Free Republic

He spoke with the religious fervor of a modern-day Jonathan Edwards, but instead of sinners in the hands of an angry God, we were humans in the hands of an angry universe. Stephen Hawking lost his longtime battle with ALS on March 14, 2018 — what would have been Albert Einstein’s 139th birthday. While Hawking’s scientific achievements led the field of astrophysics forward in a number of important ways, his impact on the general public was much more of a mixed bag.Hawking took us to the limits of space and time. In the 1960s, his doctoral work helped us better...

Editor’s Note: The following is a brief letter from Ray Kurzweil, cofounder and member of the board at Singularity Group, Singularity Hub’s parent company, in response to the Future of Life Institute’s recent letter, “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter.” The FLI letter addresses the risks of accelerating progress in AI and the ensuing race to commercialize the technology and calls for a pause in the development of algorithms more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4, the large language model behind the company’s ChatGPT Plus and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot. The FLI letter has thousands of signatories—including deep learning pioneer, Yoshua...

Louisiana State University physicists have leveraged quantum information theory techniques to reveal a mechanism for amplifying, or "stimulating," the production of entanglement in the Hawking effect in a controlled manner. Furthermore, these scientists propose a protocol for testing this idea in the laboratory using artificially produced event horizons. These results have been recently published in Physical Review Letters, "Quantum aspects of stimulated Hawking radiation in an analog white-black hole pair," where Ivan Agullo, Anthony J. Brady and Dimitrios Kranas present these ideas and apply them to optical systems containing the analog of a pair white-black hole. Stephen Hawking added more...

A person falling into a black hole and being stretched while approaching the black hole’s horizon. Credit: Leo Rodriguez and Shanshan Rodriguez, CC BY-ND =================================================================== To solve the mysteries of black holes, a human should just venture into one. However, there is a rather complicated catch: A human can do this only if the respective black hole is supermassive and isolated, and if the person entering the black hole does not expect to report the findings to anyone in the entire universe. We are both physicists who study black holes, albeit from a very safe distance. Black holes are among...

Earth Is a Whole Lot Closer to Our Galaxy's Supermassive Black Hole Than We Thought MICHELLE STARR 27 NOVEMBER 2020 It seems that Earth has been misplaced. According to a new map of the Milky Way galaxy, the Solar System's position isn't where we thought it was. Not only is it closer to the galactic centre - and the supermassive hole therein, Sagittarius A* - it's orbiting at a faster clip. It's nothing to be concerned about; we're not actually moving closer to Sgr A*, and we're in no danger of being slurped up. Rather, our map of the Milky...

An immense black hole 100,000 times bigger than the sun has been discovered at the heart of the Milky Way. The enormous void, which lies around 25,000 light years from Earth, could help scientists uncover the how stars, galaxies and even life itself came to be in the universe. ..." According to reports, this newly-discovered black hole could rank as the second largest ever seen in the Milky Way. Despite its immense size, scientists have called it a "mini me" version of its super-massive "cousin" known as Sagittitarius A*.

That’s the conclusion reached by one researcher from the University of North Carolina: black holes can’t exist in our Universe — not mathematically, anyway. “I’m still not over the shock,” said Laura Mersini-Houghton, associate physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. “We’ve been studying this problem for a more than 50 years and this solution gives us a lot to think about.” In a news article spotlighted by UNC the scenario suggested by Mersini-Houghton is briefly explained. Basically, when a massive star reaches the end of its life and collapses under its own gravity after blasting its outer layers into space —...

Stephen Hawking has shocked physicists by admitting “there are no black holes”. In a paper published online, Professor Hawking instead argues there are “grey holes”. “The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes—in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity,” he says in the paper, called Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting For Black Holes.He says that the idea of an event horizon, from which light cannot escape, is flawed. He suggests that instead light rays attempting to rush away from the black hole’s core will be held as though stuck on a...