Stephen Hawking Dies

denverpilot said:
The car thing is looking more and more disgraceful too, with the majority of the government money going to build the race car version of his toys for his rich friends and massive losses coming and production problems forming on the “everyday person” version of the cars now that he’s leveraged his way into the car biz with taxpayer money.
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Oh, pipe down (I mean that politely) - he paid that back a long time ago. And it was only $500m. I say "Only" because FCA at the same time borrowed/federal loan guaranteed $17b, GM borrowed $50b, and Ford borrowed $27b.

Unless you're talking about the EV tax deduction that's available to customers (not Tesla)?

I don't agree with that tax deduction either, but Elon didn't ask for it, and did not depend on it. Tesla exports half its vehicles to territories without the Federal subsidy, and even the Tesla's that were sold under it here was too high value for it to move the needle for most people (< 5% of value). It will make a bigger difference for the cheaper ones, but they won't be eligible for it soon anymore. The Tesla business plan predates the federal subsidies by several years - it's not like Elon formed a company just to see how to best make use of it.

And it's available to all other manufacturers as well, and they/their customers are all going to use every last cent of it. Again, nothing to do with Elon.

If you really want to complain to someone, complain to Bush's economic advisers that came up with this initially. Which IIRC was calculated as to how much Federal Subsidy equivalent was given to a gasoline vehicle over a 20 year lifespan, and then they applied the same value to EV's (but only the first 200k per manufactuer). Two wrongs trying to make a right I guess.

You can't really blame Elon for this whole mess. He has long advocated for the government not subsidizing ANYTHING - he's fine going without subsidies himself as long as the government stops subsidizing all other competing technologies as well. I think this is a fine idea. (And I especially mean that after just coming back from another 2 hour trip to go buy some ethanol-free gas for my generators... :rolleyes:).
 
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deonb said:
You can't really blame Elon for this whole mess. He has long advocated for the government not subsidizing ANYTHING - he's fine going without subsidies himself as long as the government stops subsidizing all other competing technologies as well. I think this is a fine idea. (And I especially mean that after just coming back from another 2 hour trip to go buy some ethanol-free gas for my generators... :rolleyes:).
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And Buffett advocates for more taxes on CNBC. LOL.

Sorry, I don’t buy it. Say one thing in public, privately laugh at the idiots who make you richer through populist legislation and enjoy every penny.

Being a natural skeptic I think they talk out of both sides of their faces. It’d be hard not to with all the anti-Capitalism sentiment of the masses.

I mean seriously, their target demographic wears Che shirts. They really are that stupid. Yay murdering dictators! LOL.
 
Half Fast said:
Great in the early part of his career. His proof of a singularity as the beginning of the universe and Hawking radiation were both extremely significant.

In the latter years, I think he was more famous than great. But who am I to say?
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I would agree, but also remind you that the same was true of Einstein. He had his miracle year of 1905 (can anyone name the three milestone papers he published that year?) and then there was General Relativity. But his later years were centered around work on the unified field theory that never came to fruition, arguing that Quantum Mechanics had to be wrong because it entailed spooky action at a distance, and various political causes. Taken as a whole, it is still considered by most (including me) to be a great career.

Hawking has been compared to Carl Sagan, and I think the comparison has SOME merit. But as significant and impressive a scientist as Sagan was, he did not have brilliant early accomplishments to compare with those of Hawking. But in terms of their contributions to the popularization of science, I would put the two on a roughly equal footing - with a slight edge to Sagan for Cosmos and Contact.
 
azure said:
I would agree, but also remind you that the same was true of Einstein. He had his miracle year of 1905 (can anyone name the three milestone papers he published that year?) and then there was General Relativity. But his later years were centered around work on the unified field theory that never came to fruition, arguing that Quantum Mechanics had to be wrong because it entailed spooky action at a distance, and various political causes. Taken as a whole, it is still considered by most (including me) to be a great career.

