Due to popular demand, Cambridge University has made Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis freely available online:
Demand for Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis intermittently crashed part of Cambridge University's website as physics fans flocked to read his work. Prof Hawking's 1966 thesis "Properties of expanding universes" was made freely available for the first time on the publications section of university's website at 00:01 BST. More than 60,000 have so far accessed his work as a 24-year-old postgraduate.
Prof Hawking said by making it available he hoped to "inspire people". He added: "Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding. "It's wonderful to hear how many people have already shown an interest in downloading my thesis - hopefully they won't be disappointed now that they finally have access to it!"
[...] Since May 2016, 199 requests were made for the PhD - most of which are believed to be from the general public rather than academics. The next most requested publication was asked for just 13 times. Previously, to read Hawking's PhD in full, people had to pay £65 to the university library to scan a copy or physically go to the library to read it.
Here it is (not responding as I try to load it).
Also at Varsity.
[Access to the document remains intermittent at this time. - Ed]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @12:19PM (9 children)
If you want to avoid people overcrowding your network, you should do what microsoft did with the Feynman lectures: use a format that nobody can actually read.
Then you're safe.
Otherwise the crazy science nerds will be furiously pressing refresh until they can get at the good bits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @01:36PM (7 children)
No need to furiously do anything. I grabbed the papers last night using wget -t0. It's like people have no idea how to deal with intermittent network connectivity.
I'm at work right now, and I don't visit torrent sites at work for obvious reasons, but has a torrent been posted anywhere? My usual sources didn't have it when I looked last night. A torrent seems like the best way to deal with this. I suppose if Cambridge Apollo is still DDoSed when I get home and no sign of torrents, it'll be up to me to do the needful. For science!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @01:42PM (5 children)
Oh, right, in case anybody else wants to do the needful, I should post the URLs to the PDFs I obtained thanks to the Wayback Machine [archive.org].
wget -t0 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1810/251038/PR-PHD-05437_CUDL2017-reduced.pdf?sequence=15&isAllowed=y [cam.ac.uk]
wget -t0 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1810/251038/Hawking-1966-PhD_reduced_size.pdf?sequence=10&isAllowed=y [cam.ac.uk]
wget -t0 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1810/251038/PR-PHD-05437.pdf?sequence=7&isAllowed=y [cam.ac.uk]
They're all the same document in various sizes. From the top they're 32 MB, 12 MB, and 72 MB.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @03:24PM (1 child)
high-quality version via the Internet Archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171024110727/http://schema.lib.cam.ac.uk/PR-PHD-05437.pdf?sequence=7&isAllowed=y [archive.org]
https://web.archive.org/web/20171024110727/http://schema.lib.cam.ac.uk/PR-PHD-05437.pdf?sequence=7&isAllowed=y
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @04:13PM
Ah, good enough. They didn't have it archived last night.
(Score: 3, Touché) by meustrus on Tuesday October 24 2017, @05:06PM (2 children)
Is that supposed to be an access restriction? What kind of stupidity is "isAllowed=y" in the URL query string?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @06:09PM (1 child)
Let's ask Aaron Swartz.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @03:16AM
(or weev)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @07:30PM
hm. I don't know about you, but this theoretical physicist did not know about the -t0 option of wget.
although wget has saved me many annoying interactions with mangafox and similar.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday October 24 2017, @07:32PM
But what if I don't have Microsoft Word?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.