Salon.com > Physics

“Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind”: Portrait of a genius

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Stephen Hawking is the world's most famous living scientist for two reasons that (despite his own wishes in the matter) are impossible to disentangle. The first is his disability, a motor neuron disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, often referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease) that, beginning in his late teens, has rendered him severely disabled. Most people, when diagnosed with ALS, live only a few more years; Hawking has survived for 49, turning 70 on Jan. 8. The second source of renown is his work as a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, particularly on the nature of black holes and the origin of the universe.

Even people with no inclination to tackle the brain-bending concepts Hawking outlines in his bestselling 1988 book, "A Brief History of Time," find his personal story inspiring. In that light, scientific preoccupations they might dismiss as arcane and impractical in an able-bodied person become a metaphor for the human ability to transcend limits. As Hawking himself says in the three-part documentary series "Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking" (you can stream it on Netflix), "Although I cannot move, and have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free."

“The 4 Percent Universe”: Dark matter and dueling scientists

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 19:01:00 +0000

In his 1977 film "Annie Hall," Woody Allen depicted his autobiographical avatar, Alvy Singer, at age 9, in the office of a child psychologist. The kid has stopped doing his homework, his mother complains, because of something he read. "The universe is expanding," Alvy moans to the shrink. "The universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything ... What's the point?" ("Brooklyn is not expanding!" his mother shrieks back.)

If he's kept up with the science section, then presumably the past four decades have been a roller coaster for poor Alvy, with astronomers and astrophysicists speculating that the universe would eventually start contracting again (it figures he could never permanently escape Brooklyn), and then deciding that it would go on expanding forever, in fact, that it's expanding faster and faster. Also, the universe is flat, at least the part of it we can see, which isn't much. As Richard Panek explains in his lively new account of 20th-century (plus a little 21st-century) cosmology, "The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality," 85 percent of everything consists of stuff that's undetectable to the human senses and profoundly mysterious. And we're not talking about Staten Island.

Perseid meteor shower dazzles stargazers

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:11:00 +0000

If you're able to escape the pervasiveness of city lights in the next few days (or if you live somewhere with actual sky above it) you'll have the chance to check out the most startling example of "shooting stars" visible to the naked eye -- the Perseid meteor shower. Every August the leftover bits of the Swift-Tuttle comet zoom through our atmosphere, producing up to 60 streaks of light an hour, and the peak of the astro-activity is expected after midnight Wednesday night through pre-dawn on Friday.

Fox News has an excellent explanation of the Perseids for laymen, while the Christian Science Monitor covers the pre-shower fireball (actually a tiny meteor) spotted over Alabama this week. NASA scientists compare meteor showers to bugs splatting on your car windshield, and MSNBC has tips on how to enjoy the display effectively. Check out this brief night-vision footage of 2007's Perseids:

Scientists find most massive star ever discovered

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:47:00 +0000

A huge ball of brightly burning gas drifting through a neighboring galaxy may be the heaviest star ever discovered -- hundreds of times more massive than the sun, scientists said Wednesday after working out its weight for the first time.

Those behind the find say the star, called R136a1, may once have weighed as much as 320 solar masses. Astrophysicist Paul Crowther said the obese star -- twice as heavy as any previously discovered -- has already slimmed down considerably over its lifetime.

In fact, it's burning itself off with such intensity that it shines at nearly 10 million times the luminosity of the sun.

"Unlike humans, these stars are born heavy and lose weight as they age," said Crowther, an astrophysicist at the University of Sheffield in northern England. "R136a1 is already middle-aged and has undergone an intense weight loss program."

Crowther said the giant was identified at the center of a star cluster in the Tarantula Nebula, a sprawling cloud of gas and dust in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy about 165,000 light-years away from our own Milky Way.

The star was the most massive of several giants identified by Crowther and his team in an article in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“Quantum”: When physics got spooky

Sun, 23 May 2010 21:01:00 +0000

"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics," wrote Richard Feynman, and given that he won a Nobel Prize in physics, why should you or I want to take a shot at it? Not that you or I could plausibly claim to understand the weird, protean, paradoxical subatomic world that quantum science describes, but anyone reading Manjit Kumar's "Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality" will surely feel they've gotten a bit closer. It's an exhilarating, if also disorienting, sensation.

