10 Questions with Pr. Hawking

If God doesn't exist, why did the concept of his existence become almost universal?

I don't claim that God doesn't exist. God is the name people give to the reason we are here. But I think that reason is the laws of physics rather than someone with whom one can have a personal relationship.An impersonal God.
Does the universe end? If so, what is beyond it?

Observations indicate that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. It will expand forever, getting emptier and darker. Although the universe doesn't have an end, it had a beginning in the Big Bang. One might ask what is before that, but the answer is that there is nowhere before the Big Bang, just as there is nowhere south of the South Pole.

Do you think our civilization will survive long enough to make the leap to deeper space?

I think we have a good chance of surviving long enough to colonize the solar system. However, there is nowhere else in the solar system as suitable as the Earth, so it is not clear if we would survive if the Earth was made unfit for habitation. To ensure our long-term survival, we need to reach the stars. That will take much longer. Let's hope we can last until then.

If you could talk to Albert Einstein, what would you say?

I would ask him why he didn't believe in black holes. The field equations of his theory of relativity imply that a large star or cloud of gas would collapse in on itself and form a black hole. Einstein was aware of this but somehow managed to convince himself that something like an explosion would always occur to throw off mass and prevent the formation of a black hole. What if there was no explosion?

Which scientific discovery or advance would you like to see in your lifetime?

I would like nuclear fusion to become a practical power source. It would provide an inexhaustible supply of energy, without pollution or global warming.

What do you believe happens to our consciousness after death?

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one's memories.

Given your reputation as a brilliant physicist, what ordinary interests do you have that might surprise people?

I enjoy all forms of music--pop, classical and opera. I also share an interest in Formula One racing with my son Tim.

Do you feel that your physical limitations have helped or hindered your study?

Although I was unfortunate enough to get motor neuron disease, I have been very fortunate in almost everything else. I was lucky to be working in theoretical physics, one of the few areas in which disability was not a serious handicap, and to hit the jackpot with my popular books.

Does it feel like a huge responsibility to have people expecting you to have all the answers to life's mysteries?

I certainly don't have the answers to all life's problems. While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I'm no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

Do you think there will ever come a time when mankind understands all there is to understand about physics?

I hope not. I would be out of a job.

Discovery of First Alien planet of outside our Milky Way

Astronomers have confirmed the first discovery of an alien planet in our Milky Way that came from another galaxy.The Jupiter-like planet orbits a star that was born in another galaxy and later captured by our own Milky Way sometime between 6 billion and 9 billion years ago, researchers said. A side effect of the galactic cannibalism brought a faraway planet within astronomers' reach for the first time ever.
"This is very exciting," said study co-author Rainer Klement of the Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany. "We have no ability to directly observe stars in foreign galaxies for planets and confirm them." Stars currently residing in other galaxies are simply too far away, Klement added.
The find may also force astronomers to rethink their ideas about planet formation and survival, researchers said, since it's the first planet ever discovered to be circling a star that is both very old and extremely metal-poor. Metal-poor stars are lacking in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
The newfound planet, called HIP 13044b, survived through its star's red-giant phase, which our own sun will enter in about 5 billion years. So studying it could offer clues about the fate of our solar system as well, researchers said. HIP 13044b sits extremely close to its parent star, which has now contracted again. The planet completes an orbit every 16.2 days, and it comes within about 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) of its parent star at closest approach — just 5.5 percent of the distance between Earth and the sun.
Searching for telltale tugs
The newly discovered alien planet is at least 25 percent more massive than Jupiter, researchers said. It orbits the star HIP 13044 about 2,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Fornax. HIP 13044 is about as massive as the sun, and it is nearing the end of its life. The star has already gone through its red giant phase — when sun-like stars bloat enormously after exhausting the hydrogen fuel in their cores.
The star is also composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. It is less than 1 percent as metal-rich as our sun, making it the most metal-poor star known to host a planet, researchers said.
The research team scrutinized HIP 13044's movement using a telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in Chile. After six months of observing, they detected tiny movements that betrayed the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet. "For me, it was a big surprise," said study lead author Johny Setiawan, also of MPIA. "I was not expecting it in the beginning." Setiawan, Klement and their colleagues report their results online in the Nov. 18 issue of Science.

