Oh my goodness... the man was iconic...

*sighs... thanks for the info Fangs...

V.

I am so sorry to relate the information.
Mr. Hawking was arguably the greatest mind of our generation. I can only think of one other who approached his mental ability and that is Albert Einstein.

I agree...

V.

A remarkable man I must say

Indeed! A man who exceeded in all ways!

I also posted a journal about hawking death too. U can check it out if you want. It’s under my journals

It's sad to see him gone. He was my hero when I was younger.

He is still my hero, perhaps now more than ever. He was a hero embodied!!

We know exactly what he would have come up with; he was still working on it. It was a solution to the black hole information loss paradox. He'd worked out soft electromagnetic hair' (The story behind the name is intriguing.) and was working on an equivalent for the other three fundamental forces. We can only hope that another brainbox out there is ready to pick up where he left off.

And so soon after we lost Joe Polchinski, the Brane Master.

Perhaps....perhaps.... the one thing for sure is that we will never know now. So sad! And yet he exceeded all the expectations of his doctors and therapists. The man was amazing!!

Odd that I had never heard of Mr. Polchinski. I wonder why now that I have researched him and found out who and what he was. Truly this was a double blow to our understanding of the universe. Or should I say universes?

An exceptional journey indeed, turning 5 years into 50 with sheer grit and technological advances. He's one of the few humans that I have to admit is truly exceptional.

Polchinski is a bit more niche; there's a good post about hi by a colleague here: https://profmattstrassler.com/2018/.....oe-polchinski/ He was genius in a similar vein but not as public. He lacked the tragic circumstances to thrust him into the spotlight. He amazed those who worked in his field, but to the public what was he but another egghead? It is a great pity to see both these men go, along with the discoveress of ark matter last year.

Someone discovered ark matter? Like from Noah's ark?

Yup, mysterious and apparently important stuff that has long been rumored to exist but hasn't ever been seen by the human eye.

The farcical part of it was that the nobel committee refused to give the discoverers a prize (Dark energy? Sure! Dark MATTER... eh.) But happily(?) now that the sole female member of the team is dead they're thinking of it. (Since only the surviving members will get the prize and money.)

Me, I want to find out if any antimatter exists in quantity. Have you ever read Jack Williamson's SeeTee Shock and SeeTee Ship? very interesting. Especially the idea of time running backwards near large bodies of antimatter.

I suggest you check out the webfiction 'Orthogonal'. It asks what the unvierse would be like if one minus sign was turned to a plus. (Specifically the one that relates moving through space to moving through time.) The result is a universe where (Among many MANY other things) the flow of time depends on your speed to the point where you can go backwards or freeze time at the right speed. (Backwards objects being antimatter and 'orthogonal' or time frozen objects having infinite speed.) Even the bits that are free to read are quite curious: http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html

There's excerpts, but also a big section on HOW that weird universe works that is intriguing.


Me, I've never been fond of antimatter time reversal (Or time travel in general.) It poses too many problems with causality. Plus given what we see of the universe it seems almost certain there's no big antimatter chunks out there. (And good thing too!) Mind his 'contraterrene' matter isn't really antimatter as such, given our modern understanding of it.

Of course you generate a steady stream of antimatter just by existing; the potassium-40 in your cells occasionally emits positrons. (It's also one of the rare decays that's affected by chemistry -fun fact!)

Thanks! I'll check it out.

I like the idea of time travel! It's rather a fun concept to play around with.

It can be, but people are so wishy-washy with it. It's become a shorthand now, cliche in implementation and effects. It's rare to see a universe where actual thought has been put into it and it's getting worse. (ix A Sound of Thunder in book vs movie form.)

Some of the older books had a lot of interesting ways of using it to advance plots. I know it's cliche, but By His Bootstraps by Heinlein was an early fun one. Also Times Without Number by John Brunner. And a really fun one to me is a collection of stories about Svetz, a would be time traveling collector for a zoo to be filled with extinct animals, whose time travel device is a bit wonky and takes him to alternate universes instead. So he ends up with a unicorn instead of a horse and similar mistakes. A fun book for light reading by Larry Niven.

