Stephen Hawking

Watch Stephen Hawking Deliver a Mysterious Announcement on Space Exploration 

Stephen Hawking will be making a big announcement today about space exploration. What will it be? Find out at noon, EST. Hawking and Yuri Milner of the Breakthrough Prize have been building up to an announcement on Project Starshot. So far, the only thing known about the new project is that it has to do…

Watch Stephen Hawking’s BBC Lectures on Black Holes with Chalkboard Illustrations

Now you can watch as well as listen as world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking expounds upon his latest ideas about the knotty black hole information paradox, playfully illustrated by chalkboard artist Andrew Park. Hawking recently joined a long line of illustrious figures who have given the annual BBC Reith Lectures, founded in 1948, with the very…

This Cambridge Chapel’s Light Display Is a Glorious Ode to Knowledge 

The interior of a Cambridge chapel comes alive with light in an eye-popping immersive project art installation. It’s the creation of artist Miguel Chevalier, and the installation was commissioned by the University of Cambridge for a fundraiser last month — the first time the university has invited an artist to do such a project in…

Stephen Hawking’s New Theory on Black Holes is Fantastically Insane

Black holes have a rap for being hopeless vortexes of destruction, but what would really happen if you fell into one? According to Stephen Hawking, you might end up in another universe. That’s the celebrated physicist’s latest answer to the so-called “information paradox” — the conundrum that black holes appear to swallow matter, which, according…

Ask Stephen Hawking Anything

Stephen Hawking is participating in his first-ever reddit AMA. Unlike previous Q&As hosted on the site, Hawking’s will be conducted in two parts. Today, you can submit questions here. Submissions will be selected from by Hawking, who aims to “answer as many of the questions… as possible over the coming weeks.” “I signed an open…

Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking Call for Ban on Autonomous Military Robots

There’s no question that the age of autonomous killing machines is upon us. But some very smart and very influential people would like to turn back the clock. Over 1,000 people from the worlds of tech, space travel, computing, and mathematics have signed an open letter calling for an end to the autonomous weapons arms…

Stephen Hawking Backs $100m Search for Aliens

The Breakthrough Listen project is our latest attempt to see if any other civilisations have made it through the Great Filter without destroying themselves in radioactive fires, investing $100m in the neverending hunt for aliens clever enough to have invented telly and satellites. The mission will use two of the largest radio telescopes on earth…

The Search for Alien Intelligence Got a $100 Million Boost

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner has announced a new initiative called Breakthrough Listen, a 10-year project that will search for radio and light signals emitted by extraterrestrials. At a cost of $100 million, it’s the largest sum of money ever allocated to the effort. As a discrete SETI endeavor, Breakthrough Listen will dwarf anything that has…

Mark Zuckerberg Wants You To Read Iain M. Banks’ Player Of Games

The founder of Facebook is reading a book every two weeks, and discussing it with the Facebook community. And his next selection is The Player of Games, one of the amazing Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. Writes Zuckerberg: This is a change of pace from all the recent social science books. Instead, it’s a…

Stephen Hawking Singing Monty Python’s “Galaxy Song” Is Perfection

For Record Store Day, the Pythons and Hawking teamed up to record Hawking singing the title song to Monty Python — The Meaning of Life. And it is all that is beautiful and right and just in this world. It comes from the Monty Python live show, where Brian Cox showed up to nitpick the…

Black Holes May Bleed Meaningful Information About What’s Inside

Information can escape the clutches of a black hole, say researchers from Buffalo University. And incredibly, they say this information is not just gobbledygook — it can actually be deciphered to show what lies beneath. This could have a major impact on the ongoing debate among physicists as to whether black holes destroy information or…

Stephen Hawking Captured These Amazing Pics With His Brand New Toy

The world’s most famous astrophysicist now has a vastly improved view of the cosmos. He was recently visited by employees of Celestron, who installed an 11-inch telescope in his home. Hawking has quickly taken to the telescope and he’s already posted some incredible images. Earlier this week, Hawking posted the news and the pics at…

Stephen Hawking on Space Colonization, Villainy, and Predictive Text 

The fictional version of Stephen Hawking is getting a lot of attention thanks to the biopic The Theory of Everything. But real-life Stephen Hawking is far more badass than his big-screen counterpart. He’s also up for discussing his theories on pretty much everything, as Wired’s recent interview shows. The world’s most famous theoretical physicist used…

Stephen Hawking Wants To Play A Bond Villain. Make It Happen, Hollywood

Professor Stephen Hawking has appeared as himself on The Simpsons, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Futurama, and The Big Bang Theory, but for once, he’d like to play someone other than himself. And he even has the perfect role picked out: Professor Hawking wants to play the villain in a James Bond film. The Telegraph…

Stephen Hawking is once again warning about the perils of AI. “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” he recently told the BBC, adding that “It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate…Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t…

Stephen Hawking’s ACAT: Changing the Life of One of Our Greatest Minds

Were it not for technology, one of the greatest minds of our time, that belonging to Professor Stephen Hawking, would lack a voice, a means to express ideas that greatly expand our understanding of the universe. While Hawking’s synthesised voice may be one of the most instantly recognisable in the world, his debilitating struggle with…

Stephen Hawking’s New Speech System Has SwiftKey Suggestions

Stephen Hawking’s famous computer-generated speech system just got a whole lot better. Intel redesigned the software he’s been using to pick out his words for almost 20 years, and the new version comes complete with SwiftKey predictions. Previously, Hawking’s speech system was able to predict some characters here and there, but now with SwiftKey’s algorithms…

Stephen Hawking Biopic Might Steal Your Heart, But Won’t Blow Your Mind

The Theory Of Everything is a remarkable, moving portrait of Stephen Hawking, who overcame unthinkable obstacles to revolutionize science. It’s a beautiful romance that spans the 1960s through the 1980s. Too bad the movie mostly glosses over the actual science that Hawking became famous for. Minor spoilers below… Based on a book by Hawking’s first…

How Eddie Redmayne Captured the Charisma of Stephen Hawking

Eddie Redmayne pulls off a tremendous feat in The Theory of Everything, playing Stephen Hawking from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. Not surprisingly, he’s already getting a lot of Oscar buzz. We sat down with Redmayne for an exclusive interview and he told us what it was like to meet the real Hawking.…

Yes, Time Travel Is Possible; Here’s How

Time travel’s been one of man’s wildest fantasies for centuries. It’s long been a popular trend in movies and fiction, inspiring everything from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine to the Charlton Heston shrine that is The Planet of the Apes. And with the opening of Interstellar today—n0t to spoil…