Everything in the universe

Theology is unnecessary . So says Stephen Hawking, the world-famous physicist who controversially argues in a new book that God did not create the universe. "God may exist, but science can explain the universe without the need for a creator," Hawking told CNN's "Larry King Live" in an interview that aired Friday. Hawking, 68, says in his book "The Grand Design" that, given the existence of gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. "Spontaneous creation," he writes, is the reason why the universe and humanity exist. "Gravity and quantum theory cause universes to be created spontaneously out of nothing," Hawking told Larry King. King asked Hawking why he thinks people have reacted so strongly to his book. "Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion," Hawking replied. "The scientific account is complete. Theology is unnecessary." Hawking said his book...

Putting clock-radio-style numbers on your skin might not seem all that desirable. But flashing digits are the proof of concept for a new electronic skin. In theory, "e-skins" like the one described Friday in Science Advances could be used for everything from monitoring vital signs to making wearable electronics a whole lot more wearable. Lots of researchers are working on so-called smart skins. The idea is to package electronic sensors into a super-thin, super-flexible material - so thin and flexible that the user could wear it like a temporary tattoo. Recently, one research group even made a functional smart skin out of office supplies, such as Post-it notes and foil, showing that the whisper-thin electronic sensors need not be made from expensive materials. Creating smart skins that include display screens is the ultimate goal: This would allow hospitals to monitor the vital signs of their patients with a simple stick-on patch. And in your day-to-day life, you could have ...

LONDON:   World-renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking is set to trademark his name, joining the ranks of celebrities such as JK Rowling and David Beckham who have turned their names into brands. Dr Hawking, 73, has applied to the Intellectual Property Office to have his name formally registered, while another English physicist, Brian Cox, has already made the move. For Dr Hawking, whose fame was recently boosted by the Oscar winning success of the film 'The Theory of Everything', the primary aim is to prevent others from exploiting his name with inappropriate products. "It's a personal matter for Stephen Hawking, it is not a university issue, but he has taken measures to protect his name and the success it has bought," said a spokesman for Cambridge University, where Dr Hawking is Director of Research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. Dr Hawking has also applied to trademark his name for charitable purposes, giving h...

LONDON:   Stephen Hawking's son has confessed that he used to play pranks on his father by programming swear words into his speech machine. Tim Hawking, 36, made the confession in an upcoming BBC documentary while admitting that it was only after his father got his synthesised voice that they were able to communicate properly. Mr. Tim, who works for toy company Lego, said that he had never known his father as a healthy man. The 73-year-old physicist was diagnosed with motor neuron disease in 1963. Since 1985, Mr. Hawking has used a computer speech system to speak in a distinctive electronic voice. Mr. Tim admitted that as a child he used his father's wheelchair as a go-kart and programmed swear words into his famous voice machine. "My dad was able to speak with his own, natural voice for those first years, but it was incredibly difficult to understand what he was saying - particularly for me at such a young age. As a three-year-old, I had no understanding of what he w...

What lies beyond our 4 dimensions? When I was a child, I used to visit the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco. I would spend hours fascinated by the carp, who lived in a very shallow pond just inches beneath the lily pads, just beneath my fingers, totally oblivious to the universe above them. I would ask myself a question only a child could ask: what would it be like to be a carp? What a strange world it would be! I imagined that the pond would be an entire universe, one that is two-dimensional in space. The carp would only be able to swim forwards and backwards, and left and right. But I imagined that the concept of “up”, beyond the lily pads, would be totally alien to them. Any carp scientist daring to talk about “hyperspace”, i.e. the third dimension “above” the pond, would immediately be labeled a crank. I wondered what would happen if I could reach down and grab a carp scientist and lift it up into hyperspace. I thought what a wondrous story the scientist would tell the oth...

What follows is an original writing by me ... (where the rocks come from)  Physicists today have constructed two models of "the universe." These are the theory of the very big (Einstein's theory: e=mc2) and the theory of the very small (known as Quantum Mechanics). These two ideas both "prove" themselves correct, experimentally; however, many physicists believe that they both cannot be right because they seem fundamentally at odds with each other.   Quantum theory explains the two nuclear forces and electromagnetism, but it does not yet explain gravity. The two-slit light experiment shows that the basic particles of our universe do not seem to exist (except as a wave function) until they are first measured. According to the theory, matter and energy can (and do) appear spontaneously out of the vacuum of space-time. This is called quantum fluctuation. When a particle comes into existence, so does an anti-particle (possibly in some parallel "negative" ...