeton University theorist of space-time relativity and the Cambridge University theorist of space-time origins harnessed their mental potential to "[t]he spark of enquiry and wonder." St. Albans schoolteacher Dikran Tahta initiated Hawking's spark with "maths as the blueprint of the universe itself" since behind every exceptional individual is an exceptional instructor.

Cutbacks, nationalism and quantity-framed, not quality-framed, "rote-learning, equations and examinations" jeopardize proactive involvement from judicious science and technology in mass-audience, one-way articles, books, documentaries and films.

Science-related technology keeps up Large Hadron Collider experiments on Higgs boson particles that kindle all physical forces, without keeping down over-competition, over-population, over-production, over-use and over-warming.

Curing and treating cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy, single-gene conditions; mining rare lunar metals; setting up Martian outposts loom high on science and technology bucket lists. Artificial intelligence and space exploration respectively maneuver scientific and technological mastery toward mitigating climate change, global warming and polar meltdowns and moving away from mangled Earth. Perhaps intelligent life necessarily nestles into narrow temporal niches through natural instability, short-sightedness and self-destruction, such as earthly intelligence nudging planetary necropsis from planet-wide nuclear war.

Task-oriented artificial intelligence offers proactive involvement digital personal assistants Cortana, Google Now and Siri and self-driving cars even as it operates competitively, perhaps conflictually, with humankind.

Proactive involvement prompts brain interfaces and Facebook and disabled-friendly and then mainstream-use drive by wire, home automation, the Segway, text to voice and voice to text.

Imaginative, informed, ingenious proactive involvement queues up such other humankind-friendly scientific and technological achievements as the internet, mobile phones, medical imaging, satellite navigation and social networks. It requires interactive internet education, professionalization and socialization and mass-audience scientific literacy early on even if self-designed super-elites and super-intelligent artificial intelligence never reveal humankind-unfriendly agendas. It suggests solving the 10 big questions, spreading out from "small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded" Earth and switching to clean-energy electric transportation and fusion power.

Proactive involvement turns into practice the Einsteinian ingenuity that "a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels."

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Stephen Hawking's "spark of enquiry and wonder" impelled him toward proactive involvement in understanding nature: Stephen Hawking @Stephen Hawking, via Facebook April 12, 2016, @ https://www.facebook.com/stephenhawking/photos/a.722563527830747/1004427326311031/

Stephen Hawking pinpointed an integral quality of German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879-April 18, 1955) accordingly: "When I think about ingenuity, Einstein springs to mind;" Albert Einstein and his sister, Maja (Nov. 18, 1881-June 25, 1951), in 1885; Library of the ETH Zurich: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ETH-BIB-Einstein,_Albert_(1879-1955),_Winteler-Einstein,_Maja_(1881-1951)-Portrait-Portr_03143-A.tif

For further information:

Hawking, Stephen. 2018. "[Chapter] 10: How Do We Shape the Future?" Brief Answers to the Big Questions. New York NY: Bantam Books.

Hawking, Stephen; and Thomas Hertog. 27 April 2018. "A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?" Journal of High Energy Physics 2018(147). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP04(2018)147
Available via Springer @ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FJHEP04%282018%29147

Marriner, Derdriu. 18 October 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Scientific Literacy." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/10/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 25 October 2018. "Brief Answers to Big Questions: Divine Creation, Scientific Creation?" Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/10/brief-answers-to-big-questions-divine.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 1 November 2018. "Cosmological Beginnings in Hawking's Brief Answers to Big Questions." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/cosmological-beginnings-in-hawkings.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 8 November 2018. "Intelligent Life in Stephen Hawking's Brief Answers to Big Questions." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/intelligent-life-in-stephen-hawkings.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 15 November 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Predictable Futures?" Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 22 November 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Black Hole Interiors." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_22.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 29 November 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Time Travel." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_29.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 6 December 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Doomsday Earth?" Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/12/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_6.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 13 December 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Space Colonization." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/12/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_13.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 20 December 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Artificial Intelligence." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/12/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_20.html

