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No he did not. The original paper is at

https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07702

This paper was not widely noticed back when it was written in July (both inside and outside the theoretical physics community) and still has not been accepted in a journal.

In fact, it is rather unfortunate but most of what Stephen Hawking did in his latter years has been highly speculative; perhaps food for thought for other experts, but not worth reporting about in the mainstream media since it is (in my opinion) very likely to be wrong.

I apologize for not debunking this paper with more detail but a scientist can spend a lifetime doing so... However I can make one falsifiable prediction (like a true physicist): the serious news media will not report on this.

Graham Hutton, one of the authors of the original paper, also wrote a wonderful book "Programming in Haskell". I would wholeheartedly recommend it to both the programming novice and the experienced programmer trying to learn Haskell and monadic programming.

Chapter 13 of (the second edition of) that book also revisits the original paper from a modern viewpoint and overlaps with the current article. For example, both the book and the article mention the similarity with the state transformer, introduce instances of 'functor' and 'applicative' before the 'monad' instance, and discuss the 'alternative' instance.

This is certainly an awesome and generous gesture and Drive Savers wholly deserves all the attention they get here. (No sarcasm!)

Meanwhile, this is the donation page of Save the Children for the victims of the South Asia Floods:

https://secure.savethechildren.org/site/c.8rKLIXMGIpI4E/b.95...

Clicking on this link is probably not much harder than clicking the upvote button on this story.

This seems like an area where a trusted organization (perhaps the EFF?) could do a lot of good by creating a "for dummies" webpage where the vulnerability disclosure process is explained in layman's terms (i.e. with suitable car analogies...) from a website owner's perspective. Those who discover a vulnerability in a company's IT infrastructure can then submit a link to this page with their reports.

It's most certainly not scientific writing. But I think that is not the point of these publications -- they are meant for a wide audience.

So I think I should interpret your criticism as saying that quanta does a poor job in maintaining rigor while trying to explain advanced topics in mathematics and theoretical physics to a wide audience. My impression, on the other hand, is that their reporting on these topics beats similar publications hands down. I am therefore happy to recommend it to interested laypeople, for example to my (few...) friends outside of academia and to people here on HN.

By the way, I hope you realize that these two viewpoints are not completely orthogonal.

As usual I think that Woit's blog post is unnecessarily polarizing. If you decide to read his post then I would recommend you also read the excellent comment by Marty Tysanner on the same page.

Also, sigh. If you dig deep into the dark corners of the internets then I am sure that you can find fake anything. Focus on the beauty and the truth, people. For example:

[1] LIGO continues to work beautifully, as evidenced by its second detection of gravitational waves back in June: http://news.mit.edu/2016/second-time-ligo-detects-gravitatio...

[2] A fun but highly speculative 'bump' in the LHC data, which will probably go away but is fun to think about: https://profmattstrassler.com/2016/10/21/hiding-from-a-night...

[3] New precision results from a nice little experiment done 'on the side' at CERN: https://press.cern/press-releases/2017/01/cern-experiment-re...

[4] Or just a very accessible overview of particle physics in 2016: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/2016-year-in-particl...

Quanta Magazine has also a good reputation among many theoretical physicists including myself. They of course do suffer from the occasional misconception, but as a whole the accuracy of their reporting is leaps and bounds above many other popular science sites or blogs.

The main problem is that the supposed violation of momentum conservation. This law is very deeply ingrained in all the current fundamental theories of physics, from the standard model to general relativity. These theories are extremely successful in describing phenomena all the way from subnuclear scales to cosmological scales, as well as nearly everything in between. This leads to two issues:

(a) If these models break down somewhere I would expect it to happen under much more extreme conditions and not with a 'table-top' experiment like this one.

(b) As far as I can see, giving up momentum conservation is not a feature that we can simply 'bolt onto' the existing models. It would require a radical rethinking of the very foundations of our current physical models.

So my personal attitude is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and this paper is not remotely convincing.

This experiment reminds me very much of the faster-than-light neutrinos. The authors of that experiment also seemed careful enough to not overstate their claims but this did not prevent a massive public interest in an ultimately debunked result. I expect the results in this paper to go the same way.

> The parent would decide that in early days of Higgs' career, he wasn't productive enough, and thus he would prevent him making the discovery for which he is famous.

You are stretching the meaning of my comment. Did you know that he published three papers in the three years before getting hired in Edinburgh in 1960? I only pointed out that (on any 'time horizon') his scientific productivity after 1964 was basically non-existent.

In fact I agree on some level with a lot of the comments here, including yours. I just think that Peter Higgs is not the right example to justify the cause.

> and unless we collectively realize that we can just lay back and don't need to actually compete, it won't get any better.

And therefore, sadly, it won't.

Peter Higgs published about 5 scientific papers after his Nobel-winning work in 1964 until his retirement in 1996, none of which were particularly impressive. I think this is below any reasonable standards, not just below contemporary academic standards. Therefore, barring special circumstances like an exemplary teaching record, in my opinion Edinburgh University would have been right to sack him and replace him with a more productive person. In short: I don't think that Higgs nearly getting sacked is an accurate indication that academia has too much of a 'publish or perish' culture.

It's a little complicated. The idea is that one uses this Leech lattice to define a 24-dimensional space, and we throw in little quantum strings that live on that space. These strings are inspired by (but not exactly the same as) the strings we know from standard 'string theory'.

The quantum field theory is then the one living on the worldsheet of the strings, it is the one that describes their embedding in this peculiar space. The monster group turns out to be a symmetry group of this field theory.

This is all conjecturally related to quantum gravity (according to Witten's paper) through the so-called AdS/CFT correspondence which states that field theories are sometimes equivalent to theories of quantum gravity. It has its problems and it remains to be seen if it is really true. (AdS/CFT is fine in itself, the trouble of the conjecture is whether it holds in this particular example.)

A word of warning based on previous experience: this is highly technical stuff and what is mentioned here are just words. Please don't think you can make contributions to this field without seriously studying the equations.

This article provides some historical context to today's prize.

http://profmattstrassler.com/2013/10/08/the-twists-and-turns...