A gathering of great scientists who individually will tell a personal story related to science.
Tracy Day, Brian Green (The Elegant Universe), Ira Flatow (Science Radio Host), Neil deGrasse Tyson (The Cosmos), Richard Dawkins (A Selfish Gene), Bill Nye (The Science Guy), Neal Stephenson (Science Fiction Author)
By Bob Fredericks
Stephen Hawking’s decades-old black-hole theory has been confirmed by another scientist — and that may finally land the renowned physicist on the short list for a Nobel Prize.
Hawking — whose life with his former wife and struggle with motor neuron disease were dramatized in the 2014 movie “The Theory of Everything” — calculated back in 1974 that tiny particles should be able to rob black holes of a minuscule fraction of their energy and then escape.
That means that the black holes would slowly evaporate over time, spewing out all the dust, light and passing stars they had swallowed in a trickle of heat.
Conventional wisdom at the time said that black holes were places where gravity pulled so hard that nothing could get out, including light.
The development could open up a bizarre vision of the universe in which black holes can cough themselves into nothingness, Hawking said during recent lectures on the BBC and at Harvard.
“This raises a serious problem that strikes at the heart of our understanding of science,” he said.
“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”
For a man with an impressive educational C.V., Ben Carson makes a lot of intellectual missteps. In his September 16th debate performance, he displayed a profound lack of foreign-policy knowledge; last Sunday, when he said, on “Meet the Press,” that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” he may have seriously crippled his campaign. Still, there’s one area in which Carson’s credentials have seemed unimpeachable. Many people assume that, as a successful surgeon, he has a solid knowledge of technical, medical, and scientific issues.
With the wide release of video from a speech that Carson made to his fellow Seventh-Day Adventists in 2012, however, it’s becoming clear that there are significant gaps. In the speech, he made statements on subjects ranging from evolution to the Big Bang that suggest he never learned or chooses to ignore basic, well-tested scientific concepts.
h/t: The New Yorker
Always Question Authority 