Stephen Hawking @stephenhawking. 12 April 2016 · "Today, at the One World Observatory in New York City, Yuri Milner and I launched a mission to the stars. Mark Zuckerberg lent his support by joining the board of our new initiative, Breakthrough Starshot. Within the next generation, Breakthrough Starshot aims to develop a ‘nanocraft’ -- a gram-scale robotic space probe -- and use a light beam to push it to 20 percent of the speed of light. If we are successful, a flyby mission could reach Alpha Centauri about 20 years after launch, and send back images of any planets discovered in the system. Albert Einstein once imagined riding on a light beam, and his thought experiment led him to the theory of special relativity. A little over a century later, we have the chance to attain a significant fraction of that speed: 100 million miles an hour. Only by going that fast can we reach the stars on the time-scale of a human life. It is exciting to be involved in such an ambitious project, pushing the boundaries of ingenuity and engineering. - SH." Facebook.
Available @ https://www.facebook.com/stephenhawking/photos/a.722563527830747/1004427326311031/

Thursday, December 20, 2018

Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Artificial Intelligence

Summary: Artificial intelligence takes ninth place in 10 queries that theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking turns into Brief Answers to the Big Questions.

Multiple exposure image shows Puma (Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly, or Programmable Universal Manipulation Arm) industrial robotic arm in action, used for virtual reality development and studies at NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California; Monday, April 2, 1990: NASA/Dominic Hart, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

An acknowledged last work by a world-renowned theoretical physicist for posthumous publication by Bantam Books Oct. 15, 2018, assures artificial intelligence ninth place among 10 asked and answered questions for general readers.

Stephen Hawking (Jan. 8, 1942-March 14, 2018) builds the ninth chapter to Brief Answers to the Big Questions around the query, "Will artificial intelligence outsmart us?" The founder of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, England, in October 2018 correlates intelligence with adaptability and consciousness. Chapter 4 on extraterrestrial intelligence describes living beings, including humankind, as genes and metabolism and human-derived computer virus life forms as gene-like instructions and metabolism-like performance.

Chapter 3 encounters human-like life in carbon atom chains and non-human life forms in silicon atom chains and electro-magnetic, non-DNA-based, non-macromolecular machines that establish machine-engineered descendants.

The Future of Life Institute scientific advisory board member fits artificial intelligence among life and life-like forms that favor humankind or function fiendishly like computer viruses.

Chapter 9 gauges no qualitative, significant difference between computer memories and animal minds that generate information-processed outputs from information-gathered sight, smell, sound, taste and touch sensors. Moore's Law has computer memory capacity and maximum speed doubled every 18 months and therefore hints of computers as more intelligent than humankind within 100 years. Artificial intelligence that is so intelligent that it improves itself without human intervention is intimidating if its goal-oriented, task-completion itinerary is misaligned with that of humankind.

Artificial intelligence juggles autonomous vehicles, image classification, machine translation, question-answering systems and speech recognition against target-selecting autonomous weapons systems and the 2010 computer-triggered stock-market Flash Crash.

Irwin Good (Dec. 9, 1916-April 5, 2009) knew back in 1965 that no physical laws keep artificial intelligence from knowing particle arrangements superior to human brains.

The Future of Life Institute open letter January 2015 laments lack of immediate and long-term controls against artificial intelligence competitively, non-maliciously out-inventing, out-manipulating, out-smarting, out-weaponing humankind. A report to the European Parliament mentions legal rights of electronic personhood, like business's corporate personhood, for robots whose humankind-serving, non-menacing designs practically mandate kill switches. Thirty mega-cities, each with 10-plus million inhabitants by 2025, perhaps necessitate digital surrogates in two-plus places at once and robotized commerce of same-day purchase and receipt.

Artificial intelligence occasions automated voices for public announcements and telephone systems and perhaps digital actors for entertainment and interactive tutors for mass open online courses (MOOCs).

Artificial intelligence presents a computer winner of the game Go, self-driving cars, touch screens 150 years after invention of typewriters and imminently interacting, intuitive smart-home products.

Artificial intelligence perhaps queues up human mind amplification with silicon chip implants and wireless electronic interfaces for brain-controlled body movements and reverse paralysis in spinal-cord injuries. It ranges from brain-computer interfaces, as high-performing implants that risk infection and lower-performing electrodes, to quantum computing for genome-edited genetic engineering of Hawking's motor neurone disease. Temporal stretches sufficed between invention of fire and fire extinguishers even though artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons and synthetic biology suggest no second chances for human slip-ups.

