Classical black holes are defined by the property that things can go in, but don’t come out. However, Stephen Hawking calculated that black holes actually radiate quantum mechanical particles. The two important ingredients that result in back hole evaporation are (1) the spacetime geometry, in particular the black hole horizon, and (2) the fact that the notion of a “particle” is not an invarian...

IN RECENT DECADES, complexity theory has provided profitable new perspectives and analyses in the discourse of many “hard” and social sciences (Johnson, 2001; Lewin, 1999). The oftquoted remark by Stephen Hawking—“I think the next century will be the century of complexity” (Chui, 2000)—will prove, in the near term, to be either hyperbolic appreciation or prophetic, but the good professor, at le...

The objective of every science is to arrive at, or develop, an integration of all the evidence, or facts, in a field, to resolve apparently opposed or conflicting facts. For example, Stephen Hawking is devoting his life to discover or develop a principle or law that will reconcile Einstein's unified field theory (the theory of relativity) and quantum mechanics. It would appear that the objectiv...

Black holes are probably the most fascinating objects in the Universe. They result from the attractive nature of gravity, which pulls any object towards any other object. A large ball of matter thus tends to compress under its own gravitational attraction. Remarkably, if this ball is large enough, the other fundamental forces – electromagnetic, weak and strong – are unable to resist the compres...

Using virtual stock markets with artificial interacting software investors, aka agent-based models (ABMs), we present a method to reverse engineer real-world financial time series. We model financial markets as made of a large number of interacting boundedly rational agents. By optimizing the similarity between the actual data and that generated by the reconstructed virtual stock market, we obt...

Great things can be achieved even with very low bandwidth. Stephen Hawking has been able to break new ground in theoretical physics just by twitching his hand and cheek. Jean-Dominique Bauby was able to write a bestselling memoir by blinking one eyelid. By reading and decoding “brain-waves”, the field of brain-computer interfacing (BCI) is poised to open up the possibility of such expression, e...

In 1976 Stephen Hawking proposed that information may be lost from our universe as a pure quantum state collapses gravitationally into a black hole, which then evaporates completely into a mixed state of thermal radiation. Although this proposal is controversial, it is tempting to consider analogous processes that might occur in certain theories of consciousness. For example, one might postulat...

this paper reports on the results of a research carried out during 1993-94 aiming at studying street sellers as an informal sector activity and a source of socio-economic problems in shiraz, iran. this study makes use of two logit models in order to present a unified framework depiciting the factors that seem to affect the developmeht of informal sector activities. the first model looks at thos...