A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking's Community-Bound Voice A Functional Investigation of Self-Mentions in Stephen Hawking's Scientific Prose

Thanks to the development of the concept of metadiscourse, it is now widely acknowledged that academic/scientific writing is not only concerned with communicating purely propositional meanings: what is communicated through academic/scientific communication is seen to be intertwined with the negotiation of social and interpersonal meanings. While a large number of so called metadiscoursal resour...

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and the Teleological and cosmological arguments

The quantum physics of chronology protection

This is a brief survey of the current status of Stephen Hawking’s “chronology protection conjecture”. That is: “Why does nature abhor a time machine?” I’ll discuss a few examples of spacetimes containing “time machines” (closed causal curves), the sorts of peculiarities that arise, and the reactions of the physics community. While pointing out other possibilities, this article concentrates on t...

The Singularity, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI

Professor Stephen Hawking recently warned about the growing power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to imbue robots with the ability to both replicate themselves and to increase the rate at which they get smarter leading to a tipping point or ‘technological singularity’ when they can outsmart humans. In this chapter I will argue that Hawking is essentially correct to flag up an existential danger...

Modular Inclusion, the Hawking Temperature and Quantum Field Theory in Curved Space-time

A recent result by Borchers connecting geometric modular action, modular inclusion and the spectrum condition, is applied in quantum eld theory on spacetimes with a bifurcate Killing horizon (these are generalizations of black hole space-times, comprising the familiar black hole spacetime models). Within this framework we give suucient, model-independent conditions ensuring that the temperature...