Big Bang day !!

[bogeyman]

Too much media hype about this today.

All they are doing is 'first beam': getting just one of the two beams around the ring, at low energy. There won't be any actual collisions for at least a month.

[d000hg]

Perhaps in connection with their rapid evaporation, but their existence of any size was speculated about on long before Hawking, which he may or may not get a Nobel prize for. They are still not well understood, so a lot more theories may come and go.

Well Hawking is credited with work on BHs radiating energy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation). This naturally leads to evaporation; I haven't read it for years but I think he discusses this in A Brief History of Time.

Nobel prizes can be a bit odd though. Einstein didn't get one for relativity, instead he got it for something less massive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect).

[TimberWolf]

The whole Nobel thing and Cern hinges on whether or not they find the Higgs boson. Hawkings thinks they won't and what they will find is something akin to supersymmetric partners to particles already known about. He believes this is the elusive 'dark matter' and if found would go onto to confirm his work on string theory.

I think you're a little bit too dismissive of a very intelligent man (disability or not).

Hawking is no more an authority than anyone else involved IMO, but Hawking's self-aggrandising makes me laugh. Or perhaps the media's portrayal of him as a genius - which may be linked to his disability. He is not in the genius category IMO. He's a clever (in his field, shocking outside it) guy working on new physics along with a lot of other guys who was in the right place at the right time to theorise about things which may or may not be true. If not him another guy would have (and regularly do) come up with the same or other competing theories. Hawking is just one well known figure in a crowd of equally or more intelligent but less well known figures at the moment IMO.

[Incognito]

Well Hawking is credited with work on BHs radiating energy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation). This naturally leads to evaporation; I haven't read it for years but I think he discusses this in A Brief History of Time.

Nobel prizes can be a bit odd though. Einstein didn't get one for relativity, instead he got it for something less massive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect).

Einstein never got a nobel for his theory of relativity because it was just that, a theory. It wasn't proved correct until after he'd died.

[sasguru]

Einstein never got a nobel for his theory of relativity because it was just that, a theory. It wasn't proved correct until after he'd died.

No scientific theory is "proved correct". All we can say is that it is capable of being falsified and that the current empirical evidence has not done so. Additionally a good scientific theory is capable of making predictions which again are confirmed via empirical evidence.
Read Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn

[Incognito]

Hawking is no more an authority than anyone else involved IMO, but Hawking's self-aggrandising makes me laugh. Or perhaps the media's portrayal of him as a genius - which may be linked to his disability. He is not in the genius category IMO. He's a clever (in his field, shocking outside it) guy working on new physics along with a lot of other guys who was in the right place at the right time to theorise about things which may or may not be true. If not him another guy would have (and regularly do) come up with the same or other competing theories. Hawking is just one well known figure in a crowd of equally or more intelligent but less well known figures at the moment IMO.

I'm assuming your attack on Hawking is part of the British culture of feeling superior only when you're putting someone else down.

Hawking is the current Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge and has held this post since 1980, long before the current media circus jumped on the bandwagon. Have a look at the previous holders of the post, I think you'll find some esteemed names there, unless maybe they were just other guys who came up with 'things which may or may not be true'.

[GerrySt]

So do I need to get a rate rise now or can it wait for a few months?

[Incognito]

No scientific theory is "proved correct". All we can say is that it is capable of being falsified and that the current empirical evidence has not done so. Additionally a good scientific theory is capable of making predictions which again are confirmed via empirical evidence.
Read Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn

Yes okay, if you want to be pedantic. Technically, what science deals with are hypotheses. A theory is a hypothesis which has been well supported by experiments. However, hypotheses, and even theories, are most always considered to be tentative. That is, it is always allowed that some valid experiment could show that the hypotheses is incorrect, either wholly or in part (referred to as falsifiability), so that it must be rejected or modified.

So in science, absolute proof is usually impossible. Essentially it would require proving a universal negative: this hypothesis does not fail under any circumstance. And as they say, to prove a universal negative requires universal knowledge. A hypothesis which is not "falsifiable" is not generally considered to be scientific. That's not the same as being untrue; there might be any number of truths which are all the same beyond the reach of science.

Going back to Einstiens genreal theory of realitivity, it wasn't supported by evidence until Irwin Shapiro concucted his tests at the MIT with the Haystack antenna in the 60's which was the point I was getting across.

Thanks Sas.

[sasguru]

Yes okay, if you want to be pedantic. Technically, what science deals with are hypotheses. A theory is a hypothesis which has been well supported by experiments. However, hypotheses, and even theories, are most always considered to be tentative. That is, it is always allowed that some valid experiment could show that the hypotheses is incorrect, either wholly or in part (referred to as falsifiability), so that it must be rejected or modified.

So in science, absolute proof is usually impossible. Essentially it would require proving a universal negative: this hypothesis does not fail under any circumstance. And as they say, to prove a universal negative requires universal knowledge. A hypothesis which is not "falsifiable" is not generally considered to be scientific. That's not the same as being untrue; there might be any number of truths which are all the same beyond the reach of science*.

Going back to Einstiens genreal theory of realitivity, it wasn't supported by evidence until Irwin Shapiro concucted his tests at the MIT with the Haystack antenna in the 60's which was the point I was getting across.

Thanks Sas.

It is customary when quoting someone else to acknowledge that source.
Pretending that they are your own words is known as plagiarism.
As you haven't offered that courtesy I will do it for you:

*http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/36328

[Incognito]

It is customary when quoting someone else to acknowledge that source.
Pretending that they are your own words is known as plagiarism.
As you haven't offered that courtesy I will do it for you:

*http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/36328

Cheers