Hawking's talk at Dublin gets out on web

[Martin]

Somebody at the Dublin conference made a transcript of

the much-anticipated talk Stephen Hawking gave today

on his proposal to resolve the black hole information paradox.

 

They got the transcript to Sean Carroll a cosmologist/blogger

at University of Chicago, who posted it here:

 

http://pancake.uchicago.edu/%7Ecarroll/hawkingdublin.txt

 

As you can see from the final paragraphs of the transcript, Hawking

conceded his bet with John Preskill in style----the stakes being

an encyclopedia, Hawking offered Preskill an

Encyclopedia of Cricket.

 

However Cricket is an obcure English pastime unknown to people in Preskill's part of the world---where they do more surfing and such. Preskill had, however, heard of baseball (which bears a superficial resemblance to Cricket) so Hawking in a grand gesture had the

Encyclopedia of Baseball flown across the Atlantic so that he could present it as he conceded the bet.

 

there are some interesting things to discuss about the paradox, and it helps to read what hawking actually said, instead relying on a journalistic interpretation.

[mossoi]

However Cricket is an obcure English

Do me a favour. It's an international sport played by more countries than baseball with its own world cup.

[Martin]

John Baez was at the Dublin GR17 conference and gave one of the plenary talks, the day before Hawking's.

Baez has a good physics website hosting the Usenet Physics FAQ

and his own "this week's finds in mathematical physics" column

 

Baez posted his report on the Dublin event today

 

 

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week207.html

[fuhrerkeebs]

HAHAHAHAHA...I'm sorry...but all the data NASA collects on this kind of stuff gives indirect evidence of black holes. Check it out if you don't believe me. And black holes definitely don't go against the laws of relativity, in fact, Relativity predicts black holes...it's all implied in the most well known aspect of GR--so well known, in fact, that people with no real knowledge of GR besides the fact that gravity is caused by "curved space know about it--the Schwarzchild solution.