Hawkingesque treatments for an overcrowded, overused Earth in a solar system and universe with respective 10-billion- and 27.6-billion-year shelf lives team artificial intelligence and space colonization.

Stephen Hawking emphasizes a robot's kill switch, which did not help Discovery One spacecraft scientists in controlling malfunctioning HAL in director Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, but, Hawking notes, "that was fiction;" replica of HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic) in Robot Hall of Fame, Carnegie Science Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Photojunkie, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Hawking, Stephen. 2018. "[Chapter] 9: Will Artificial Intelligence Outsmart Us?" Brief Answers to the Big Questions. New York NY: Bantam Books.

Marriner, Derdriu. 29 November 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Is Time Travel Possible?" Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_29.html

Thursday, December 13, 2018

Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Space Colonization

Summary: Space colonization has eighth place among 10 questions honed by theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking into Brief Answers to the Big Questions.

"This artist’s impression shows a view of the surface of the planet Proxima b orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. The double star Alpha Centauri AB also appears in the image to the upper-right of Proxima itself. Proxima b is a little more massive than the Earth and orbits in the habitable zone around Proxima Centauri, where the temperature is suitable for liquid water to exist on its surface.": Credit ESO/M. Kornmesser: CC BY 4.0 International, via European Southern Observatory

Space colonization accounts for eighth place in the 10 asked and answered questions that a world-renowned theoretical physicist arranged into a final work for posthumous publication by Bantam Books Oct. 15, 2018.

Stephen Hawking (Jan. 8, 1942-March 14, 2018) broaches space colonization in Chapter 4 on "Should We Colonise Space?" of his Brief Answers to the Big Questions. The editor of A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion collection of Albert Einstein's (March 14, 1879-April 18, 1955) scientific writings considers space colonization for human survival outside Earth. He describes human-crewed spacecraft for a lunar base within 30 years, Martian outposts within 50 years and exploration of the outer planet's moons within 200 years.

Program expenses for space exploration and space colonization minimally equal one-fourth of 1 percent of world gross domestic product and 0.1 percent of United States' GDP.

Crewed spacecraft on the Moon by 2050 and Mars by 2070, not probes on Titan and rovers on Mars, find out about humankind as interplanetary species.

Crewed space flight programs and zero-gravity flights, such as the one that gave Hawking a four-minute weightlessness experience in 2007, generate tomorrow's astrophysicists and space scientists. Space exploration has to have commercial entrepreneurship, such as that of Space X pioneer Elon Musk; governmental transparency; public interest, such as in lunar landings, 1969-1972. The International Space Station's zero orbital gravity incurs problematic liquids and such undesirable physiological changes as weakened bones that invalidate long-term survival on crewed space flights.

Zero liquid water and magnetic fields and respectively zero and one percent of the Earth's atmospheric pressure jeopardize space colonization of the lunar and Martian surfaces.

Metal and mineral mining, nuclear and solar power sources and oxygen and water sources in polar ice caps keep subsurface Mars and the subsurface Moon colonizable.

Coldness, gaseousness, hotness and smallness respectively leave Jovian and Saturnian moons, Jupiter and Saturn, Mercury and Venus, and Martian moons off space exploration for space colonization. One percent of 1,000 stars within 30 light years of the Earth theoretically means 10 Earth-like planets within the Goldilocks planet-star distance for surface liquid water. Chemical rockets, at 1.86-mile (3-kilometer) hourly speeds, net respective 130- to 270-day and 3-million-year navigation times to Mars and Alpha Centauri, nearest star system to Earth.

The Breakthrough Starshot research and development program organized by Hawking and Yuri Milner in 2016 offers, perhaps imminently, light propulsion of miniaturized spacecraft by phase-locked lasers.

One hundred gigawatts of power from 100 lasers, perhaps imminently, propel 1,000 0.79-plus-inch (2-plus-centimeter) Star Chip probes with 0.07-plus-ounce (2-plus-gram) sails at 100,000,000-mile (160,934,400-kilometer) hourly speeds.

