Strange

And CDM is cold dark matter. Of course, apart from being cold (i.e. not moving at very high velocities) and dark (not interacting via the electromagnetic force, and possibly not the weak force either) we don't know what it is. So Lambda-CDM is basically a description of the universe based on general relativity (specifically, the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (FLRW) metric) with the addition of dark matter to explain the dynamics of galaxies and galaxy clusters (and various other things) and dark energy to explain the accelerating expansion.

Gravity is dependant on mass and distance. So, for example, the gravitational effect of the your red giant is exactly the same as the effect of a black hole of the same mass at the same distance. The only difference with a black hole is that it has a smaller radius so you can get closer, and therefore to a place where the force of gravity is much greater than the red giant. The radius of a black hole is proportional to its mass. The volume increases with the cube of the radius and so large black holes have quite low average density.

Apart from the "echo" problem, isn't this just a page template implemented, effectively, as server-side includes? I don't see what is new here.

The "no black holes" claim comes from sub-editors who write headlines, rather than Hawking. His paper makes no such claim. ... quantum effects may make the event horizon more complicated than the simple model of GR alone. That is hardly surprising and is the focus of much current research. Whether Hawking's approach or another one will turn out to be most accurate is something else.

Strictly speaking, no. It is just very, very, very unlikely: http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8

But, in fact, you can't. You can't imagine photons to be like little billiard balls.

But note that any given distance, the gravity will be exactly the same as that due to a normal object of the same mass at that distance. So, for example, if the Sun became a black hole, it would make no difference to the Earth's orbit.

Of course you can. All useful programming languages are Turing complete. 3D graphics in Javascript: http://ctho.org/toys/3d.html PCI driver in C: http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~baker/devices/lxr/source/2.6.25/ldd-examples/pci/pci_skel.c And, of course, C was developed with the main purpose of writing the Unix operating system.

Yes. Any programming language can be used to do any task. But some have features (or libraries, etc) that make certain types of tasks easier. I think people should learn several different types of programming language (procedural, declarative, functional, etc) and then learning any specific language is just syntax.

Yes. The whole point of the quantisation of light (aka photons) is that each photon is indivisible: it either reacts with one electron in an atom or none. (This is basically what Einstein got his Nobel prize for.)

Correct. But I doubt any such really black surface exists in reality. I have no idea what you are asking. A single photon is detected at a single location (the atom that it interacts with in the photo-detector). But, until it is detected you don't know where it is or where it has been.

Therefore, the surface is not black, just nearly black. Because individual photons are detected, one at a time. Obviously, if you only allow photons to go through one slit, there will be no interference pattern.

That is the whole point of the quantum double-slit experiment: you can't know that. If you know which slit it illuminates / goes through then there is no interference pattern. If you don't know, then there is. You cannot know anything about where a photon is until you detect (and thereby destroy) it.

If you think about the classical version of the experiment, the light source must be able to illuminate both slits. This means that any given photon could go through either slit. The same continues to be true when there is only one photon at a time.

Wikipedia has a good overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity

Of course. Of course!

Ah, I see (I misread the post and thought the explosion was last year!) I don't see how this has any connection to Hawking's work, though.

Can you provide a reference to this explosion? I haven't heard anything about it. p.s. Hawking, not Hawkins.

To work out the acceleration you would make some assumption about the period over which the anomalous speed change occurred. It seems to me that, as the cause of the change in speed is not known, any such calculation is likely to be completely arbitrary.

Really? I know there is a zone outside the event horizon that photons can orbit, but I have never heard of photons being trapped at the event horizon. Can you provide a reference to this?

See post #8

Nowhere does that say anything about atomic clocks on Pioneer. There weren't any, as far as I know.

This paper seems to have some definitive information of the velocity / energy anomalies: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0608087 It doesn't seem to represent it as acceleration, but I suppose you can work that out. I thought they also got distance information from the transmission delay?

This is not directly related to antimatter gravity (that is the ALPHA experiment) but there is some detail here about how antihydrogen is produced and manipulated: http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2014/01/28/anti-beam-me-up-scotty/

A handy set of articles from New Scientist to set the context: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24956-hawking-timeline-a-brief-history-of-black-holes.html