An extragalactic origin

Last year, another research team announced it may have detected a planet in the Andromeda galaxy. However, that faraway find will be nearly impossible to confirm. The astronomers performing that previous study used a method called gravitational microlensing, which only works when a planet-hosting star happens to line up with another star. Such events happen very rarely.
HIP 13044, on the other hand, belongs to the Helmi stream of stars that were once part of a nearby dwarf galaxy. Astronomers believe our own Milky Way gobbled up the Helmi stream between 6 billion to 9 billion years ago.While it's technically possible that the planet was born in the Milky Way and then stripped from its parent star by the interloping HIP 13044, the odds of that happening are minuscule, researchers said.
So HIP 13044 almost certainly has an extragalactic origin.
"We can be pretty sure about that," Klement told. "Stellar encounters in the Milky Way essentially don't occur. The chance that the star captured the planet from another star by an encounter is very, very unlikely."

Rethinking theories of planet formation

Most of the nearly 500 alien planets discovered so far orbit metal-rich stars, researchers said. And a metal-rich star is fundamental to the dominant theory explaining how giant planets form — the core-accretion model. This model posits that dust and gas particles circling a young star cling together and gradually become larger, forming rocks, boulders and eventually the stony cores of giant, gassy planets like HIP 13044b.
Because its parent star is so metal-poor, HIP 13044b may have formed in a different way, researchers said. The planet may have arisen via the gravitational attraction between gas molecules, through a process termed the disk-instability model. So it may not have a rocky core at all.
"You are able to form pure gas planets by this method," Klement said. The fact that such a metal-poor star can host planets should inspire astronomers to look at other stars like it, Klement added. Astronomers haven't examined many up to this point, so they don't have a good handle on how frequently planets might pop up around low-metal stars.
The discovery also hints that planets may have studded the cosmos from the universe's early days — back when pretty much all stars were metal-poor. "You can think of the very first stars in the universe, or the second or third generation of stars," Klement said. "Could they already have been able to form planets? That's a very fascinating question."

Vision of our solar system's fate?

Our own sun is on the same stellar-evolution track as HIP 13044; scientists predict it will blot into a red giant in 5 billion years or so. So astronomers may be able to learn something about the fate of our solar system by studying HIP 10344b and its parent star, researchers said.
That fate would not be pretty for Earth. HIP 13044b likely once orbited much farther away from its star but spiraled closer and closer during the red giant phase due to friction with the swollen star's envelope, researchers said. Any more interior planets would have been destroyed during this process.
When our own sun enters its red giant phase, Earth will likely get cooked.
"The inner planets, including Earth, maybe will not survive," Setiawan told . "But Jupiter, Saturn and the outer planets might move to closer-in orbits, exactly like we detected."
HIP 13044b is a survivor, but it won't live forever. Its parent star is due to expand again in the next phase of its stellar evolution, researchers said, and this time the planet will almost certainly be engulfed.

