by admin on September 4, 2010
LONDON — Did creation need a creator?
British physicist and mathematician Stephen Hawking says no, arguing in his new book that there need not be a God behind the creation of the universe. The concept is explored in “The Grand Design,” excerpts of which were printed in the British newspaper The Times on Thursday. The book, written with fellow physicist Leonard Mlodinow, is scheduled to be published by Bantam Press on Sept. 9.
“The Grand Design,” which the publishers call Hawking’s first major work in nearly a decade, challenges Isaac Newton’s theory God must have been involved in creation because our solar system couldn’t have come out of chaos simply through nature.
But Hawking says it isn’t that simple. To understand the universe, it’s necessary to know both how and why it behaves the way it does, calling the pursuit “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.”
“We shall attempt to answer it in this book,” he wrote. “Unlike the answer given in ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,’ ours won’t be simply ‘42.’”
The number 42 is the deliberately absurd answer to the “Ultimate Question” chosen by sci-fi author Douglas Adams.
Hawking, who is renowned for his work on black holes, said the 1992 discovery of another planet orbiting a star other than the sun makes “the coincidences of our planetary conditions … far less remarkable and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings.”
In his best-selling 1988 book “A Brief History of Time,” Hawking appeared to accept the possibility of a creator, saying the discovery of a complete theory would “be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.”
But “The Grand Design” seems to step away from that, saying physics can explain things without the need for a “benevolent creator who made the Universe for our benefit.”
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing,” the excerpt says. “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to … set the Universe going.”
Hawking retired last year as the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University after 30 years in the position. The position was once held by Newton.
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by admin on July 29, 2010
At one level, the pursuit of higher and more robust capital requirements for banks is not going well. The United States Treasury insisted, throughout the yearlong financial reform debate, that capital should be the focus — increasing the loss-absorbing buffers that banks must carry — and that it (and other regulators) needed to negotiate this is through the Basel Committee process.
But Basel has come under great pressure from the banking lobby, which argues that any increase in capital requirements would limit lending and slow global growth, an issue discussed by Douglas Elliott in this useful paper. The Institute of International Finance, a lobbying group for big banks, issued an influential argument along these lines, and the European stress-test results strongly suggest that European politicians do not want to press more capital into their financial system — just enough would be fine with them.
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PARIS — Unemployment in rich countries may have peaked – but there are still 17 million more people out of work than at the start of the crisis, the OECD said Wednesday.
They are “the human cost of the crisis,” OECD chief Angel Gurria said, urging governments not to neglect them as they seek to repair wrecked balance sheets.
The longer a person is unemployed, the harder it typically becomes for them to gain paid employment.
“This threatens to mark whole generations,” Gurria said in a news conference to mark the publication by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development of the report ‘Employment Outlook 2010.’
There are 47 million unemployed in the OECD’s 31 member countries – the world’s most developed economies, the report says.
That’s a rate of 8.6 percent, according to May 2010 figures, and compares with 5.8 percent in 2007.
The United States accounts for more than half of the jobs shed since 2007 – 10 million.
Ireland needs to create one job for every five that exist today, or about 320,000 positions, to reach pre-crisis levels and Spain has lost 2.5 million jobs.
Gurria said deficit cuts should be done extra carefully and governments will “have to do a fine type of surgery instead of using an ax.”
He said that governments “could have done better” in designing stimulus measures to prevent job losses.
OECD projections show that the unemployment rate could remain above 8 percent by the end of 2011.
The Paris-based watchdog advised governments to target their jobs policies on the most disadvantaged groups, and those with few or no skills, who risk loosing contact with the labor market.
It recommends tax breaks and hiring subsidies for people out of work for more than a year.
Including those who have given up looking for work or who are underemployed, the number of people looking for work could be as high as 80 million, the report says.
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Associated Press writer Rafael Mesquita contributed to this report from Paris.
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