Star Chip quests queue up asteroid flybys; Mars flyby within one hour; Pluto within days; interstellar space-traveling Voyager within one week; Alpha Centauri within 20-some years. Realizable space colonization of Earth-like Proxima b remains a reason for Star Chip space exploration of Alpha Centauri despite extreme acceleration, cold, collisions, turbulence and vacuums. Human sojourns as separate species, "civilized" earthling, interplanetary travelers and interstellar voyagers respectively start 2 million and 10,000 years ago and in 100 to 500 years.

Einstein theorized light-beam travel and general and special relativity within 20 years, 1895-1915, today's theorized time for tomorrow's nanocraft space exploration that triggers human space colonization.

"NASA plans to grow food on future spacecraft and on other planets as a food supplement for astronauts. Fresh food, such as vegetables, provide essential vitamins and nutrients that will help enable sustainable deep space pioneering." Credit NASA: Public Domain, via NASA

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Hawking, Stephen, ed. 2009. A Stubbornly Persistent Illusion: The Essential Scientific Works of Albert Einstein. Philadelphia PA: Running Press Book Publishers.

Hawking, Stephen. 2018. "[Chapter] 8: Should We Colonise Space?" Brief Answers to the Big Questions. New York NY: Bantam Books.

Marriner, Derdriu 25 October 2018. "Brief Answers to Big Questions: Divine Creation, Scientific Creation?" Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/10/brief-answers-to-big-questions-divine.html

Marriner, Derdriu 22 November 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Black Hole Interiors." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_22.html

Thursday, December 6, 2018

Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Doomsday Earth?

Summary: Doomsday Earth gets seventh place among 10 questions that theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking gathers into Brief Answers to the Big Questions.

Stephen Hawking notes that Earthlings may possibly escape from Doomsday Earth, but "The same of course may not be possible for the millions of other species that inhabit the Earth, and that will be on our conscience as a race;" Noah's Ark, 1846 oil on canvas by American Quaker folk painter Edward Hicks (April 4, 1780-Aug. 23, 1849); Philadelphia Museum of Art: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Doomsday Earth angles into seventh place amid the 10 questions asked and answered by a world-renowned theoretical physicist for a posthumous publication, acknowledged as his last, by Bantam Books Oct. 15, 2018.

Chapter 7 on "Will We Survive on Earth?" blends Doomsday Earth into Stephen Hawking's (Jan. 8, 1942-March 14, 2018) book Brief Answers to the Big Questions. Physicists for the January 2018 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists calculated the Doomsday Clock of economic, environmental, military and political catastrophe at two minutes to midnight in January 2018. The symbolic Doomsday Clock dates to June 1947, when its seven minutes to midnight discerned Doomsday Earth after World War II (Sept. 1, 1939-Sept. 2, 1945).

The author of A Brief History of Time, A Briefer History of Time and the former's illustrated edition eschews economic and social marginalization and political instability.

Doomsday Earth follows from world government-industrial-military complexes flouting the consequences of fostering solvable deforestation, disease, drought, extinction, famine, global warming, overpopulation, overproduction, polar meltdowns and war.

Greenhouse effects from unreflected solar energy and unsequestered carbon dioxide give Doomsday Earth sulphuric acid rain and Venus-like temperatures at 250 degrees Celsius (482 degrees Fahrenheit). A violent universe's laws of physics and probability hurtle huge asteroids against Doomsday Earth still hurting from Chernobyl April 25-26, 1986, and Fukushima March 11, 2011. Environmental catastrophe or nuclear terrorism, confrontation or accident, such as Japan's and Russia's seven and 32 years ago, is imminent sometime within the next 1,000 years.

Doomsday Earth jeopardizes millions of species without whom un-Noah-like humankind, who junk sentient animals, especially cats, journey to habitable planets before environmental catastrophe joins nuclear disaster.

A violent universe's laws of physics and probability knell midnight on the Doomsday Clock for Doomsday Earth from preventable anti-environmentalism and war-mongering and unpreventable asteroid collisions.

