̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Stephen Hawking

Cambridge ReseARch Trail

zs332 — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 16:34:06 +0000

A new augmented reality trail, launched as part of the Cambridge Festival, is showcasing the world leading research of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge in a new light.

Hawking Archive saved for the nation

zs332 — Thu, 27 May 2021 14:17:39 +0000

Hawking Archive to join those of Newton and Darwin at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

6,000 and counting: Cambridge Vice-Chancellor joins Stephen Hawking in making his PhD ‘Open Access’

sjr81 — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 17:00:09 +0000

Cambridge also becomes first UK university to publish position statement on Open Research.

Step inside the mind of the young Stephen Hawking as his PhD thesis goes online for first time

sjr81 — Sun, 22 Oct 2017 23:01:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��1966 doctoral thesis by the world’s most recognisable scientist is the most requested item in Apollo with the catalogue record alone attracting hundreds of views per month. In just the past few months, the ̽��ֱ�� has received hundreds of requests from readers wishing to download Professor Hawking’s thesis in full.

To celebrate Open Access Week 2017, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s Office of Scholarly Communication has today announced Professor Hawking’s permission to make his thesis freely available and Open Access in Apollo. By making his PhD thesis Open Access, anyone can now freely download and read this historic and compelling research by the then little-known 24-year-old Cambridge postgraduate.

Professor Hawking said: “By making my PhD thesis Open Access, I hope to inspire people around the world to look up at the stars and not down at their feet; to wonder about our place in the universe and to try and make sense of the cosmos. Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding.

“Each generation stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before them, just as I did as a young PhD student in Cambridge, inspired by the work of Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein. It’s wonderful to hear how many people have already shown an interest in downloading my thesis – hopefully they won’t be disappointed now that they finally have access to it!”

Dr Arthur Smith, Deputy Head of Scholarly Communication, said: “Open Access enables research. By eliminating the barriers between people and knowledge we can realise new breakthroughs in all areas of science, medicine and technology. It is especially important for disseminating the knowledge acquired during doctoral research studies. PhD theses contain a vast trove of untapped and unique information just waiting to be used, but which is often locked away from view and scrutiny.

“From October 2017 onwards, all PhD students graduating from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge will be required to deposit an electronic copy of their doctoral work for future preservation. And like Professor Hawking, we hope that many students will also take the opportunity to freely distribute their work online by making their thesis Open Access. We would also invite former ̽��ֱ�� alumni to consider making their theses Open Access, too.”

While the ̽��ֱ�� is committed to archiving all theses it is often a struggle gaining permission to open up historic theses. With the online publication of Professor Hawking’s thesis, Cambridge now hopes to encourage its former academics – which includes 98 Nobel Affiliates – to make their work freely available to all.

To make more of the ̽��ֱ��’s theses Open Access in Apollo, the Office of Scholarly Communication and Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library will digitise the theses of any alumni who wish to make their dissertation Open Access. Interested alumni should contact thesis@repository.cam.ac.uk

At a recent event to celebrate the 1,000th research dataset in Apollo, Dr Jessica Gardner, Director of Library Services, said: “Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library has a 600-year-old history we are very proud of. It is home to the physical papers of such greats as Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. Their research data was on paper and we have preserved that with great care and share it openly on line through our digital library.

“But our responsibility now is today’s researcher and today’s scientists and people working across all disciplines across our great university. Our preservation stewardship of that research data from the digital humanities across the biomedical and that is a core part of what we now do.”

Apollo is home to over 200,000 digital objects including 15,000 research articles, 10,000 images, 2,400 theses and 1,000 datasets. ̽��ֱ��items made available in Apollo have been accessed from nearly every country in the world and in 2017 have collectively received over one million downloads.

Professor Hawking’s 1966 doctoral thesis ‘Properties of expanding universes’ is available in Apollo at https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.11283 or in high resolution on Cambridge Digital Library at https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PHD-05437/1

For further information about Open Access Week, visit: www.openaccessweek.org

Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis, ‘Properties of expanding universes’, has been made freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world, after being made accessible via the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Open Access repository, Apollo.

Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding.

Stephen Hawking

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike

Centre for the Future of Intelligence joins international coalition for safe and beneficial AI

sjr81 — Tue, 16 May 2017 19:00:13 +0000

̽��ֱ��Partnership is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to collaboration and open dialogue on the opportunities and challenges of AI. Its founding members included Amazon, Apple, Google/DeepMind, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft.

CFI’s Executive Director, Dr Stephen Cave, said: “With AI advancing rapidly, we need a broad coalition to manage its impact for the good of all. ̽��ֱ��Partnership on AI is a much-needed and timely development, bringing together the leading companies driving the technology, and an increasingly wide range of other groups, including non-profit and academic institutions, such as our Centre based at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.”

As well as CFI, twenty other organisations have joined ̽��ֱ��Partnership on AI, including UNICEF and Sony.

̽��ֱ��Partnership’s goals are to study and formulate best practices on the development, testing, and fielding of AI technologies, advancing the public’s understanding of AI, to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society and identify and foster aspirational efforts in AI for socially beneficial purposes.

̽��ֱ��Partnership on AI was actively designed to bring together a diverse range of voices from for-profit and non-profit, all of whom share the belief in the tenets, and are committed to collaboration and open dialogue on the many opportunities and rising challenges around AI.

Added Cave: “At CFI, we strongly share the Partnership’s mission to ensure that AI develops in a way that is safe, responsible and fair. We are therefore delighted to be joining the Partnership on AI, alongside other organisations including UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, and our partners in Oxford, the Future of Humanity Institute.

“We hope that being a member will provide us with new allies and opportunities in what is likely to be one of the great challenges of the 21st century, and hope to be able to contribute the insight and analysis of our highly interdisciplinary team.”

CFI is a collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, Imperial College London and the ̽��ֱ�� of California at Berkeley and is funded by an unprecedented £10 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust.

Its mission is to create the interdisciplinary community that will be needed to make the AI revolution go as well as possible for humanity. At the Centre’s launch in Cambridge last October, Professor Stephen Hawking said: “ ̽��ֱ��rise of powerful AI will be either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity. We do not yet know which. ̽��ֱ��research done by this centre will be crucial to the future of our civilisation and of our species.”

You can find out more about CFI at www.lcfi.ac.uk and @LeverhulmeCFI. You can find out more about the Partnership on AI at: www.partnershiponai.org/the-latest/ and @PartnershipAI

̽��ֱ��Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), a Cambridge-based research Centre exploring the nature and impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI), is joining the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society (Partnership on AI), it was announced this evening.

With AI advancing rapidly, we need a broad coalition to manage its impact for the good of all.

Stephen Cave

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike

Understanding gravity - from Newton to Hawking

sjr81 — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 14:12:30 +0000

As part of its 600th anniversary, the ̽��ֱ�� Library has put on display some of its greatest treasures in the blockbuster exhibition Lines of Thought: Discoveries that Changed the World.

To celebrate the anniversary and the exhibition, which runs until September 30, 2016, the ̽��ֱ�� Library has made a series of six short films, each examining one of the six key themes of Lines of Thought.

On the Shoulders of Giants – Understanding Gravity covers three centuries of development in human understanding of how and why gravity operates.

Beginning with Copernicus and a first-edition copy of his iconic De Revolutionibus, Understanding Gravity looks at his first formative ideas of a sun-centred (heliocentric) universe.

Adam Perkins, Curator of Scientific Manuscripts at the ̽��ֱ�� Library, said: “It’s essential to have Copernicus’ idea to create what we know today about the solar system. But we also have on display other, later objects in the exhibition – such as Tyco Brahe’s De Nova Stella – which tried to keep the Earth at the centre of the solar system. However, Johannes Kepler, Brahe’s pupil, immediately rejected the ideas in De Nova Stella and went back to Copernicus’ sun-centred solar system.”

Perhaps the star of Understanding Gravity, and Lines of Thought as a whole, is Newton’s copy of Principia.

