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October 14, 2015
Stephen-Hawking-scientist-new-image-in-chair

Stephen Hawking has been outspoken in recent years about the catastrophic dangers humanity faces in the 21st century. He said we should be cautious in attempting to contact aliens, warning that advanced extraterrestrial life may not be friendly toward us and could destroy the human race. He also stated we should be cautious in creating strong artificial intelligence. The renowned physicist joined Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Google executive Demis Hassabis in signing a letter that warned against a military artificial intelligence arms race.
Hawking even issued a warning to the scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) about the dangers of the Higgs Boson “God Particle,” claiming it could initiate “catastrophic vacuum decay” — a quantum bubble that expands at the speed of light and wipes out the universe.
Recently, Hawking addressed the threat he says may be more far more dangerous to the future of human civilization than robots, aliens, or quantum particles: capitalist greed. During a Reddit AMA, he argued that the future is wrought with the peril of rampant inequality expedited by an automated machine-based global economic system.
“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed.” Hawking continued, “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”
Predictably, a dramatic response thread followed. Many commenters agreed with Hawking and denounced the globalist oligarchy that is currently consolidating wealth at an unprecedented rate. Responses ranged from calls for a “bloody revolution” to references to the recent films Elysium, Wall-E, and Zeitgeist 2: Addendum. One commenter invoked the anarcho-syndicalist political views of linguist Noam Chomsky.
The main theme of the discussion centered around the automation of labor and how that would affect the human workforce and the global economy. Hawking seems to believe that our current trajectory will make such automation a death knell for the working classes, with thebourgeoisie machine owners exerting total economic control over human civilization.
One commenter strongly disagreed with Hawking, referencing recent Journal of Economic Perspective articles and claiming “technology has never, will never, and simply cannot result in structural unemployment.”
The comment thread is a treasure trove of wide-ranging ideas that include:
~The efficacy, or lack thereof, of voting
~A “universal basic income”
~Microeconomics
~Techno-socialism, with “an open source decentralized consensus algorithm for the masses”
~A post-scarcity society run by strong artificial intelligence

This article is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Jake Anderson and theAntiMedia.org.
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April 06, 2015

scientists in Europe have successfully restarted the Large Hadron Collider, which might discover dark matter and extra dimensions in space.
Scientists have successfully restarted the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful atom-smasher ever
built, hoping to enter a new realm of physics and make history for the second time.
Two beams of particles travelling a whisker below the speed of light were sent flying in opposite directions through the LHC's 27 kilometres of circular underground tunnels straddling the Swiss-French border.
Amid scenes of jubilation in the LHC control room, Professor Rolf Heuer, director general of Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, said: "Congratulations. Thank you very much everyone... now the hard work starts."

Currently the 3.74 billion machine is running at a low "injection" energy of 450 giga-electron volts (GeV). In June, the energy level will be ramped up to a record-breaking 13 tera-electron volts (TeV) and experiments probing the fundamental building blocks of the universe can begin.
Two years ago the LHC team, which includes a number of British physicists, astounded the world with the discovery of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle that gives other particles mass.
Now the scientists have their sights set on an even more exotic trophy - dark matter, the invisible, undetectable material that makes up 84 per cent of matter in the universe and binds galaxies together yet whose nature is unknown.
With a beam energy of 13 TeV - almost twice that which produced the Higgs boson - it is conceivable that the LHC will capture dark matter, marking a leap forward in our understanding of the universe.
A technical hitch had delayed the restart of the LHC after a two year re-fit and upgrade.
An electrical short circuit prompted fears that operations could be put back weeks or even months. However, engineers quickly located the problem - a small piece of metal debris - and removed it.
As tension built during the final minutes before the restart, Frederick Bordry, Cern's director for accelerators and technology, handed out Easter eggs to staff in the LHC control room.
The particles of protons, the "hearts" of atoms, travel round the LHC at just three metres per second below the speed of light.
When experiments begin they will be smashed together in four giant detectors located around the beam ring, sparking the creation of new particles and hopefully opening up a new era in physics.
source - sbs

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September 08, 2014
British theoretical physicist and Professor Stephen Hawking has recently warned that the "God" particle could destroy the universe. He says that the Higgs boson could cause a ''catastrophic vacuum decay'' that undermines space-time and destroys the universe.In a preface to a new book called "Starmus", he wrote:  "The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become meta stable at energies above 100bn
gigaelectronvolts (GeV)."

This means that the (Higgs Boson) elusive 'God particle' discovered by scientists in 2012, who
''believes that this gives shape and size to everything that exists - could cause a 'catastrophic vacuum delay' if scientists were to put it under extreme stress''. However, he adds, that under the present economic climate, it is very unlikely that the excited scientists would be funded such extravagant amounts of money to create a particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV.
But if the money did come rolling in, 'this could happen at any time and we wouldn't see it coming.'Starmus is due for release in early November 2014.

Source -zeenews
via - cnet

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