Stephen Hawking's Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site After It's Posted Online (bbc.com) 79
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Demand for Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis intermittently crashed part of Cambridge University's website as physics fans flocked to read his work. Prof Hawking's 1966 thesis "Properties of expanding universes" was made freely available for the first time on the publications section of university's website at 00:01 BST. More than 60,000 have so far accessed his work as a 24-year-old postgraduate. Prof Hawking said by making it available he hoped to "inspire people." He added: "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. 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!" The 75-year-old's doctoral thesis is the most requested item in Cambridge University's library. Since May 2016, 199 requests were made for the PhD -- most of which are believed to be from the general public rather than academics. The next most requested publication was asked for just 13 times. The Cambridge Library made several PDF files of the thesis available for download -- a high-resolution "72 Mb" file, digitized version that's less than half the size, and a "reduced" version that was even smaller -- but intense interest overwhelmed the servers. Here's the first paragraph of Hawking's introduction: "The idea that the universe is expanding is of recent origin. All the early cosmologies were essentially stationary and even Einstein whose theory of relativity is the basis for almost all modern developments in cosmology, found it natural to suggest a static model of the universe. However there is a very grave difficulty associated with a static model such as Einstein's which is supposed to have existed for an infinite time. For, if the stars had been radiating energy at their present rates for an infinite time, they would have needed an infinite supply of energy. Further, the flux of radiation now would be infinite. Alternatively, if they had only a limited supply of energy, the whole universe would by now have reached thermal equilibrium which is certainly not the case. This difficulty was noticed by Olders who however was not able to suggest any solution. The discovery of the recession of the nebulae by Hubble led to the abandonment of static models in favour of ones which were expanding."
Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
60,000 hits? That is amazing.
. . . those Cambridge Boys have got the smarts! They can figure out all the various forces shaping our universe, and important stuff like that.
Unfortunately, the Cambridge Boys seem to have vastly underestimated the power of the force of a good 'ole fashioned Slashdotting . . .
Stephan Hawking could post his toenail clippings, and the demand for those would be overwhelming . . .
Re: Use AWS S3 or Cloudfront ? (Score:1)
Re:Use AWS S3 or Cloudfront ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or the most superior version of all: BitTorrent.
Offer a fallback slow link for people who can't use a torrent. Hell, do it as a Google Drive / Dropbox / Box / One Drive / whatever link.
If you can't cope with hosting it, there are plenty of free options.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd imagine some Varnish would probably have done enough.
I'd love to know what their general architecture is. I know "get some Cloudfront" or "get an Akamai contract" are solutions, but I'll bet this site gets a small base-load year-in, year-out and so doesn't really justify much expense. It'd be nice to know what architecture fails as much as what works.
As for BitTorrent - it's great and all, but it's not just a matter of "click the link, wait for the download" for most people. Perhaps it should be, but ri
Re:Use AWS S3 or Cloudfront ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not post it on AWS S3 or Cloudfront
Or better still, on Sci-Hub.
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I honestly don't give a shit what hawking has to say.
Especially in a 51 year old thesis. You could learn more about the expansion of the Universe from a Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] than from that paper. We have learned a lot since then.
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60,000 hits? That is amazing. How can a website cope with such high numbers? They need to use "AI" to speed it up.
It's a classical old-school Institution. The server is probably a SparcStation 2 in the stacks, behind the Journals from 1976.
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Now I'm wondering just how serious "slashdotting" was back in the day. By modern standards, it was probably nuthin'.
Re: Wow! (Score:1)
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60,000 hits? That is amazing. How can a website cope with such high numbers? They need to use "AI" to speed it up.
You'd think they would have heard of cache. But then again some of these high IQ boys can't even tie a shoelace!
Re: (Score:1)
bittorrent (Score:3)
Sounds like this might have been a good application for bittorrent. Have only magnet links on the campus website.
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But then they might have trouble glorifying Stephen with a download count.
You have a point. I suppose there's some bragging rights to saying "we put up this paper and it broke our site". I guess it comes down to what you're actually trying to accomplish.
Re: (Score:2)
But then they might have trouble glorifying Stephen with a download count.
No, but you would be able to get a "leechers" count...
The Internet Archive would've been a better choice (Score:2)
Yes, and uploading copies of all the various renderings of the document to archive.org [archive.org] would have given them this, time-honored robust hosting via an ordinary HTTP GET request, from a secure site that doesn't require Javascript to use (contrary to the Mega download link someone else posted to /. elsewhere in this story), made a "download" URL available one could put anywhere (even their own website without alerting most users the data was actually coming from archive.org such as a requirement to go through
Why is Hubble credited? (Score:1)
Why is Edwin Hubble credited with the idea of an expanding universe? The idea was first proposed by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest in Belgium who published a paper on it in 1927, two years prior to Hubble. Although Hubble did provide very useful observational evidence to support the theory, it is inaccurate to attribute the theory to him.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is Edwin Hubble credited with the idea of an expanding universe?