Although earlier minds had challenged the view that the earth was the centre of the solar system, it was the work of Sir Isaac Newton, second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, which firmly established that the planets revolved around the sun, and that gravity was the force which controlled this.

“Its publication in 1687 inspired a scientific revolution and laid the foundations of modern physics,” said Perkins. “ ̽��ֱ��bulk of Newton’s scientific manuscripts came to Cambridge in 1872, where they continue to be the focus of global scholarly activity.”

Although Newton was able to posit the existence of gravity, he was unable to explain how it functioned and it fell to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to suggest a solution, with proof coming from Trinity College mathematicians Frank Dyson and Arthur Eddington.

Cambridge physicists and mathematicians including Stephen Hawking and Jocelyn Bell have continued to grapple with the implications of Newton and Einstein’s work in order to explain better the universe around us.

To celebrate Lines of Thought, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library commissioned a once-in-a-lifetime photo of Professor Stephen Hawking and Newton’s copy of Principia, shot in Professor Hawking’s office at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in Cambridge. Lines of Thought has also put on display Hawking’s typescript draft of A Brief History of Time – the worldwide bestseller which was first published in 1988.

Added Perkins: “Hawking sees his own theoretical work as part of a continuum of the ideas going back across the great founding fathers of modern science, many of whom we have on display at the moment.

“Well over 200 scientists have deposited their papers in Cambridge which has given us a world-class treasure. Lines of Thought has given us the opportunity to share these treasures with people around the world as we celebrate 600 years of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.”

̽��ֱ��most important publication in the history of science – Isaac Newton’s own annotated copy of Principia Mathematica – and other seminal works by Copernicus, Einstein and Stephen Hawking, feature in a new film, released today, celebrating 600 years of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

Principia's publication in 1687 inspired a scientific revolution and laid the foundations of modern physics.

Adam Perkins

Lines of Thought: Understanding Gravity

Priceless treasures: in a shot commissioned to celebrate Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s 600th anniversary, Professor Stephen Hawking is pictured with Newton’s annotated first edition of Principia Mathematica. Credit: Graham CopeKoga

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike

Newton, Darwin, Shakespeare – and an envelope of ectoplasm: Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library at 600

sjr81 — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 09:45:45 +0000

Older than the British Library and the Vatican Library, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library was first mentioned by name in two wills dated March 1416 and its most valuable contents stored in the wooden chest pictured above. ̽��ֱ��library now holds nine million books, journals, maps and magazines – as well as some of the world's most iconic scientific, literary and cultural treasures.

Its priceless collections include Newton’s own annotated copy of Principia Mathematica, Darwin’s papers on evolution, 3000-year-old Chinese oracle bones, a cuneiform tablet from 2000BC, and the earliest reliable text for 20 of Shakespeare’s plays.

But is also home to a bizarre assembly of non-book curiosities, collected over centuries, including a jar of ectoplasm, a trumpet for hearing spirits and a statue of the Virgin Mary, miraculously saved from an earthquake on Martinique.

Since 1710, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library has also been entitled to one copy of each and every publication in the UK and Ireland under Legal Deposit – meaning the greatest works of more than four millennia of recorded thought sit alongside copies of Woman’s Own and the Beano on more than 100 miles of shelves. With two million of its volumes on open display, readers have the largest open-access collection in Europe immediately available to them.

To celebrate the Library’s 600th birthday, a spectacular free exhibition, Lines of Thought, will open on March 11, 2016. Featuring some of Cambridge’s most iconic and best-known treasures, it investigates through six distinct themes how both Cambridge and its collections have changed the world and will continue to do so in the digital era.

