[Info-vax] Where is EISNER:: and who funds it?

[Paul Hardy]

alanfe... at gmail.com <alanfeldman48 at gmail.com> wrote:
>  …
> Theoretical physicists often set natural constants like c (speed of
> light), \hbar (the reduced Planck constant), and e (charge of a positron) to 1.

One of my abiding memories was of going to a lecture by Stephen Hawking in
Cambridge in 1975, one of the last times he spoke with his own voice in
public. He had prerecorded the lecture using his voice synthesis system
(which was a  DECtalk) but answered questions himself. The lecture was
jointly hosted by the university physics society and the university science
fiction society, and the tittle was something like “can black holes provide
faster than light travel to distant stars?”

He started by defining the units in which he worked - setting  the speed of
light, Planck’s constant, and the electron charge, all to one. He said it
gave a set of units that was ideal for his work in studying the time just
after the Big Bang - damned hot, damned fast, and damned heavy!

Very memorable talk!

-- 
Paul at the paulhardy.net domain