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somebody got a transcript of Hawking's 21 July talk at dublin
to the blogger/cosmologist and generally cool guy Sean Carroll
and Peter Woit, the mathematician blogger of Columbia U and
Not Even Wrong fame, passed the link on to us
http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/hawkingdublin.txt
So I printed out these words of Hawking
and sit reading them
they are no-formulas, readable, and fairly much
for general audience
He says among other arresting things:
"There is a problem describing what happens, because Strictly speaking,
the only observables in quantum gravity, are the values of the field
at infinity. One can not define the field at some point in the middle,
because there is quantum uncertainty in where the measurement is
done."
I don't know if I buy that. One observes correlations of measurments made in this life in one's own backyard---I would have thought----not at infinity.
the entertainment of this talk is high, and it is very well written I'd say, but there is something
whole-hog-graphic
about it (pun chuckle chuckle) that I mistrust.
to the blogger/cosmologist and generally cool guy Sean Carroll
and Peter Woit, the mathematician blogger of Columbia U and
Not Even Wrong fame, passed the link on to us
http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/hawkingdublin.txt
So I printed out these words of Hawking
and sit reading them
they are no-formulas, readable, and fairly much
for general audience
He says among other arresting things:
"There is a problem describing what happens, because Strictly speaking,
the only observables in quantum gravity, are the values of the field
at infinity. One can not define the field at some point in the middle,
because there is quantum uncertainty in where the measurement is
done."
I don't know if I buy that. One observes correlations of measurments made in this life in one's own backyard---I would have thought----not at infinity.
the entertainment of this talk is high, and it is very well written I'd say, but there is something
whole-hog-graphic
about it (pun chuckle chuckle) that I mistrust.
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