He isn't. Hubble's fame comes from finding an elegant way to demonstrate it.
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Why is Edwin Hubble credited with the idea of an expanding universe? The idea was first proposed by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest in Belgium who published a paper on it in 1927, two years prior to Hubble. Although Hubble did provide very useful observational evidence to support the theory, it is inaccurate to attribute the theory to him.
I was taught in school that it was Lemaitre who first came up with the Big Bang theory. He is a useful example for both sides to show that science and religious belief can co-exist, despite the fact the Big Bang theory bears no resemblance to the Bible's creation myth(s).
1966? (Score:1)
Why is that is science paper that is 50 years old is finally free?
Re: 1966? (Score:2, Informative)
It's quite recent that universities have moved away from print copies of theses and dissertations in favor of electronic copies. I believe it has always been free, just as a print copy. I suspect that nobody has gone back to scan in most printed theses and dissertations, so they just sit in a library somewhere. Because of the demand for Hawking's dissertation, the university has scanned a copy and posted online. It was probably free the whole time, just in print form. I doubt there's interest in scanning mo
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Printed copies were still used when I submitted my phd in 2006, though there was an option to submit an electronic version in addition to the mandatory printed one. Printed theses used to be (are?) available at the library for reading but obviously only in dead-tree form unless/until someone bothers to scan them.
Re: (Score:2)
Crashed? (Score:2)
Wikipedia defines a crash as when a computer program "stops functioning properly and exits". A crash is generally a non-recoverable state. Are you sure you don't mean the site was overloaded?
More interesting is the website "intermittently crashed". I think we'll need Mr Hawking to explain the mechanics behind a program that is both crashed and not crashed. It must be that quantum physics stuff.
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Well it's on one of them new fangled quantum computers. It's both fast and slow, smart and dumb, hot and cold, ...
Oh wait that's my wife.
Re: Crashed? (Score:1)
Olbers, not Olders (Score:5, Informative)
Thus "Olber's Paradox" [wikipedia.org]. Text recognition error?
Vector (Score:3)
>"The Cambridge Library made several PDF files of the thesis available for download -- a high-resolution "72 Mb" file, digitized version that's less than half the size, and a "reduced" version that was even smaller"
Why not just provide TEXT or a vectorized PDF? OCR it and do some clean up and then, compressed, it would be what, a few hundred kilobytes, if that? This isn't rocket science :)
Re: Vector (Score:1)
Theses and dissertations generally contain quite a few figures that can't and shouldn't be reduced to text. They may well include tables that won't make sense if improperly formatted. Given the field and type of work being done, I strongly suspect there are a lot of equations included that would need to be properly formatted in order to make sense. For a single dissertation, it's definitely possible for someone to review it and ensure that figures, tables, and equations are handled properly. However, we sho
Re: (Score:3)
I don't disagree with what you are saying, especially about the volume and such. But, obviously, Hawking is famous and demand for his single document could certainly justify someone performing an OCR of the text with bitmap of the figures, as needed. Good work for a intern or graphic design student :)
Re: (Score:2)
Further a "proper" PDF where the text is in fact text and not a bitmap is a lot more useful than a bunch of scanned images because it can be searched.
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I seriously doubt that nobody has ever converted it by hand into electronic form.
on top of that, they could have found someone to do it for them.
however serving 60 000 copies of some megabytes is really easy.
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The conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra can't run a website, either.
I bet Mick Jagger would struggle to run a website as well.
In between sneering about that, maybe you can hop up in a jiffy and see if the toner needs changing in the LaserJet on third floor for us, like a good IT guy?
Re: (Score:2)
And? The comment you replied to didn't mention Hawking at all, so comparing him to conductors or rock stars is completely irrelevant. A better claim would be why you think the London Symphony Orchestra doesn't need a functioning website.
Cambridge University'sprimary purpose is not to create websites, any more than the LSO or Mick Jagger's is. Nothing to do with Hawking per se.
Link (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a link to a copy of the original 72M version:
https://mega.nz/#!dgRUgLhS!OcP... [mega.nz]
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Math error on universe, the answer is actually 42.
Small wonder (Score:2)
"Stephen Hawking's Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site "
Well, there's a lot of gravity in that thing.
"stuff that matters" (Score:2)
Yeah
Comment (Score:2)
News for nerds, stuff that matters. Slashdot is reporting on the slashdot effect!