Political will and scientific and technological illiteracy outside government-industrial-military complexes lag Doomsday Earth behind Moon-Jupiter flights from lunar bases in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Fictionalized futures since Herbert George Wells (Sept. 21, 1866-Aug. 13, 1946) manifest static, scientifically and technologically literate, steady-state societies even though scientific technology realistically moves around. Scientific technology needs to nestle infinite-energy, infinite-history, infinite-space, infinite-time quantum mechanics and single-history, space-time general relativity within one complete unified theory within 100 to 1,000 years.

Max Planck's (April 23, 1858-Oct. 4, 1947) quantum theory offers particle scales of 100,000 billion billion billionth of a millimeter for mathematical equations and particle accelerators.

The complete theory of currently contradictory, ultimately unifiable general relativity and quantum mechanics presents Doomsday Earth humankind survival smarts among the violent universe's infinite-dimension, infinite-energy particles.

Complete theories queue up space exploration for space colonization away from Doomsday Earth even as genetic engineering qualifies as super-accelerated biological evolution into enhanced superhuman beings. Genetic engineering realizes pathogen- and pest-resistant edible plants and, perhaps within 1,000 years, redesigned superhumans for apocalyptic Doomsday Earth; cold, irradiated space; light-speed travel; unearthly exoplanets. Scientific and technological developments to stop the Doomsday Clock suggest respectively sophisticated biological and electronic systems for human and computer survival on and off Doomsday Earth.

Doomsday Earth perhaps tenders humankind 100 to 1,000 years to turn back climate change, turn down greenhouse effects, turn off nuclear weapons and turn up exoplanets.

Stephen Hawking foresees an "almost inevitable" crippling of Earth by "a nuclear confrontation or environmental catastrophe" in the next 1,000 years; mushroom cloud from Castle Romeo nuclear test, conducted 1954 on barge in Castle Bravo crater, Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands; Saturday, March 27, 1954: United States Department of Energy, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Hawking, Stephen. 1996. The Illustrated A Brief History of Time. Updated and Expanded Edition. New York NY: Bantam Books.

Hawking, Stephen. 1998. A Brief History of Time. Updated and Expanded. Tenth Anniversary Edition. New York NY: Bantam Books.

Hawking, Stephen; with Leonard Mlodinow. 2008. A Briefer History of Time: The Science Classic Made More Accessible. New York NY: Bantam Books.

Hawking, Stephen. 2018. "[Chapter] 7: Will We Survive on Earth?" Brief Answers to the Big Questions. New York NY: Bantam Books.

Marriner, Derdriu 29 November 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Is Time Travel Possible?" Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_29.html

Thursday, November 29, 2018

Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Is Time Travel Possible?

Summary: Time travel claims sixth place in 10 inquiries collated by theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking into Brief Answers to the Big Questions.

The final work, posthumously published through Bantam Books Oct. 15, 2018, by a world-renowned theoretical physicist acclaims time travel as sixth among 10 questions about the universe's origins and relationships to humans.

Stephen Hawking (Jan. 8, 1942-March 14, 2018) brings up "closed time-like curves" through Chapter 7's "Is Time Travel Possible?" in Brief Answers to the Big Questions. Science fiction calls for space and time warps through extra dimensions to carry cargo and crew to certain spaces, or future and past times, and back. Earth-surface triangles; Euclid's (from Greek Εὐκλείδης, Efkleídis, "renowned," 325-270 B.C.?) flat-surface, straight-line triangles; saddle-shaped surface triangles respectively come to more than, precisely, less than 180 degrees.

Euclidean geometry explains the Earth's flat, three-dimensional space of down-up, east-west and north-south directionally at right angles to one another in a triangle of 180 degrees.

Curved spaces fit into Bernhard Riemann's (Sept. 17, 1826-July 20, 1866) mathematical descriptions in 1854 and Albert Einstein's (March 14, 1879-April 18, 1955) general relativity theory.

Special relativity in 1905 gathered three-dimensional space of distance, latitude and longitude and fourth-dimensional time into space-time, gauged similarly by non-moving, but differently by moving, observers. Its application, at less than light's 186,282.398-mile (299,792.458-kilometer) speeds per second, has eight- and 50,000-year round-trip travel respectively to the nearest star and Milky Way center. General relativity in 1915 identified space-time as curved, distorted, warped by its inclusive energy and matter and implied semi-bent light and radio waves near the Sun.