Milky Way may have inflated two huge bubbles of gamma rays

An ancient eruption of a supermassive black hole in the Milky Way may have inflated two huge bubbles of gamma rays which were just now discovered and are considered a new type of astronomical object.
"It shows, once again, that the universe is full of surprises," said Jon Morse, director of astrophysics at NASA headquarters. Combined, the bubbles, which are aligned at the center of the Milky Way, span a vast distance of about 50,000 light-years. The structures are very distinct, with defined edges, and have as much energy in them as 100,000 supernova.
They were found with NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope, which surveys the sky every three hours for the highest-energy light.Among the 1,500 sources of gamma rays Fermi has mapped so far, nothing resembles the bubble-shaped structures, which stretch across more than half of the visible sky, from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus.
"You have to ask where could energy like that come from," said astronomer Doug Finkbeiner, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.Hints of the bubbles appeared years earlier in X-ray surveys and in maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation stemming from the Big Bang explosion.
"We had a hypothesis before Fermi launched that there should be some gamma ray emission in this part of the sky. We were thinking something a bit more modest, maybe something within 10 or 20 or 30 degrees of the center, not these giant structures reaching all the way up to 50 degrees," Finkbeiner said.
Scientists have two possible explanations for the Fermi bubbles. Theory one: a burst of star-formation at the center of the galaxy generated short-lived massive stars with energetic winds that blasted high-energy particles out into space.
Finkbeiner points out that it would take some time to accumulate as much energy as what's inside the bubbles, however. He favors an alternative theory: an outburst from the supermassive black hole lurking in the center of the galaxy. In other galaxies, astronomers have seen evidence for jets of particles triggered by matter that is being pulled into a black hole, objects that have so much gravitational pull that not even light can escape their grasp.
There's no evidence that the Milky Way's central black hole, which is about 400 million times more massive than our sun, has jets, but astronomers suspect it might have in the past."We know it didn't get to be that big by sitting there quietly all the time. It certainly has had big accretion events in the past, where material falls on it and then some of that material comes back out as high-energy particles blasted out in the form of a jet," Finkbeiner said.
"We've never really seen very good evidence of it. This might be the first evidence for a major outburst of the black hole at the center of the galaxy. When it's going full-blast … it would not actually take an enormous amount of time -- maybe 10,000 or 100,000 years -- for it to produce enough energy to create these structures," Finkbeiner said.
"This result is very exciting," added Fermi scientist Simona Murgia, with the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif. "These features could reveal unexpected and very important physical processes in our galaxy that until now we knew nothing about despite the fact that these features could possibly be almost as large as the Milky Way and might have been around for millions of years."

LHC creates mini big bangs

The world's largest particle smasher - the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva in Switzerland - has seen the highest temperatures ever produced by a science experiment, thanks to a flurry of "mini big bangs".
On 7 November, the LHC started smashing lead ions head-on, instead of the usual proton-proton collisions. This produced what are referred to as mini big bangs: dense fireballs that have temperatures of about 10 trillion °C.
At such temperatures and energies, the nuclei of atoms melt into a mix of their constituent quarks and gluons. The fireball is known as a quark-gluon plasma. The formation of the plasma is a key prediction of the extremely successful theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which tells us that as we go back to earlier and earlier times in the universe's history, the strength of strong interactions falls almost to zero. The discovery of this so-called "asymptotic freedom" is what resulted in a Nobel Prize for David Politzer, Frank Wilczek and David Gross in 2004.
The quark-gluon plasma has been studied in great detail at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Upton, New York, which smashes gold ions head-on. In February 2010, RHIC researchers reported the creation of plasma that had temperatures of 4 trillion °C.
Now, thanks to a 287 TeV beam, the LHC's lead ions are colliding with energies about 13.5 times greater than what has been achieved at RHIC.The resultant plasma fireballs will allow physicists at CERN using the 10,000-tonne ALICE (A Large Heavy Ion Experiment) detector to study the universe as it was about a millionth of a second after the big bang.
One can only wonder about what surprises are in store. At RHIC, the biggest surprise was that the quark-gluon plasma, instead of being a gas, acts like a perfect liquid.