"Quantum" orbits around the celebrated fifth Solvay conference, held in Brussels in 1927, a gathering of the greatest minds in 20th-century physics. It was at Solvay that Werner Heisenberg and Max Born presented the theory of quantum mechanics they had been working on for several years under the informal leadership of Niels Bohr. Their understanding of subatomic reality came to be called "the Copenhagen interpretation" (after the location of the Institute of Theoretical Physics, which Bohr ran), and its champions proclaimed it a "closed theory, whose fundamental physical and mathematical assumptions are no longer susceptible of any modification."

Ask the pilot

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 12:27:00 +0000

Last month, New York Times technology columnist David Pogue set the Web abuzz by rekindling an old brainteaser about whether a theoretical airplane would be able to take off from a theoretical treadmill. The puzzle was "ripping around the Internet" (Pogue's words), and appeals for clarification quickly reached Ask the Pilot's in box. Will it or won't it fly, people wanted to know, imploring me to weigh in.

Belatedly, and grudgingly, I will now do so. Such topics tend to induce the rapid closure of my eyelids, and while I'd like to tell you this is the kind of shop talk that keeps aviators engaged and alert in those quiet midnight hours high above the ocean, nothing could be further from the truth. (Mostly they're just bemoaning the loss of their pensions and talking about movies.) Nevertheless, here goes ...

"Imagine a plane is sitting on a massive conveyor belt," poses Pogue's Dec. 11 Times blog, "as wide and as long as a runway. The conveyer belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off?"

Secrets of the cosmos

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 12:27:00 +0000

The universe might just be an enormous computer -- that's the final, mind-twisting pirouette at the conclusion of Charles Seife's new book about information theory and quantum computing, "Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, From Our Brains to Black Holes." By the time you get to this suggestion, the statement seems pretty plausible, but by then you've already traveled through Seife's crystal-clear explications of thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes and multiple universes. In other words, you know he's not talking about using the cosmos to search the Web during your lunch break for the best price on iPods.

Every reader has his or her own reasons for plunging into a book like "Decoding the Universe." The sizable audience for popular science writing is mostly made up of former science and math majors who find the material congenial and like to keep up with the theoretical fringes of the subjects they once studied. People with specialized expertise like to see how their field is being represented to the public. Those who know the discipline might even prefer Seth Lloyd's new book, "Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos," since Lloyd is a bona fide MIT professor while Seife is a journalist. (Seife uses one of Lloyd's thought experiments -- in which he designed the "ultimate laptop" out of a black hole -- as an example in "Decoding the Universe.")

“Strange Matters” by Tom Siegfried

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 21:39:00 +0000

In the fourth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Democritus postulated the existence of atoms, indivisible particles of matter that formed the basis of all reality. Although none of his writings have survived, many of his views were taken up and refined by Epicurus and his followers. Ancient atomic theory reached its zenith in Rome shortly before the birth of Christ, when Lucretius published his magnum opus, "De rerum natura "("On the Nature of Things"), possibly the only epic poem about theoretical physics. Two millennia later, some of the 20th century's greatest scientific minds, including a young Albert Einstein, finally succeeded in conclusively establishing the existence of atoms. Of course, the particles turned out to be rather different from Democritus' conception, but the episode remains one of the most remarkable stories in the history of ideas.

Big trouble in the world of “Big Physics”

Mon, 16 Sep 2002 19:30:00 +0000

In February 2000, a promising young physicist named Jan Hendrik Schön published some startling experimental results. Schön and his partners had started with molecules that don't ordinarily conduct electricity, and claimed they had succeeded in making them behave like semiconductors, the circuits that make computers work. The researchers reported their findings in Science, one of the flagship scientific journals.

The data created an immediate stir. Schön, who works at Lucent Technologies' prestigious Bell Labs, followed that paper up with another, and then another. In his world of "publish or perish," he became a virtual writing machine, issuing one article after another. His group reported that they could make other nonconductors into semiconductors, lasers and light-absorbing devices. These claims were revolutionary. Their implications for electronics and other fields were enormous, holding the promise that computing circuitry might one day shrink to unimaginably small size. In the words of one Princeton professor, Schön had "defeated chemistry." He had become a modern alchemist, apparently conducting electricity where it had never gone before.