Hawking has been compared to Carl Sagan, and I think the comparison has SOME merit. But as significant and impressive a scientist as Sagan was, he did not have brilliant early accomplishments to compare with those of Hawking. But in terms of their contributions to the popularization of science, I would put the two on a roughly equal footing - with a slight edge to Sagan for Cosmos and Contact.
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4 papers.

One on the photoelectric effect (gave support for light as discrete packets of energy, quanta), Max Plank's work on black body radiation
Special relativity (the "special" term came later as he hadn't developed the theory to include gravity yet)
Mass-energy equivalence (E=mC**2)
Brownian motion (gave support for the kinetic theory of gases and statistical mechanics)

I was always impressed about the range of topics those 4 papers covered.
 
Cap'n Jack said:
4 papers.

One on the photoelectric effect (gave support for light as discrete packets of energy, quanta), Max Plank's work on black body radiation
Special relativity (the "special" term came later as he hadn't developed the theory to include gravity yet)
Mass-energy equivalence (E=mC**2)
Brownian motion (gave support for the kinetic theory of gases and statistical mechanics)

I was always impressed about the range of topics those 4 papers covered.
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Ah, right. I had forgotten that there was a separate paper on mass-energy equivalence. I always lump that in with the one on (what we now know as) special relativity, mea culpa.

But yes, the three I was thinking of were the others you mention: photoelectric effect (for which he later won the Nobel), special relativity, and Brownian motion.
 
Cooter said:
If science stays in its lane, knows its limits, and is honest about its motivations, people will indeed heed what it has to offer.
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I feel the same way about "reality" show hosts! :devil:
 
The lady I'm dating reads some of our banter here and one opinion she always comes back to is:

"That Denver guy really needs to get laid."

She just said it again as she was reading this thread and I told her she'd get no argument from me.
 
timwinters said:
The lady I'm dating reads some of our banter here and one opinion she always comes back to is:

"That Denver guy really needs to get laid."

She just said it again as she was reading this thread and I told her she'd get no argument from me.
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Now Denver will be checking every 5 minutes to see if she’s PM’d her contact info to him yet....
 
timwinters said:
The lady I'm dating reads some of our banter here and one opinion she always comes back to is:

"That Denver guy really needs to get laid."

She just said it again as she was reading this thread and I told her she'd get no argument from me.
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Wut 'bout me? Am I in line?
 
Does it have to be a recent photo? ;)
 
timwinters said:
The lady I'm dating reads some of our banter here and one opinion she always comes back to is:

"That Denver guy really needs to get laid."

She just said it again as she was reading this thread and I told her she'd get no argument from me.
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Hmmm. I’ll let my wife know. :)

Clark1961 said:
Wut 'bout me? Am I in line?
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After Tim. (Hey, you walked right into that one.)
 
Half Fast said:
How many ya got, anyway?

And are there YouTube videos?
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I all know is that the last time I tried online dating, I noticed that some people posted photos that were taken far enough in the past to qualify as false advertising! :eek2:
 
Palmpilot said:
I all know is that the last time I tried online dating, I noticed that some people posted photos that were taken far enough in the past to qualify as false advertising! :eek2:
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Quick, swipe left! Or is it right? I honestly don’t know.

And I’m not going to Google because something scares me about what would come up.
 
azure said:
Ah, right. I had forgotten that there was a separate paper on mass-energy equivalence. I always lump that in with the one on (what we now know as) special relativity, mea culpa.

But yes, the three I was thinking of were the others you mention: photoelectric effect (for which he later won the Nobel), special relativity, and Brownian motion.
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Interestingly his turning the world of science upside down with relativity didn’t earn a Nobel. It’s really political.
 
paflyer said:
Interestingly his turning the world of science upside down with relativity didn’t earn a Nobel. It’s really political.
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Politics was definitely a factor. Einstein was Jewish and at least one of his influential opponents (Philipp Lenard) later joined the Nazi party. Stuart Clark has a pretty decent article on this in The Guardian from a few years back.
 
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