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cafegirl is a working artist and graduate student with utterly appalling work habits and a very old laptop. This blog is specifically intended for graduate school writing assignments. If you have wandered in from my other blog, please note that I am blogging anonymously. Please remember that my classmates and professors read this - so play nicely. That being said, I DO encourage comments!!

Friday, March 02, 2007

Unit 7: Hawking

People and Terms Used in this Unit:

Herman Bondi: (1919 - 2005), mathematician/cosmologist, lectured at Cambridge and then at Kings College, University of London. Together with Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold, developed the Steady-State Theory which competed with the Big Bang Theory.

Fred Hoyle: (1915 - 2001), asronomer, cosmologist and author, Cambridge, rejected the model of the universe dubbed the Big Bang Theory (See Bondi).
"Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards." - Fred Hoyle

Roger Penrose: (born 1931), mathematician, physicist; while at Cambridge, Penrose worked on singularities and how the collapse of a star could form a black hole. His ideas on singularities inspired Hawking's own theoretical work. They later collaborated.

Bertrand Russell: (1872 - 1970), British philosopher, mathematician, author (Nobel Laureate 1950) and social critic. One of Hawking's boyhood heroes. See: http://philosopedia.org/index.php?title+Bertrand_Russell and http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/brs.html

Denis Sciama: (1926 - 1999), British physicist, when Hawking was working on his PhD at Cambridge, Sciama was his faculty supervisor.

Renormalization: a calculation technique for trying to remove singularities and infinities (from the lecture); A renormalization group is "a calculation technique for relating quantities that apply in different energy or distance regions" (Randall, Warped Passages, p. 468)

ALS: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Also known in the US as "Lou Gehrig's Disease", ALS is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that attacks the nerve cells of the brain and spine that are responsible for voluntary muscule movement, including those muscles involved in breathing. There is a lot of very useful information on the disease at the following url: http://www.alsa.org . Hawking was diagnosed with ALS when he was 21.

Singularities: "A region where a mathematical description of an object breaks down because some quantity becomes infinite" (Randall, Warped Passages, p. 468) For the purposes of this unit, a singularity is the point of infinite mass at the center of a black hole.

Scientific Theories: models that describe obervations and make accurate predictions; they need to be tested, repeatedly

Predictions: statements about future events, conditions, behavior and so on. In the context of this unit, it would likely refer to an outcome forecast by an equation derived from a theory.

Arbitrary Elements: I'm not altogether certain what this term refers to, in connection with this unit. An "arbitrary constant" is defined by the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Mathematics as "a non-numerical symbol which is not a variable in a generalized operation." Since the word "arbitrary" was introduced during our discussion of Newton, I gather that the symbol in this case is "G", which is the symbol for the force of gravity. "G" stands for a very small number with a set experimental value but the actual value of "G" has not been precisely determined. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Mathematics. Christopher Clapham and James Nicholson. Oxford University Press, 2005. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. University of North Carolina - Greensboro. 19 April 2007

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