From: mike_steiner@qm.claris.com (Mike Steiner)
Newsgroups: rec.org.mensa
Subject: Re: Stephen Hawking, Mensan
Date: 2 Sep 92 18:46:13 GMT

In article <5410@unixhub.SLAC.Stanford.EDU>, joann@ariadne.SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Jo Ann Malina) writes:
> 
> In article <15097@claris.com>, mike_steiner@qm.claris.com (Mike Steiner) writes:
> |> In article <1992Aug30.054806.26282@ncsu.edu>, cjdcosta@eos.ncsu.edu (CHRISTOPHER J DCOSTA) writes:
> |> > 
> |> > 
> |> > I just caught Siskel & Ebert's review of "A Brief History of time".. Not
> |> > very enlightening as to the content, but yes, it's a documentary. And Siskel
> |> > liked it but Ebert thought it "treated Hawking like a brain in a box" instead
> |> > of a person, or something of that sort. Anyway, I'm going to see it.
> |> 
> |> As I wrote a few moments ago, we saw it Friday evening; it was worth seeing.
> 
> I did enjoy it, although it's pretty slow paced, lots of talking heads,
> Hawking's mother, sister, colleagues reminiscing about his life and work,
> plus his talking computer reading parts of his book to us as we watch him
> composing it with his hand-held word selector. This is interspersed with
> some mediocre graphics trying to illustrate some of the ideas he has worked
> on over the years. They are very exciting. I hope they are explained in more
> detail in the book, which I now intend to read. For instance, the idea that
> the universe never had a "beginning" (in terms of all the matter in it being
> compressed into a single particle in the moment before the Big Bang) is not
> one I had heard before. Of necessity it had to be treated sketchily in the
> film, I hope the book goes into more (non-mathematical) detail.

Yes, the book definitely does so.  However, although it is not mathematical,
by the end, the concepts are very hard to keep up with in the first reading,
at least for someone who is not trained in the subject.  He does lead up to
them gradually, so the early parts of the book may seem too simplistic.
When you buy the book, be careful that you get the right one; there is one book
that is about the making of the movie, and is essentially the movie in book form.
I think that you want the original--which inspired the movie.  As Hawking wrote
in the introduction to the second book, "This is a book written about the movie
which was made about the book.  I don't know whether they will make a movie about
this book."

> Also some words were used in ways I didn't understand, such as "entropy"
> being used as if it were a place at the event horizon (of a black hole).
> Or the idea of matter-antimatter particles popping into existence, only to
> disappear by annihilating each other again; if this happens near the
> event horizon, one half the pair may drop into the black hole and the
> other escape into the universe. That much I grasp, but this state of
> affairs was somehow supposed to mean that black holes could someday
> "boil away," and I don't get how the one process implies the other.

He explains these in more detail in the book.  I believe that he means that
when one particle does not go into the black hole, it represents a slight
loss of mass or energy (which are same, as we all "know"); therefore, after
a sufficent number of billions of years, the black hole will lose all its
mass and energy by this means.  Why the other particle entering the black
hole doesn't represent a gain of mass or engery is something that I either
never figured out, or have forgotten.
Newsgroups: rec.org.mensa