It generally HAS to be the older books, when it was a high idea and not the low one we have now. Its popularity has made authors lazy and they do not properly think through the consequences of such a powerful technology. I struggle to see anything modern that can replicate that old school charm.

Also, WE had unicorns, they were as ugly as hell. https://www.thecut.com/2016/03/unic.....-but-ugly.html Indeed it's surprising how many weird and exotic animals existed in our past.

I wonder, however, if that guy's 'time travel' device didn't function like those in Issac Arthur's canon. (Multiverse, no time travel. Such devices disintegrate you, but in one of the many alternate dimensions random atoms form into a copy of you by pure chance. Like Star Trek's transporters.)

True that. The old time writers generally thought things through more. Well, the good ones anyway.

But did they have the same affinity to virgins? somehow I doubt it. =p

I dunno. He always got back to the same universe he left. but then there was something about his 'time travel cage' being an extension of the universe he was born into with some kind of connection between his universe and the one he traveled to. So I think that particular one was one of the less well thought out in a scientific respect, and written more as a fun 'what if' type of story.

Virgin affinity? As in the authors liking them or virgins liking the authors?

'The same universe' is relative; there's a story 'The Parting Of The Ways' where an interunviersal machine is invented. You select a target when you go, but when you go to return you see a 'band' because 'your' universe has split into many slightly different copies while you've been gone. You pick one and everything is fine... until one guy who's been trying to 'game' the bands crashes his device into a copy of himself who had also chosen that universe.

In that case traveling guy again incinerates himself, but in some branch of the universe he left a copy of him randomly reappears -with extras. In most universes he's dead and gone, in many more he 'returns' in a garbled state, or not remembering the trip, or with a six foot vampire bunny instead of a unicorn... But in infinite copies he appears just as if he was returning from another dimension. And in those cases, can we say he HAS traveled? What if the first machine left a small pile of ash behind?

More like the usual. Unicorns only liking virgins.

Too much overthiking here for me.

*Nods*

Rabbit brain. They weren't meant for comprehending cosmology and other dimensions. (I mean the most famous rabbit thinkers believed their world to be a literal piece of crap.)

Also,those unicorns gotta get their act together. This is why they died out; waaaay to picky.

Insults won't get you anywhere with me. I thought you knew that by now.

I do. The problem is 'getting somewhere' with you can be a very dangerous thing.

You're smarter than you look.
(not that that would take much)

Thanks, YOUR intelligence is matched only by your beauty.

Why, thank you sweetie! That's so nice of you to say.

Yes, yes it is. Nice.

I was surprised as well. A remarkable man.

Truly remarkable. Not only in his intelligence but his ability and work to overcome his disabilities. It will be a long time....if ever....till we see his like again.

Oh yeah, he's a reminder that many of the limitations we perceive are placed on ourselves. You know he was on Star Trek once, right? :)

I may have heard that about him. Though I'm not sure. Did he portray himself? And which Star Trek was it?

Never mind. I found it. Pretty cool too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEa7CfPaCRw

Yeah, he's the only person in Star Trek to portray himself (albeit holographically).

Love that scene too!

Hehe, it's a good one!

Thank you for posting this and for the link. He was a super genius who deserves every tribute he gets. ^!^

I'm sad to have had to, but it needed to be known.

You have that correct! Mr. Hawking was almost supernaturally intelligent. Would that our world could be enriched by more like him!

he will be missed !! ^v^

For sure, little one. He was arguably the finest mind since Einstein. Who knows what he might have thought up with more time?

Einstein and and Hawking were the 2 greatest ever in my book !! ^v^

I agree!

sad day :/

Indeed! What a loss to humanity!!

Very sad, thanks for update hun! :(

Bummer news, but is too much not to share.

A brilliant mind is gone.

I hope the people honor him by putting
his wheelchair in the Smithsonian Museum.

That would be fitting indeed!