Exploring the Ethics of Scientific Publishing: The Case of Hawking's Manuscript

[spidey]

vaccum fluctuations are happening everywhere and so the negative energy photon can decrease its near by object not only black hole and the other photon exists as radiation..but this doesn't happen i think... then why it should happen near event horizon...i think i explained what i thought...

 

[Demystifier]

The vacuum fluctuations only serve as an (misleading in my opinion) intuitive way to "explain" what is going on. In actual calculations this is not how one really describes the Hawking radiation.

See, e.g., the review
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0609163 [Found. Phys. 37 (2007) 1563]
especially Secs. 9.3, 9.5 and 9.6.

 

[spidey]

In almost all websites,they use the vacuum fluctuations to explain hawking radiation..and even hawking himself explains radiation emitted from black hole using vacuum fluctuations near event horizon in his book"A brief history of time"..do u mean that hawking radiation can be explained using other than vacuum fluctuations near event horizon...

 

[Demystifier]

1. In almost all websites,they use the vacuum fluctuations to explain hawking radiation..and even hawking himself explains radiation emitted from black hole using vacuum fluctuations near event horizon in his book"A brief history of time"..

2. do u mean that hawking radiation can be explained using other than vacuum fluctuations near event horizon...

1. That is true.

2. Exactly. For example, even if you read the original paper of Hawking himself, you will see that the explanation does not involve vacuum fluctuations. But it is not easy to read it if you are not a specialist. Therefore, in popular explanations for non-specialists, the writers do not know how to explain it in simple terms, so they use an intuitive (but not well justified) picture of vacuum fluctuations.

 

[spidey]

Now,I think, am confused...

You say that vacuum fluctuations are not there in hawking paper...i don't know about that..then why everyone is explaining using vacuum fluctuations... isn't it contradictory...how can explanation changes for non-specialists?

 

[jnorman]

"But it is not easy to read it if you are not a specialist." man, that is an understatement if i ever read one. hawking is almost impossible to follow.

i remember reading "nature of space and time" by hawking and penrose. while penrose's essays were coherent and readable, hawking's contributions were some of the most convoluted, difficult to follow, and abstruse writings i think i have ever run across. i think i pretty much lost all respect for hawking after reading that book, because i was expecting so much more from him. i truly got the feeling, inspired by feynman's remark that "if you can't explain it to a freshman, you don't understand it well enough yourself", that hawking perhaps doesn't understand what he is talking about either, and tries to cover it up with theoretical-babble...

 

[Demystifier]

"But it is not easy to read it if you are not a specialist." man, that is an understatement if i ever read one. hawking is almost impossible to follow.

i remember reading "nature of space and time" by hawking and penrose. while penrose's essays were coherent and readable, hawking's contributions were some of the most convoluted, difficult to follow, and abstruse writings i think i have ever run across. i think i pretty much lost all respect for hawking after reading that book, because i was expecting so much more from him. i truly got the feeling, inspired by feynman's remark that "if you can't explain it to a freshman, you don't understand it well enough yourself", that hawking perhaps doesn't understand what he is talking about either, and tries to cover it up with theoretical-babble...

Are you talking about this?
http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9409195
Trust me, this is still much easier to read than the original Hawking papers.

I agree, Penrose is much better popularizator of physics than Hawking. Hawking is either too difficult or too trivial. Penrose is somewhere in between.

 

[MeJennifer]

When did this manuscript enter the public domain? Looks like an unauthorized publication, am I wrong?

 

[Demystifier]

When did this manuscript enter the public domain? Looks like an unauthorized publication, am I wrong?

It is a common practice in high energy physics.

But look at it this way:
Who writes the scientific papers? Scientists.
Who are the referees for these papers? Scientists.
And who earns a lot of money by publishing these papers? Someone else.
Do you think it's fair? I don't.