#stephenhawking

legeneralmidi@diaspora.psyco.fr

Trou noir, cet obscur objet du désir

Quand avons-nous découvert l'existence des trous noirs ? Quelles étaient les premières théories scientifiques pour expliquer leur présence ? Qu'est-ce qu'un trou noir ? Quels sont leurs différents caractéristiques ? Que connaissons-nous de ces objets stellaires si mystérieux ?

avec :
- #AlainRiazuelo ( #Astrophysicien.)
- #LoicVillain (chercheur en #astrophysique relativiste et professeur à l'Université de Tours).

Le 10 avril 2019, sous nos yeux ébahis : les équipes de l’ #EventHorizon #Télescope publient la première image d’un #trounoir qu'on nommera #M87Etoile. Trois ans plus tard, le premier cliché de #SagittariusAEtoile, notre trou noir supermassif au cœur de notre Voie Lactée. Ces images, parfois comparées à celles de donuts géants, sont les preuves indiscutables de l'existence de ces monstres au centre des #galaxies.
"C'est un objet qui retient la lumière, son champ de #gravité est suffisamment fort pour empêcher la #lumière de s'y échapper. Il apparaît donc noir, parce que la lumière est piégée en son sein..."
- Alain Riazuelo

Si le concept de trou noir a plus de deux siècles, ils sont restés pendant longtemps, des fantasmes de théoriciens. #StephenHawking en parlait d'ailleurs de la sorte : "On dit parfois que la réalité dépasse la fiction, et rien n’est plus vrai dans le cas des #trousnoirs. Ils sont plus étranges que tout ce que les écrivains de science-fiction ont pu imaginer."

"L'étude des trous noirs est fondamentale parce qu'elle nous permet de comprendre comment les étoiles évoluent, mais aussi parce que ce sont des objets très exotiques, où les lois de la nature sont poussées à l'extrême. Cela nous permet de mieux comprendre les notions d'espace, de temps, mais aussi de matière..." - Loïc Villain
#FranceCulture #France-Culture #podcast #baladodiffusion #science #Eurêka #NatachaTriou

dredmorbius@joindiaspora.com

"The thing about smart people is that they seem like crazy people to dumb people."

Attributed to Stephen Hawking.

This suggests a triangular relation in the form of "The thing about X is that they seem like Y to Z", where X, Y, and Z are smart, dumb, and crazy people respectively.

  • The thing about smart people is that they seem like crazy people to dumb people.
  • The thing about crazy people is that they seem like smart people to dumb people.
  • The thing about smart people is that they seem like dumb people to crazy people.
  • The thing about dumb people is that they seem like smart peoople to crazy people.
  • The thing about dumb people is that they seem like crazy people to smart people.
  • The thing about crazy people is that they seem like dumb people to smart people.

Mind: other than being symmetric, this probably isn't very useful or particularly accurate.

It presumes that members of one class will always misattribute the members of another class as the third. (And not their own.) There's really no reason to believe this. And that there are only three operative classes of people. (Everyone knows that there are in fact 10 types of people. ...)

Though i think there's a certain poetic truth:

Dumb people tend to view intelligence as insanity, and are often persuaded by the insane (or manipulative).

Crazy people have a tendency to rail against the stupidity of the intelligent, and see intelligence in the stupid.

And smart people may mistake stupidity for insanity and vice versa.

There's a deeper question of just what divisions around intelligence are. Etymology is not dispositive, but it is insightful, and one finds that "smart" relates to rapid and effective execution, "crazy" from "crazed" meaning cracked or broken, and various terms for a lack of intelligence being "slow" or "dull".

There's the distinction between smart (or synonyms intelligent, wise, or genius) with informed or educated. "Stupid" is not the same as "ignorant" (the latter is cured by information and education, the former is insensitive to both). And there's a distinction between being insensitive to instruction vs. interpreting it irrationally (crazy).

#intelligence #stupidity #insanity #StephenHawking