The next Newton?

Wed, 15 May 2002 21:26:00 +0000

Stephen Wolfram wants to bring science into the age of the computer. A boy genius turned multimillionaire scientist, Wolfram has been a veritable recluse for the last decade while developing his new approach to fundamental physics. He runs his software company, Wolfram Research, largely by videoconference calls from his home, allowing himself the latitude to pursue his research on the subject of complexity. He views the future of science as one dominated by the computer, one where scientists run experiments via the keyboard, unraveling the vast complexities of the natural world through relatively simple rules of programming.

Wolfram is a maestro of this new world, a Moby of a scientist who has looked deep into the standard way of doing science and who sees the sparkling of a new dawn. His just-published magnum opus, "A New Kind of Science," is his Principia, a response to the deterministic mathematics that Isaac Newton used to render science into a tidy picture of elliptical orbits and parabolic arcs, predictable to as many decimal points as you please.

“The Hole in the Universe” by K.C. Cole

Fri, 26 Jan 2001 19:00:00 +0000

K.C. Cole's new book is about nothing. "Nothing is far and away the most difficult subject I have attempted to pin down on the pages of a book," she writes in a foreword. "Grasping 'nothing' requires resisting the temptation to follow it wherever it leads, getting lost in the semantic thicket of Nothing puns, or simply bouncing the idea around on one's knee, stringing together curious facts and ancient history -- taking it for a pleasurable, if rather pointless, trip."

Cole resists two out of three temptations. "The Hole in the Universe" covers current physics and cosmology in simple, energetic prose, without much knee-bouncing or idle following; but Cole indulges in such a tangled thicket of overly cute nothing puns in the first chapter that I'm tempted to say the real book starts on Page 25. Only then does she get down to explaining, clearly, why the vacuum of space is a deep modern riddle.

Aliens: The sequel

Wed, 05 Jul 2000 19:38:00 +0000

High-profile eccentrics are in short supply these days in Silicon Valley. Instead, we have a profusion of whitewashed, khaki-wearing, buzzword-spouting young executives single-mindedly in pursuit of dazzling IPOs. After all, who has the time to pursue truly extravagant visions when there are start-ups to be funded?

The Valley's lack of truly interesting people may in part explain why Joe Firmage is still the subject of widespread morbid fascination. As CEO and founder of the enormously successful Web services company USWeb, he announced back in 1998 that he believed in aliens. To escalate matters, at the same time he began a very public campaign intended to attract readers to his online book, entitled "The Truth," in which he talked about alien visitations, intergalactic travel and a host of unconventional economic and scientific theories.

Firmage's subsequent departure from USWeb -- which, at the time, was merging with CKS, another prominent Web design firm -- was swift; the media coverage of his book was not kind. Words like "nuts" and "crazy" followed his every move. His career, so said the conventional wisdom, was over.

Has feminism changed science?

Tue, 22 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

In classic biology textbooks, the story of conception resembles nothing so much as a true-romance novel, in which the bodice-ripping formula of Barbara Cartland et al. is transposed into a cellular-level melodrama starring the virile "active sperm" and the demure "passive egg."

"In these sagas of conception," writes science historian Londa Schiebinger, "the spermatic hero actively pursues the egg, surviving the hostile environment of the vagina and defeating his many rivals." Like Sleeping Beauty, the egg drifts unconsciously in the fallopian tube, waiting to be awakened by the valiant, vital sperm. It is an archetypal story of female passivity enlivened by male energy -- a story as old as Aristotle, and as replete with patronizing overtones.

Since the late 1970s, however, a new generation of biologists has begun to peek behind this suspect veil and, using fresh analyses, to reveal quite a different story, one summed up by the title of a seminal paper, "The Energetic Egg." In this new account the egg, no longer a slumbering princess, becomes an active agent, directing the growth of microvilli (small finger-like projections on its surface) to capture and tether the sperm. Here the egg and sperm are partners, co-activators in the process of conception.