Abrief history of Hawking.

[alokmohan]

A brief history of the Hawkings <br />Lucy Hawking tells Hannah Stephenson about writing a book with her famous scientist father, Stephen, her battle with alcohol - and how she and her father split with their partners <br />Monday, September 24, 2007 <br /><br />Lucy Hawking dips into her rucksack, pulling out a handful of space rocks (the sweet kind) which she kindly gives me for my children.<br /><br /><br />She's been doing a series of book events for children, she tells me, fishing out a miniature Simpsons doll of her father, Professor Stephen Hawking, complete with wheelchair (in honour, presumably, of his cameo in the show), and some freeze-dried ice-cream as eaten by astronauts, which she uses in her presentations.<br /><br />It's fun stuff, the kind of eye-catching fare which would make youngsters sit up and listen to snippets of science. <br /><br />And it's a clever introduction to her new children's book, George's Secret Key To The Universe, the first of a trilogy written in collaboration with her famous scientist father.<br /><br />Single mother Lucy (36), who has a nine-year-old autistic son, William, is bright, witty and easy to talk to - unless you veer into her family's personal life.<br /><br />She is fervently protective of her father, refusing to answer questions about his private life or about his ex-wife Elaine, who faced accusations of abuse three years ago amid stories that he had been cut, beaten and left out in the sun on the hottest day of 2003. Prof Hawking has always denied the allegations.<br /><br />That period, coupled with the disintegration of Lucy's own marriage to William's father, Alex Mackenzie Smith, a former member of the UN Peace Corps in Bosnia, led her to a descent into alcohol, which resulted in her spending a month at a clinic in Arizona.<br /><br />Today, sipping mineral water, she simply wants to move on, she says, and deal with the much happier place in which she finds herself with her father.<br /><br />"Life is not a bed of roses for anyb

 

[ashish27]

hmmn, you seem to be obsessed with Hawking. There are also many other scientist. Have you heard about Jill Tarter? Her work is no less significant.

 

[alokmohan]

Many of you responded to yesterday's item about the work on naked singularities, arguing that in fact the team hadn't done anything new. I think that's partially my fault in not giving some more background, and since it's interesting stuff, here goes:<br /><br />A black hole itself is typically created, physicists believe, when an object such as a star collapses in on itself. Its gravitational force twists space around it (as expressed in Einstein's theory of general relativity) so strongly that ultimately, light itself can't escape. The radius at which regular laws of physics break down is called the event horizon. Because nothing can pass out of this zone, there seems to be no way that scientists can observe the black hole, or singularity, that exists beyond this point, a phenomenon that's been dubbed the “cosmic censorship hypothesis.†<br /><br />By the early 1990s, some physicists had suggested the notion of a “naked†singularity, or one that did not have this event horizon, and might thus be observable from the outside. The idea was controversial enough to disgust Cambridge's Stephen Hawking, who in 1991 bet two proponents of the theory $100 and a T-shirt that no such phenomenon was possible. <br /><br />It took six years for the bet to be concluded. A University of Texas supercomputer analysis showed that under specific conditions, a naked singularity could be formed. On the strength of this, Hawking reluctantly paid up, with the bet's bounty including T-shirts reading “Nature Abhors a Naked Singularity.â€<br /><br />But perhaps fittingly for the mysteries of a black hole, other physicists argued that Hawking shouldn't have paid, because even though the naked singularity could exist, the probability of it forming was mathematically zero. <br /><br />Tricky, yeah?<br /><br />For more on the bet, a 1997 New York Times article outlines the story well here. And a Princeton professor's response on the zero-probability issue is here. <br /><br />The new work from the

 

[alokmohan]

Plese enlighten me about Jill Tarter.

 

[alokmohan]

Jill Cornell Tarter (born 1944) is an American astronomer and the current director of the Center for SETI Research. She holds the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute.<br /><br />Tarter received her undergraduate education at Cornell University and her PhD from the University of California. Tarter has worked on a number of major scientific projects, most relating to the search for extraterrestrial life. As a graduate student, she worked on the radio-search project SERENDIP. She was project scientist for NASA's High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS) in 1992 and 1993 and subsequently director of Project Phoenix (HRMS reconfigured) under the auspices of the SETI Institute. She was co-creator of the HabCat in 2002, a principal component of Project Phoenix.<br /><br />Tarter has published dozens of technical papers and lectures extensively both on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the need for proper science education. Her work in the astrobiology field and her success as a female scientist have garnered achievement awards from Women in Aerospace and NASA, amongst others. Tarter was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2002 and a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences in 2003. She was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in 2001.<br /><br />Tarter was one of the inspirations for Ellie Arroway, the character played by Jodi Foster in the movie Contact. She conversed with the actress for months before and during filming.<br /><br />Tarter also interacted with the students at IIT Bombay during Techfest 2007 via a video conference. [1]<br />

 

[ashish27]

good! <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /> you decided to self-enlighten yourself! that should be the spirit! <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" />