As well as the iconic Newton, Darwin and Shakespeare artefacts mentioned above, items going on display include:

Edmund Halley’s handwritten notebook/sketches of Halley’s Comet (1682)
Stephen Hawking’s draft typescript of A Brief History of Time
Darwin’s first pencil sketch of Species Theory and his Primate Tree
A second century AD fragment of Homer’s Odyssey.
̽��ֱ��Nash Papyrus – a 2,000-year-old copy of the Ten Commandments
Codex Bezae – 5th New Testament, crucial to our understanding of ̽��ֱ��Bible.
A hand-coloured copy of Vesalius’ 1543 Epitome – one of the most influential work in western medicine
A written record of the earliest known human dissection in England (1564)
A Babylonian tablet dated 2039 BCE (the oldest object in the library)
̽��ֱ��Gutenberg Bible – the earliest substantive printed book in Western Europe (1454)
̽��ֱ��first catalogue listing the contents of the Library in 1424, barely a decade after it was first identified in the wills of William Loryng and William Hunden

As well as Lines of Thought, 2016 will also see dozens of celebratory events including the library’s 17-storey tower being lit up as part of the e-Luminate Festival in February. Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library is also producing a free iPad app giving readers the chance to interact with digitised copies of six of the most revolutionary texts held in its collections. ̽��ֱ��app analyses the context of the six era-defining works, including Darwin's family copy of On the origin of species, Newton's annotated copy of Principia Mathematica, and William Tyndale's translation of the New Testament into English, an undertaking which led to his execution for heresy.

From October 2016, an exhibition featuring some of the ̽��ֱ�� Library’s most unusual curiosities and oddities will replace Lines of Thought as the second major exhibition of the sexcentenary.

Over the past 600 years, Cambridge has accumulated an extraordinary collection of objects, often arriving at the library as part of bequests and donations. Some of the library’s more unusual artefacts include children’s games, ration books, passports, prisoner art and Soviet cigarettes and cigars.

̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “For six centuries, the collections of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library have challenged and changed the world around us. Across science, literature and the arts, the millions of books, manuscripts and digital archives we hold have altered the very fabric of our understanding. Thousands of lines of thoughts run through them, back into the past, and forward into tomorrow. Our 600th anniversary is a chance to celebrate one of the world’s oldest and greatest research libraries, and to look forward to its future.

“Only in Cambridge, can you find Newton’s greatest works sitting alongside Darwin’s most important papers on evolution, or Sassoon’s wartime poetry books taking their place next to the Gutenberg Bible and the archive of Margaret Drabble. Our aim now, through our Digital Library, is to share as many of these great collections as widely as possible so that anyone, anywhere in the world, can stand on the shoulders of these giants.”

In 2016, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library will celebrate 600 years as one of the world's greatest libraries with a spectacular exhibition of priceless treasures – and a second show throwing light on its more weird and wonderful collections.

For six centuries, the collections of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library have challenged and changed the world around us. Across science, literature and the arts, the millions of books, manuscripts and digital archives we hold have altered the very fabric of our understanding.

Anne Jarvis

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Detail from Vesalius' Epitome, one of the most influential works in western medicine

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike

Professor Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday public symposium

gm349 — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:59:27 +0000

To coincide with Professor Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, in conjunction with Intel, is hosting a public symposium on Sunday, 08 January entitled ‘ ̽��ֱ��State of the Universe’.

Speakers will include Professor Hawking, the Astronomer Royal Lord (Martin) Rees, Professor Saul Perlmutter ( ̽��ֱ�� of California, Berkeley, 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics), and one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists Professor Kip Thorne (California Institute of Technology).

2 - 6pm, Sunday 08 January 2012

Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Site

Cambridge CB3 9DA

Free tickets for the symposium are unfortunately no longer available.

However, for those unable to attend, the symposium will be webcast live. Please visit: https://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/hawking70/multimedia.html

In addition to the symposium, a scientific conference (which is already fully booked) will be held earlier in the week (05-07 January). A major goal of the conference will be to review the current status of the fields of black holes, cosmology and fundamental physics; the 27 invited speakers are all world leaders in these fields. Additional information regarding the conference can be found at the following website: https://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/stephen70/

Symposium will focus on ‘ ̽��ֱ��State of the Universe’.

Photo Philip Waterson, LBIPP, LRPS

Professor Stephen Hawking

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes