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posted by martyb on Wednesday March 21 2018, @02:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the R.I.P. dept.

Stephen Hawking's ashes to be interred near Sir Isaac Newton's grave

The ashes of Professor Stephen Hawking will be interred next to the grave of Sir Isaac Newton at Westminster Abbey, it has been revealed. The renowned theoretical physicist's final resting place will also be near that of Charles Darwin, who was buried there in 1882.

Stephen Hawking's Last Paper (Probably) Doesn't Prove We Live in a Multiverse

A few months before physicist Stephen Hawking died, he published a paper that several media outlets touted as a way to finally prove (or disprove) the existence of parallel worlds. But that claim may be a bit of cosmic inflation, said several physicists who were not involved in Hawking's research.

"The paper makes no statements about observational tests. It's not entirely uninteresting, but it's one of literally several thousand ideas for what might possibly have happened in the early universe" many of which include parallel worlds, said Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, who blogs at backreaction.blogspot.com.

Sabine Hossenfelder's blog post: Hawking's "Final Theory" is not groundbreaking

A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation? (arXiv:1707.07702 [hep-th])

Hawking's final quest: saving quantum theory from black holes

Hawking spent much of his later years trying to figure out how a black hole could regurgitate information—although he also worked on theories of what triggered the big bang. Three years ago he began his last work on black holes with Malcolm Perry, a theoretical physicist and Hawking's colleague at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and Andrew Strominger, a theorist at Harvard University. "It was only 2 weeks ago that I saw him," Perry says. "He certainly wasn't in the best shape, but his mind was clearly focused on the problem."

[...] [Strictly] speaking, Strominger says, the theorem states only that two similar black holes can be "transformed" into each other by a handful of mathematical relations called diffeomorphisms, which relabel the coordinates of space-time. An infinite family of other diffeomorphisms has been neglected for decades, he says. They imply that a black hole's event horizon might be bedecked with an infinity of charges, a bit like electric charges. The charges could distinguish one black hole from another and encode infalling information, Strominger says. "We're cautiously optimistic about this idea," he says. "Stephen was very optimistic."

However, the charges may not encode enough information or may not do so in a unique way, Giddings cautions. One theorist who requested anonymity out of respect for Hawking says his various solutions for the black hole information problem pale next to his best work. Hawking's latest work also misses a bigger issue, the theorist says. If a black hole preserves information, he argues, then an unavoidable conclusion of Einstein's theory of gravity—that there's no way to tell if you're falling into a huge black hole—must be wrong.

Soft Hair on Black Holes (open, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.231301) (DX) (arXiv)

Also at Discover Magazine and NBF.

Previously: Stephen Hawking Dead at 76


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by isostatic on Wednesday March 21 2018, @11:56PM

    by isostatic (365) on Wednesday March 21 2018, @11:56PM (#656393) Journal

    Hey that's my password!

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