Kurt Gödel (April 28, 1906-Jan. 14, 1978) in 1948 joined general relativity field equations and an albeit non-expanding universe of rotating matter into time travel backward.

Curved, distorted, warped Gödel and cosmic-string universes respectively keep the small cosmological constant too large and stretchable, super-long, thin backward-curled, backward-traveling strings in 1.1023-octillion (100-billion-billion-billion-tonne) tension.

Big-Banged and time-travelling universes respectively lacked curved, distorted, warped space-time and launch shortcut, time-travelling, tube-like wormholes by loading negative-mass matter and negative-energy density into saddle-shaped surfaces. The electromagnetic, gravitational, quantum Uncertainty Principle militates against simultaneously well-defined positions and speeds for paired antiparticles and particles moving together, apart and together for mutual annihilation. The Casimir effect nets indirect, virtual observations of paired antiparticles' and particles' negative and zero energy densities respectively between and outside two close, parallel metal plates.

Experimental evidence in bent light of curved space-time and Casimir effect confirmation of negative-warped, saddle-shaped space-time offer apparent support to time travel through warped, wormholed space-time.

The co-author with Roger Penrose of The Nature of Space and Time Sept. 22, 2015, presents the alternate-path alternative-histories approach after return from time travel forward.

The repeat-story, unblocked-path consistent-histories' approach qualifies as more like Richard Feynman's (May 11, 1918-Feb. 15, 1988) sum-over-histories approach than David Deutsch's alternative-histories approach. The sum-over-histories approach resists, under quantum theory rules, one unique history since "the universe has every single possible history, each with its own [greater, lesser] probability." Hawking's Chronology Protection Conjecture stops time travel backward in warped space-time by sustaining virtual articles as closed-trajectory particles with large densities and energies and low probabilities.

Special relativity and M-theory respectively suggest time travel at swifter than the speed of light and at mix-ups of curved, warped seven-dimensional and flat, four-dimensional space-times.

Phenomenon of gravitational lensing involves distortion of light from background galaxies by a nearer galaxy cluster's gravitational field warping of space-time; gravitational lensing by Abell 370, a galaxy cluster located 5 billion light years away, manifests as arcs and streaks of background galaxies' stretched images; image credit NASA, ESA/Hubble, HST Frontier Fields: European Space Agency (europeanspaceagency), CC BY SA 2.0 Generic, via Flickr

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

artist's 1998 representation of passage by a hypothetical spacecraft with a negative energy induction ring through a traversable wormhole: NASA Glenn Research Center/Les Bossinas, Public Domain, via NASA @ https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/multimedia/artgallery/art_feature_001_CD1998_76634.html

Hawking, Stephen. 2018. "[Chapter] 6: Is Time Travel Possible?" Brief Answers to the Big Questions. New York NY: Bantam Books.

Hawking, Stephen. "Chronology Protection: Making the World Safe for Historians." In: Stephen W. Hawking, Kip S. Thorne, Igor Novikov, Timothy Ferris and Alan Lightman, The Future of Space-Time. Introduction by Richard Price. New York NY: Norton Paperback, W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.

Hawking, Stephen; and Roger Penrose. 2015. The Nature of Space and Time. With a New Afterword by the Authors. Princeton NJ: Isaac Newton Institute Series of Lectures, Princeton University Press.

Thursday, November 22, 2018

Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Black Hole Interiors

Summary: Black hole interiors emerge fifth in 10 questions that theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking examines in Brief Answers to the Big Questions.

binary system GRO 1655-40 comprises a star and a black hole; artist's representation of GRO 1655-40, with black hole pulling gas away from the star, by science illustrator Melissa Weiss: NASA/CXC (Chandra X-Ray Center)/M. Weiss, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Black hole interiors approach the halfway mark as fifth of 10 answered questions in the posthumous publication Oct. 15, 2018, of the last work by a world-renowned mathematics professor and theoretical physicist.