World Action Plan to Combat Asteroid Threat

Space agencies around the world are working to be ready to coordinate their response to any potentially harmful asteroid headed for Earth.To help focus a world-class planetary defense against threatening near-Earth objects, the space experts are seeking to establish a high-level Mission Planning and Operations Group, or MPOG for short.
Veteran astronauts and space planners gathered here at the European Space Agency's European Space Operations Center Oct. 27-29 to shape the asteroid threat response plan and establish an Information Analysis and Warning Network.
The MPOG workshop was organized by the European Space Agency, the Association of Space Explorers and Secure World Foundation (for whom this columnist is a research associate).
"It was the first face-to-face meeting of representatives from space agencies wrestling with the tough geopolitical and technical issues which they will face when we're confronted with an actual impact threat," said former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, a workshop leader and longtime activist on ways to protect the Earth from future asteroid impacts.

Sticky issues with space rocks


While the technical issues – early warning and deflection – are challenging, they essentially pale in comparison with the very sticky issues that will confront the community of nations when they have to make a collective decision to act on an actual threat, Schweickart told SPACE.com. [5 Reasons to Care About Asteroids]
"This really has to be a collective decision," Schweickart said, "since, in the deflection process, there will be a trail of nations across which the impact point moves as we shift it off the Earth."
The space agencies in the MPOG workshop grappled with the questions of what would have to be performed and how they would do it, Schweickart said, "either as the 'designated hitter,' as it were ... or collectively in some way. These are difficult geopolitical challenges, and the workshop provided the first face-to-face setting for many of the space agencies to grapple with it together."
The workshop touched upon a number of strategies to deflect an incoming object, but there was also discussion of using a "physics package," space slang for a nuclear bomb if need be. There remains a good deal of discussion over which deflection strategy best serves the planet and humankind – if time is on our side.
Asteroid workshop findings.
Participants agreed that the "sooner the better" would be the best approach to identifying a menacing NEO. Early identification would enable a much more coordinated approach between nations to fend off any head-on collision between our sweet world and a large space rock.
"Understanding how to react if we were really faced with an imminent asteroid impact threat is very important. This workshop was an important part of defining the decision process," said Detlef Koschny, Near-Earth Object segment manager of ESA in the Netherlands and a coordinator of the MPOG workshop.

In a post-workshop handout, the attendees concluded that -

A Mission Planning and Operations Group should be established.

The MPOG should identify to space agencies the technical issues involved in planetary defense, to take advantage of synergies between human exploration, science, and study of the NEO hazard.

The MPOG should propose research themes in NEO deflection for use by space agencies, addressing those areas most critical for effective deflection strategies.

There is great value in finding hazardous NEOs early, to reduce the costs of deflection missions. Early detection would require upgraded NEO search and tracking capabilities.

What next?

The results of the workshop will be folded into the ongoing work of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in its sessions next spring and summer. This will all come together as a set of recommendations or procedures that will be put before the U.N. General Assembly in about a year.
"By coordinating future MPOG meetings with the asteroid decision-making efforts in the U.N., the spacefaring nations can prepare for joint action against a future asteroid impact," said former astronaut Tom Jones, chairman of the Association of Space Explorers' Committee on Near-Earth Objects.
"This meeting advanced the technical solutions we'll need to respond to an impact threat," Jones added.
"The U.N. process addresses international decision-making ... when to mount a deflection campaign. Both efforts will need to progress far beyond these early discussions to create a true asteroid response capability," Jones told SPACE.com.

ESA's multi-pronged approach

Moving out on the planetary defense issue is the European Space Agency. For its part, the ESA has kick-started a multi-pronged and phased Space Situational Awareness Preparatory Program, said Nicolas Bobrinsky, who is head of the effort.
The initiative would give Europe the capability to watch for objects and natural phenomena that could harm satellites in orbit or facilities on the ground. Bobrinsky noted that an asteroid impact would release devastating kinetic energy causing a myriad of woes, from blast waves and tsunamis to atmospheric disturbances and electromagnetic effects.
The NEO component of the ESA plan includes discovery, identification and orbit-prediction functions, as well as a future civil warning capability. Full operational services are to be implemented in 2012-19.
Meanwhile, Schweickart said the truism in the forefront of the NEO-versus-Earth dialogue today is, "Find them early, find them early, and find them early."
"Upgrading our telescopic capability to find the far more numerous smaller but still very dangerous asteroids is the most important investment we can make," Schweickart concluded.

