Praise for DEATH BY BLACK HOLE

An Inquiry into Stephen Hawking's Philosophical Death Claim Critic, 2022

The phrase "death of philosophy" was the first time I encountered it in Stephen Hawking's magnum opus. I was astounded and disappointed that a scientist who has been so circumspect about the future of physics and astronomy had given the conclusive verdict on the "death of philosophy" in a single sentence

2018

On March 14, 2018, after 76 years of living a purpose driven life, Stephen Hawking left Earth. He wanted to gain a total comprehension of the Universe by questioning his own existence and special characteristics. One of his recommendations was that one should always look up at the stars, not down at his own feet. “Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist”, he said. “Be curious.”

The Review of Metaphysics, 1989

It turns out that a brilliant Indian physicist by the name of Abhas Mitra has solved the puzzle. Reexamining the equations for black holes, Mitra discovered that you can indeed create a singularity with an event horizon surrounding it. The trouble is, you can only do this if the black hole's mass is zero! In other words, even though you can plug any large mass you want into an equation on the blackboard, you can't have a black hole with mass in reality. So with a proper understanding of general relativity, we see that there's no such thing as an event horizon surrounding a singularity (naked or otherwise), no Hawking radiation, and no information-loss paradox. Problem solved. See how Nature always elegantly intervenes to invalidate our flights of fancy that might violate Her fundamental principles? There is no need for quantum wormhole entanglements, à la Susskind, or nasty AMPS firewalls because there is no way of making a black hole in the first place. Predictably, the physics community is not enamored with Mitra's ideas. After all, scientists have spent almost 100 years contemplating black holes and basing really cool and radical theories on them. But recent astronomical data on so-called black hole candidates (BHCs) show they have stupendously large magnetic fields, which classic black holes simply cannot have. So it looks like Mitra is right. Even the legendary Stephen Hawking himself recently cast doubts on the existence of black holes, and has started calling them gray holes instead. Unfortunately, the absence of black holes is bad news for many current cosmological theories, especially ones like Lee Smolin's evolving universes, where mommy universes give birth to black holes that collapse into baby universes; a kind of genetic selection process that results in universes with lots of black holes and high probabilities of being friendly to intelligent life based on the anthropic principle

Stephen Hawking entered the hall of the greatest scientists of all time, alongside names like Galileo, Newton and Einstein. He was a warrior fighting a degenerative disease that deprived him of movement. Hawking made important contributions to understanding the functioning of the Universe by exploring issues such as Black Holes, Wormholes, Space and Time, and the Big Bang. The understanding of the Thermodynamics of the Black Holes caused us to approach the Relativity of Quantum Mechanics, leaving the "Theory of Everything" closer to our reality. Stephen William Hawking was born exactly on the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death and died at the age of 76 on Albert Einstein´s birthday on Pi Day on March 14, 2018.

viXra, 2019

Many physicists and other scientist researchers, in order to overcome the deadlocks of Quantum Theory and General Theory of Relativity, or the issues related to the mind-brain problem and the nature of consciousness, end up adopting an extended physical reality. A line of thought represented among others by Julian Barbour, Roger Penrose and Lee Smolin seeks to construct the extended physical reality with the tools of physics and mathematics alone. Wolfram Schommers believes that basic physical reality goes beyond the image of reality that our brain forms and on this premise develops its own mode about reality. A large number of researchers, of all specialties, extends and deepens the study of the relationship between mind and physical reality by formulating a variety of scientific views, some of which are indeed impressive. All of these researchers introduce, in one way or another, an extended physical reality that has as a common denominator some kind of eternity from which temporality emerges by physical processes. In this sense, many religious experiences are the result of the structure of the physical world. Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emission, The Divided Brain and The Making of the Western World, gives us all the means to explain and interpret why the human brain, although coming in contact with and knowing this eternal reality, had to rediscover it through the language of mathematics and physics.

From antiquity to our present day, scientists specifically cosmologists and physicists, are still on their relentless pursuit to understand the nature and structure of universe with all it’s components. We all know of or at leat have heard of brilliant minds such as Albert Einstein, Max Planck and others who have contributed to our present conception of the nature of reality. One of those brilliant minds of the 20th and 21st century upon whose work I am going to give an overview is Stephen Hawking. Professor Stephen Hawking who studied at both Oxford and Cambridge University, held the Chair Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge England, a chair that was once held by Isaac Newton. He is without a doubt the leading cosmologist of our time. He is to the 20th and 21st century what Charles Darwin was to the 19th century with his mechanism for the theory of evolution. Even though Professor Hawking is bound physically by ALS or Motor Neurone Disease, yet this did not cause an impediment to his cognitive faculties. That’s why we have several books to which he is the author of and it my aim to give an overview of one of his most iconic books which was a bestseller for 237 weeks. This book is entitled ‘A Brief History of Time - From the Big Bang to Black Holes.’