Prof Hawking: 'The world of science needs Africa's brilliant talents'
Posted on 05/11/2008 2:31:15 PM PDT by yankeedame
By Sebastien Berger in Johannesburg
Last Updated: 9:18PM BST 11/05/2008
Stephen Hawking, the wheelchair-bound physicist, has launched a search for the "Einsteins of Africa" with a lecture in Cape Town.
Prof Hawking: 'The world of science needs Africa's brilliant talents'
Prof Hawking's speech at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), titled Universe, marked the expansion of the postgraduate institution in an effort to accelerate Africa's development.
Two Nobel physics laureates – a prize which still eludes the author of A Brief History of Time – along with the head of Nasa, also took part.
Prof Hawking, 66, said: "The world of science needs Africa's brilliant talents, and I look forward to meeting prospective young Einsteins from Africa in the near future. If my visit helps to create opportunities for Africans to enter maths and science, I will be delighted."
AIMS was founded four years ago by Neil Turok, professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge university, and an education activist. The centre receives six applications for every place and 160 people have graduated from it so far.
Prof Turok has co-developed advanced theories about the origins of the universe with Prof Hawking, but now has diametrically opposed views in certain areas.
"As well as an African Einstein, we want to see the African Gates, Brins and Pages of the future," he said, referring to the founders of Microsoft and Google.
Pretty forlorn hope, considering that Africa seems to be devolving at present.
I can’t wait to see where this post goes, I’ll check it later.
If it was safe for them to stay, many of Africa’s best and brightest would be building that continent up, given its vast natural resources (tantalum, gold, etc.)
If it wasn’t for the highest murder rate in the world, rampant pandemics, frequent wars, wild promiscuity leading to AIDS pandemics, entrenched corruption and tribalism ...
Which is why there are many talented Nigerian oil field workers in the US and South African nurses in Texas hospitals.
I wish them the best. Some great scientists have been African or of African descent, so there must be more to be found, if negative cultural and economic factors can be overcome.
As I like to point out, Thomas Sowell, America’s greatest living intellectual, is black. Nothing more need be said.
Why?To get more of this Anti-American bilge?
African Nobel Prize Winner says HIV Created in Lab for Biological Warfare
There were a few stories on FR about Wizards in Nigeria shrinking male genitalia.
Perhaps Mr Hawking should start there?
Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits capital
Posted on Tuesday, April 22, 2008 8:23:11 PM by LonghornFreeper
KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2005555/posts?page=1
She won the Nobel Peace Prize, not a science prize. There’s a difference.
Turn on the Jerry Springer show to watch any number of unbelievably stupid Americans. Yet the United States still produces large numbers of brilliant scientists. There are lots of uneducated people -- and surely more than a few stupid ones -- in Africa. That doesn't mean they can't have Einsteins eas well.
Obviously Mr. Hawking has not listened to Dr. Jeremiah Wright on Yoruba Mathmatics and African Logic or Bantu Physics. Mr. Hawking is obviously a captive of European thinking and does not understand this different African thinking.
Obviously Mr. Hawking has not listened to Dr. Jeremiah Wright on Yoruba Mathematics and African Logic or Bantu Physics. Mr. Hawking is obviously a captive of European thinking and does not understand this different African thinking.
Correcting typo.
Here’s hoping that “Einstein” is killed for being a witch.
That is, we hope he ISN’T killed for being a witch.
[Trying to type with cat taking bath on shoulder]
Lot’s of geniuses in Zimbabwe waiting to be discovered I am sure. sarc
Looking in one of the greatest places on earth. Moneywise anyway.
“If it wasn’t for the highest murder rate in the world, rampant pandemics, frequent wars, wild promiscuity leading to AIDS pandemics, entrenched corruption and tribalism ...”
Why did you bring Philly into the discussion?
There's only one place that it can go --- to the dustbin of wishful thinking.
Or we can can all get lobotomies and embrace the fanciful fictional accounts of great (utterly lost) subsaharan African universities, languages, math and science achievements which all vanished *poof* from the earth before Neanderthals left their mark on Europe...
Wow, you managed to take it where I thought it would go. Your mom must be proud.
Even brilliant minds can occasionally go off the rails...
There. Fixed it for you. My mother is in fact proud. But I am also a masochist, leaving you all kinds of openings to make me look like a total fool, by sharing all the secret documented histories written for Africans by Africans, describing all the scientific achievements that were presumably stored for safekeeping in the Library of Alexandria.
The Greeks were just lucky. They had branch libraries...
Damned plagiarists!
Steve, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but the Einsteins (of whatever hue) got the hell out of there while the getting was good.
I was talking about Africa, but I guess it can apply to Philadelphia.
Physicist Neil Turok: Big Bang Wasn't the Beginning - According to Turok, who teaches at Cambridge University, the Big Bang represents just one stage in an infinitely repeated cycle of universal expansion and contraction. Turok theorizes that neither time nor the universe has a beginning or end. It's a strange idea, though Turok would say it's no stranger than the standard explanation of the Big Bang: a singular point that defies our laws of physics, where all equations go to infinity and "all the properties we normally use to describe the universe and its contents just fail." That inconsistency led Turok to see if the Big Bang could be explained within the framework of string theory, a controversial and so-far untested explanation of the universe as existing in at least 10 dimensions and being formed from one-dimensional building blocks called strings. Within a school of string theory known as m-theory, Turok said, "the seventh extra dimension of space is the gap between two parallel objects called branes. It's like the gap between two parallel mirrors. We thought, What happens if these two mirrors collide? Maybe that was the Big Bang."I sure am glad that we have "Einsteins" like this guy to explain the universe to us ignorant slack-jawed yokels."In our picture, there was a universe before the Big Bang, very much like our universe today: a low density of matter and some stuff called dark energy. If you postulate a universe like this, but the dark energy within is actually unstable, then the decay of this dark energy drives the two branes together. These two branes clash and then, having filled with radiation, separate and expand to form galaxies and stars. Then the dark energy takes over again. It's the energy of attraction between the two branes: It pulls them back together. You have bang followed by bang followed by bang. You have no beginning of time. It's always been there."
"...it means that time runs forward for a while. Then there's a random state without an arrow of time, then time runs backwards, and then time runs forward again. That's the bigger picture: We're still very far away from understanding it, but that would be my bet. But my main interest is the problem of the singularity. If we can't understand what happened at the singularity we came out of, then we don't seem to have any understanding of the laws of particle physics."
Wow, what a silly, needlessly obscure way of saying “black people are stupid,” which I’m guessing is the apparent point of your post.
My tongue was firmly planted in cheek.
Well, he’s a smart man. He went to Cape Town, not Bongo City. What does that tell you?
by sharing all the secret documented histories written for Africans by Africans, describing all the scientific achievements that were presumably stored for safekeeping in the Library of Alexandria.
Nothing I or anyone else could do would change your mind. If you are a racist, you’re a racist. Do your own research, dude.
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