Superstitious Beliefs, now becoming more common

It's that time of year again. Ghosts, goblins and other spooky characters come out from the shadows and into our everyday lives.For most people, the thrill lasts for a few weeks each October. But for true believers, the paranormal is an everyday fact, not just a holiday joke.

To understand what drives some people to truly believe, two sociologists visited psychic fairs, spent nights in haunted houses, trekked with Bigfoot hunters, sat in on support groups for people who had been abducted by aliens, and conducted two nationwide surveys.

Contrary to common stereotypes, the research revealed no single profile of a person who accepts the paranormal. Believers ranged from free-spirited types with low incomes and little education to high-powered businessmen. Some were drifters; others were brain surgeons.
Why people believed also varied, the researchers report in a new book, called "Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture." For some, the paranormal served as just another way of explaining the world. For others, extraordinary phenomena offered opportunities to chase mysteries, experience thrills and even achieve celebrity status, if they could actually find proof. "It's almost like an adult way to get that kidlike need for adventure and exploration," said co-author Christopher Bader, of Baylor University in Waco, Texas. "Other people are sitting at home and renting videos, but you're sitting in a haunted house that is infested with demons."
"These guys who are hunting Bigfoot are out chasing a monster," he added. "I could see the real appeal in going out for weekend and never knowing what you might find." There is no hard data on how common it is to believe in the paranormal, which Bader and co-author Carson Mencken define as beliefs or experiences that are not fully accepted by science or religion.
But trends in television programming offer a sense that there is a widespread interest in mystical phenomena that is becoming more common. In the 1970s and 80s, Bader said, there were maybe one or two paranormal-themed shows in the TV line-up. Today, there are dozens, including programs about ghost hunters, psychic kids, haunted homes and even possessed pets.
Plenty of scientists have put energy into debunking paranormal claims. Bader and Mencken wanted to look instead at what drives people to believe.They started with two nationwide surveys that interviewed a total of more than 3,000 Americans about their beliefs, experiences and interests.
When the scientists broke down the results, they found that people who are moderately religious are most likely to believe in the paranormal. This could be because they are open enough to believe in the unknown, but not so rigid in their religious beliefs to reject mysterious experiences altogether.
The numbers also showed that different types of paranormal entities appeal to different demographics. Women, for instance, are most likely to believe they live in haunted houses. College graduates are most likely to have out-of-body experiences. Unmarried white men are most likely to believe in UFOs.Bigfoot hunters were perhaps the most surprising group, Bader said. They defied all stereotypes of paranormal pursuers who wear flowing clothes and commune with spirits.

Instead, they were very serious, extremely conventional and often highly professional. In fact, their beliefs contradicted their lifestyles so much that many of them were plagued by anxiety, which drove them even further to stick to their beliefs. "Their friends and family consider them kooky," Bader said. "Everyone is saying they're nuts. So, they have a real aggressive style and seriousness of purpose. They want to prove everyone wrong."

For one hunter, the search began one day when he was out in the woods and, he swears, he saw Bigfoot cross his path. "Imagine the stress that would put on your life," Bader said. "You consider yourself a normal, smart guy, and you think you just saw a giant monkey walk in front of you. Now, you have to fit that into your life."

"These are not people trying to explain a crazy world," he added. "They are trying to prove to themselves that they aren't crazy." Regardless of the person or the phenomenon, paranormal experiences are purely quirks of the human brain, said Michael Shermer, executive director of the Skeptics Society, an educational organization, and founding publisher of Skeptic magazine. Whether it's hearing creaks in an old house or watching dots move randomly on a computer screen, he said, people tend to look for patterns and meanings in everything. "The default condition in brain is that all patterns are real," Shermer said. "It's just what we do."

Rubbish Astrology?

