TO : ALL Re : bet Dr. Stephen W. Hawking lost Press-Telegram [http://www.ptconnect.com/] Monday, February 17, 1997 EDITORIAL Page B6 Betting on the cosmos If we had to choose sides in a dispute over the cosmos between Dr. Stephen W. Hawking and just about anyone, we'd put our money on Hawking. But if we had in one recent bet, we'd have lost. Hawking, the brilliant Cambridge University scientist who is regarded as being almost in the same theoretical league as Albert Einstein, made a bet with two California Institute of Technology professors six years ago that naked singularities could not exist. Last week Hawking paid off: 100 pounds sterling, plus a T-shirt inscribed, ''Nature Abhors a Naked Singularity.'' That message isn't exactly a total concession, but that's because Hawking lost on a technicality. We'll explain. Actually, we can't explain because we don't quite get it. So we'll borrow the description of New York Times science writer Malcolm W. Browne. First, Browne's definition of the terms: A singularity is a mathematical point at which space and time are infinitely distorted, where matter is infinitely dense, and where the rules of relativistic physics and quantum mechanics break down. Singularities are believed to lurk at the hearts of black holes, which conceal their existence from the outer world. A naked singularity would be a singularity without a black-hole shell, and therefore visible, in principle, to outside observers. Black holes can't actually be seen, but they can be observed because their gravitational effects suck in matter, which spirals toward the hole, is heated and gives off light; their X-rays and other radiation have been detected by observatories. By the way, this sort of stuff isn't just the whimsical speculation of astrophysical theorists. The right answers could help explain the working of one naked singularity of singular importance to us: the Big Bang, which theoretically spun off our universe, and perhaps countless others, 15 billion years ago. The winners of the bet with Hawking are Dr. Kip S. Thorne and Dr. John P. Preskill who, like Hawking, are researchers into cosmic relativity. They based their victory, such as it is, on some recent supercomputer calculations by Dr. Matthew Choptuik of the University of Texas at Austin, who concluded that there could be special circumstances in which a naked singularity could be created from a collapsing black hole. Choptuik concedes that the circumstances are a long shot, comparable to standing a pencil on is sharpened tip: improbable, but theoretically possible. Now you can see why Hawking hasn't given up easily. He's never seen a pencil stand on its tip, either. Hawking promptly made another bet with his two Cal Tech peers: Although there may be a very limited set of conditions that could result in a naked singularity, no general conditions for such a phenomenon would be found. That makes sense to us. We're putting our money on Hawking. _______________________________________________________________________________ ''TIME'' [http://time.com/] February 24, 1997 PEOPLE BY BELINDA LUSCOMBE Page 77 In Physics, the Naked Win Scientists are not what you'd call high rollers. But in 1991 STEPHEN HAWKING, the brilliant, paralyzed British physicist, bet American colleagues KIP THORNE and JOHN PRESKILL that there is no such thing as a naked singularity in physics. A singularity is an object of such density that the laws of physics do not apply to it. A naked singularity is such an object outside a black hole, but Hawking believes it can exist only inside a black hole. He lost his bet when someone else proved that you could, in theory, focus gravity waves so precisely as to create a naked singularity. ''Stephen took a while to accept the result,'' says Preskill, but now Hawking has paid up: #100 (about [US]$163), some ''clothing to cover the winner's nakedness'' and a thumbprint on a concession statement. The physicist didn't give in easily. The message on the T shirts he gave Thorne and Preskill reads, NATURE ABHORS A NAKE SINGULARITY. _______________________________________________________________________________ Till later, MAC??? / tNATOA / [PRo-iauR]