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Essays reveal Stephen Hawking predicted race of 'superhumans'
The late physicist and author Prof Stephen Hawking has caused controversy by suggesting a new race of superhumans could develop from wealthy people choosing to edit their and their children's DNA. Hawking, the author of A Brief History of Time, who died in March, made the predictions in a collection of articles and essays.
[...] In Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Hawking's final thoughts on the universe, the physicist suggested wealthy people would soon be able to choose to edit genetic makeup to create superhumans with enhanced memory, disease resistance, intelligence and longevity. Hawking raised the prospect that breakthroughs in genetics will make it attractive for people to try to improve themselves, with implications for "unimproved humans". "Once such superhumans appear, there will be significant political problems with unimproved humans, who won't be able to compete," he wrote. "Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant. Instead, there will be a race of self-designing beings who are improving at an ever-increasing rate."
Stephen Hawking's last paper on black holes is now online
Stephen Hawking never stopped trying to unravel the mysteries surrounding black holes -- in fact, he was still working to solve one of them shortly before his death. Now, his last research paper on the subject is finally available online through pre-publication website arXiv, thanks to his co-authors from Cambridge and Harvard. It's entitled Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair, and it tackles the black hole paradox. According to Hawking's co-author Malcolm Perry, the paradox "is perhaps the most puzzling problem in fundamental theoretical physics today" and was the center of the late physicist's life for decades.
Black Holes and Soft Hair: why Stephen Hawking's Final Work is Important:
[Black holes] have a temperature and produce thermal radiation. The formula for this temperature, universally known as the Hawking temperature, is inscribed on the memorial to Stephen's life in Westminster Abbey. Any object that has a temperature also has an entropy. The entropy is a measure of how many different ways an object could be made from its microscopic ingredients and still look the same. So, for a particular piece of red hot metal, it would be the number of ways the atoms that make it up could be arranged so as to look like the lump of metal you were observing. Stephen's formula for the temperature of a black hole allowed him to find the entropy of a black hole.
The problem then was: how did this entropy arise? Since all black holes appear to be the same, the origin of the entropy was at the centre of the information paradox.
What we have done recently is to discover a gap in the mathematics that led to the idea that black holes are totally bald. In 2016, Stephen, Andy and I found that black holes have an infinite collection of what we call "soft hair". This discovery allows us to question the idea that black holes lead to a breakdown in the laws of physics.
Stephen kept working with us up to the end of his life, and we have now published a paper that describes our current thoughts on the matter. In this paper, we describe a way of calculating the entropy of black holes. The entropy is basically a quantitative measure of what one knows about a black hole apart from its mass or spin.
So if black holes have soft hair, is it possible to give them a hair cut?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @03:16AM (1 child)
Black Holes have no hair, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hair_theorem [wikipedia.org]
Yet the paper posits that they might actually have hair, as a way of escaping the information paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox [wikipedia.org]
We already know that blackholes encode their information on their surface, there is no volume to speak of, only area.
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Bekenstein-Hawking_entropy [scholarpedia.org]
So maybe the paradox is a false one.
Wouldn't it be simpler to say that the past is as uncertain as the future, i.e. multiple past states existed and came together and are still coming together.
Thus information is not lost as long as you were the observer watching it go in, yet it is destroyed from the perspective that if you watched the blackhole decay then you'd have no way of knowing which photon that escapes, mapped to which photon that went in.
This is so easy to think about that I struggle to understand why it's such a debate, perhaps I'm just looking at the view from Mt Stupid, but...
We already know that blackholes are 4 dimensional curves in space and time. That is to say that inside the event horizon, spacetime twists until it loops in on itself, it is a closed time like curve, therefore it stands to reason that once you cross the event horizon, time must be repeating and is likely moving at a different rate relative to your internal clock.
This means that anything that enters a black hole is going to be smeared across the surface as local time in that hole repeats itself.
I think of this like a CD stuck on repeat, getting damage from normal physical stresses, i.e. a real CD in a real player, not an idealized one..
Let's call the blackhole collapse point T0.
From the outside observer looking in (outside the CTC but inside the event horizon), time cycles itself playing the same selection of frames from 0.0000000001 to 0.999999999 over and over again like a CD on repeat. Each time the replay starts over, T is incremented by 1, so T0 is the first pass, T1 is the second pass etc.
Now scratch the surface of the CD or CTC at some point during T10.
This scratch is equivalent to new information, it has altered the surface and from now on it is a permanent part of the surface.
The scratch will be seen and heard by anyone listening to the thing play after T10, but no one who wasn't present during T10 would have any idea where the scratch came from.
Eventually the CD begins to fatigue and wear out, this is from mechanical and heating stresses, but in the case of a black hole it's from 4D gravitational and time stress, i.e. entropy in the black hole is increasing each T cycle and this entropy or noise carries over, similar to a CD collecting dust and scratches.
The bits being destroyed on the surface are dissipated as heat or entropy, i.e. hawking radiation.
Eventually the CD no longer has enough information to play.
Eventually the CTC inside the black hole no longer has enough information to repeat.
In the beginning the CD has 50 tracks, near the end of it's life only a handful of tracks are remaining.
In the beginning the CTC has 50 solar masses, near the end if it's life only a handful of solar masses are remaining.
They both cease to function when they no longer contain enough information to play.
In the case of the CD you have a useless platter where the information encoded on it is now long gone, replaced with a maximally entropic state.
In the case of the black hole, it explodes with the surface being released as photons in a maximally entropic state.
Yet if you were an observer watching things happen and could somehow see the things falling in, then you would have memory of those events, the information isn't truly lost because it is encoded in the memory of the observer. For non-observed information it also is not lost per se, it is maximally entropic. The stuff is still there, but it's scrambled beyond any ability to unscramble it without the aide of information obtained from an external observer.
In the case of a black hole though, the entire universe IS an external observer as things cross the horizon and this seems to be the key that is missed in all these attempts to solve the information paradox.
Furthermore, if the Universe is evolving towards a multiverse, it stands to reason that a neigh infinite number of multiversal realities also observed the events. Those observers are closer in terms of their quantum states than observers who did not share observations, thus in this case it is a collapse of the entanglement of multiversal observers with the object being observed, that truly preserves the information.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 17 2018, @05:35AM
Yeah... a blackhole that is not observed is gonna live forever, but as soon as an observer shows up, it will start decaying until it explodes.