Marc - Hawkings - A Monty Update

The kids watch "World Pup" about dogs and .. football. Groan.  It's right up there with "Space Dogs" where the dogs go into ..

So I am at Automat last night for a dinner party honoring Marc who is in town for a conference and meeting investors for his Texas-focused buy-out fund (Texas is, he points out, the 12th largest economy in the world).  At the table are the usual hedge-fund suspects as would be expected from the Harvard Business School where Marc was graduated, mid-1990s. 

On my right Lucy who was was a journalist in New York and now completing her third book in a children-series about a kid, George, who finds a way to slip through a computer generated portal and travel around the solar system.  I probe a bit and turns out out that George has been translated in 38 languages and her father Stephen Hawking - you know, theoretical science and all that. Black holes.  

I suggest to Lucy that this must be difficult for her - proving my point by swapping my interest from her to her dad (who can forget the Hawking-Preskill bet where Hawkings argued that since general relativity made it impossible for black holes to radiate, and lose information, the mass-energy and information carried by Hawking Radiation must be "new", and not originate from inside the black hole event horizon.  Since this contradicts the idea under quantum mechanics of microcausality, quantum mechanics would need to be re-written.  Preskill, of course, disagreed and the winner to receive a set of Encyclopedias.  Suck on that one, Connally).

Lucy's book sounds pretty cool, as is she, and I scribble myself a note to buy George for the kids.

Monty update: for those following the trauma, the hamster alive somewhere in the house and we can hear the damn thing scratching.  Madeleine dutifully sets out a bowl of nuts and water and sure enough - gone in the morning.