Hawking: "Philosophy is Dead"

[sidbrown]

No, the observations are not made in the black holes, rather the model used for the black hole makes some predictions of fluidity. Those fluid characteristics are observed in the Lithium and gold experiments I mentioned, so the string theory then gives hope to the physicists that they may have found a way to describe the observed effects predicted for black holes in the other situations: the quark-gluon plasmas of gold ions that act like fluids, and the Lithium ions at less than one micro Kelvin temperature that have measurable viscosity and entropy. The Li experiments are at Duke, and the Brookhaven National Lab has the gold plasma created in the Relativisitic Heavy Ion Collider.

Lithium:
phy.duke.edu/research/photon/qoptics/highlights/pdf/PhysNewsUp04.html
RHIC:
bnl.gov/rhic/

Superstring postulated fuzzball, there may be a bundle of strings at the center of a black hole:
http://www.planetjune.com/blog/images/fuzzball2.jpg

Thanks Vico. This is all very interesting.
But it looks like some aspects of superstring theory can be verified without recourse to the LHC?
Here’s a song about the LHC from Les Horribles Cernettes.
youtube.com/watch?v=A1L2xODZSI4

 

[sidbrown]

No, the observations are not made in the black holes, rather the model used for the black hole makes some predictions of fluidity. Those fluid characteristics are observed in the Lithium and gold experiments I mentioned, so the string theory then gives hope to the physicists that they may have found a way to describe the observed effects predicted for black holes in the other situations: the quark-gluon plasmas of gold ions that act like fluids, and the Lithium ions at less than one micro Kelvin temperature that have measurable viscosity and entropy. The Li experiments are at Duke,…Lithium:
phy.duke.edu/research/photon/qoptics/highlights/pdf/PhysNewsUp04.html

As I read the lithium experiment
phy.duke.edu/research/photon/qoptics/highlights/pdf/PhysNewsUp04.html
it concerns superfluidity in a Fermi gas based on pairs of fermion atoms. I thought that there was a theory developed in 1956 of Cooper pairs bound by the electron phonon interaction which gives rise to superconductivity. So I don’t see the necessity of invoking superstrings for this particular phenomena, since as you know the BCS theory explains superfluidity in He3, and I don’t see why it would not be unreasonable to expect a similar mechanism in this case.

 

[Vico]

Thanks Vico. This is all very interesting.
But it looks like some aspects of superstring theory can be verified without recourse to the LHC?
Here’s a song about the LHC from Les Horribles Cernettes.
youtube.com/watch?v=A1L2xODZSI4

Yes, the Lithium experiment (at Duke) is an example that does not use the LHC, rather a focused laser beam cools and traps lithium-6 atoms producing “evaporative cooling” to produce and oscillate Lithium “jelly”.

So all this science is revealing many things about our universe which we did not know, which is seems Hawking believes is making philosophy out of date. But, it is important to remember that philosophy which is rational, is different than Theology, as Theology is based upon revelation.

 

[ManOnFire]

The idea that everything can be explained is an absurd fantasy, and the fact that anyone might entertain the idea that everything can be explained is indicative of why philosophy is dead.

Science is what drives discovery. It is results based. It needs no justification. Your hypothesis either achieves results and becomes self justifying or it is proven false and becomes just as dead as philosophy and metaphysics.

It seems hypocritical for an atheist to claim that “The idea that everything can be explained is an absurd fantasy…” If you believe that God doesn’t exist, then logically, there must be an objective explanation for everything. I’ve heard atheists claim that these explanations simply haven’t been discovered yet, but they usually claim “yet” as opposed to your absolute claim of absurdity.