Chapter 5's "What Is Inside a Black Hole?" blends black hole interiors into Stephen Hawking's (Jan. 8, 1942-March 14, 2018) Brief Answers to the Big Questions. Albert Einstein's (March 14, 1879-April 18, 1955) theory of general relativity in 1915 concerns time, space and gravity, only electric force with ever-attractive and long-range consequences. John Michell (Dec. 25, 1724-April 21, 1793) before, and John Wheeler (July 9, 1911-April 13, 2008) after, the Einstein equations discerned dark stars and black holes.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Oct. 19, 1910-Aug. 21, 1995) and Lev Landau (Jan. 22, 1908-April 1, 1968) respectively exempted white dwarfs and neutron stars from fuel-exhausted gravitational collapse.

Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904-Feb. 18, 1967), Hartland Snyder (Feb. 24, 1913-May 22, 1962) and George Volkoff (Feb. 23, 1914-April 24, 2000) featured more massive stars.

Thermal pressure from hydrogen conversion into helium goes against gravitational collapse in stellar masses greater than neutron stars and white dwarfs until they go through fuel. Oppenheimer, Snyder and Volkoff, and Roger Penrose heralded respectively "uniform spherically systematic symmetric" and non-spherical, non-uniform huge stars gravity-honed into compact, fuel-exhausted, infinitely dense, single-pointed singularities. Identification of quasi-stellar objects, quasar 3C273 in 1963, indicated gravitational energy releases from gravitational collapse into singularities whose information-gathering inspection the Penrose cosmic censorship conjecture inhibits.

Even gravitational pull from huger, not uneven pull from smaller, black hole interiors never jeopardizes journeys across entryway event horizons where gravity jams light back inside.

Additional in-falling matter and radiation and colliding, merging black holes keep increasing event horizon surface areas, beyond the sum of pre-merger areas in the latter's case.

Jacob Bekenstein in 1972 and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Sept. 14, 2015, list three stationary-state black hole parameters: angular momentum (spin); electric charge; mass. Event horizon area properties manifest the first and second laws of thermodynamics about entropy (disorder) increasing with time and proportional changes in system energy and entropy. The Uncertainty Principle negates simultaneously noting particle position, size and speed; nets long-wavelength lightweights and short-wavelength heavyweights; nurtures black holes from objects heavier than salt grains.

Thermal radiation emissions from some decoupled virtual antiparticles and particles outrunning super-strong gravity occasions space-distorted, time-distorted black hole interiors with decreased masses and sizes into oblivion.

Thermal radiation emissions preserve nothing about black hole interiors even though scientifically deterministic laws present an evolving universe of non-created, non-destroyed, transferred, transformed energy, information, matter.

Flat-looking space-time away from curved, distorted, warped black hole interiors queues up supertranslation charges of uncurved, undistorted, unwarped space and time respectively conserving momentum and energy. Sasha Haco, Hawking, Malcolm Perry and Andrew Strominger regard charge, mass and momentum properties and super-rotation and supertranslation charges as retrievable information about black hole interiors. Their calculations since 2016 suggest all black hole entropy-related information from super-rotation (spinning) charges and some information about black hole interiors from super-translation (non-spin movement) charges.

Black holes transmit charge, mass and spin information even as surface storage areas on entryway event horizons teem with information thereby unlost about black hole interiors.

Ongoing revisions of light-year distances place black holes A 0620-00 and GRO 1655-40 closer to the sun than previous calculations; Stephen Hawking's voice has been beaming since June 15, 2018, to A 0620-00, currently considered as the nearest known black hole, with arrival at A 0620-00's event horizon slated for around the year 5475; artist's impression of GRO 1655-40 by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics computer animator/video producer April J. Hobart: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Foellmi, Cédric. 2009. "What Is the Closest Black Hole to the Sun?" New Astronomy, vol. 14, issue 8 (November): 674-691.
Available via Semantic Scholar @ https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/73d5/2dfbf6be1c9aba2164e9875be2f5e46b52e2.pdf

Hawking, Stephen. 1994. Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays. New York NY: Bantam Books.

Hawking, Stephen. 2018. "[Chapter] 5: What Is Inside a Black Hole?" Brief Answers to the Big Questions. New York NY: Bantam Books.