Like many astronomers, I found myself (yet again) in an uncomfortable position last weekend. A stranger, upon learning I was an astronomer, said, "Oh, I'm a Gemini, what are you?" How many more times can I smile sweetly back, with a laugh, and say: "I'm not an astrologer, that's not what I do, I'm an astronomer."? According to the latest statistics there are more people now than ever before who read their star signs in the daily news. We live in a time that is more scientifically aware than any other period in history and yet people still believe the stars and planets can determine their fate.
Interestingly, astronomy and astrology share the same origins; in fact it's accurate to say that astrology came first. Ancient civilizations tried to find sense in the happenings in the sky and attribute them to their lives. We soon learned that perhaps there was no mystical force determining our future and the two subjects split into astronomy (the branch of physics that studies celestial bodies and the Universe as a whole) and astrology (a pseudoscience claiming divination by the positions of the planets, sun and moon).
Today though, astrology has turned into nothing more than a fairground act and astronomy has turned into a science having to point out the difference! And this is where I come in. I thought it was interesting, as an (ahem) impartial writer that I highlight a couple of stumbling blocks supporting my belief that astrology really is a load of rubbish.
The zodiac is the band around the sky where the sun, moon and planets move through. The signs of the zodiac are the constellations of stars within this band. Both astronomers and astrologers agree on this bit.
But according to astrologers there are 12 signs of the zodiac. Wrong! There are 13 signs of the zodiac; Ophiuchus is the 'new' one yet for some curious reason I have never come across an Ophiuchian!
Taking the concept of the signs of the zodiac, I was born in July which means that when I was born the sun was in Cancer. Wrong again. Originally yes, the sun would have been in Cancer when the star/sun charts were produced about 2000 years ago. But in reality, the wobble of the Earth on its axis -- which we call "precession" -- has led to them being all out of sync.
In fact, when I was born, way back in July 1973, the Sun was in Gemini. you're all reading the wrong star signs! All those astrology columns you've read that seemed spot-on were a fluke. Surprising eh? The last point I want to throw out to the cyber world is the discovery of planets. Until 1781 there were only five planets known to affect us in the minds of astrologers: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
In 1781, astronomer Sir William Herschel spotted an object moving in the sky and originally thought it was a comet but later realized its planetary nature. The object was the gas giant Uranus. In 1846, another discovery was confirmed, the eighth planet in the solar system. This was an ingenious piece of work combining mathematics and observation. Astronomers noticed some peculiarities in the way Uranus moved through the sky and, after painstaking observation, concluded it must have been the gravitational tug from another object causing its curious motion. The position of the new planet was calculated from the movements of Uranus and subsequently identified telescopically. Neptune had been found.
The interesting thing here is that until the scientific discovery of the two new planets, astrologers had not once mentioned them. Following their discovery they found their way into astrological predictions. If they had a real impact on our lives, surely astrologers should have discovered them or at least known they were out there before astronomers?
Finally, don't even get me started on the nature of the magic/fairy dust that allows a planet to affect us here on Earth. Science has shown us through measurement, observation and experimentation that there are four forces in the Universe: electromagnetism, strong interaction, weak interaction and gravitation. For reasons too detailed to go into in this article, none of them can impact humanity purely from the positions of the stars in the sky or how aligned the planets are.
If there is some mystical force (other than the fundamental four above) affecting our lives from the planets, then clearly distance is no object for this force as it doesn't matter if a planet or star is near or far. How does it work, then, that we have found hundreds of exoplanets orbiting other stars? Or that there are over 200 billion stars in the Milky Way? Surely that 'force' would also be affecting us. Thankfully it doesn't, otherwise we would all be running round as complete loonies with all these 'influences' flying at us from all directions.

As you can tell, I'm not fond of astrology. It's all about telling people what they want to hear and us fragile human’s wanting something to believe in. After all, I've never once heard someone read out their predictions telling them that today is going to be a rubbish day; may as well just stay in bed.