Friday, October 08. 2010
Via Treehugger
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by Stephen Messenger, Porto Alegre, Brazil
Like many youngsters, and those young at heart, seven-year-old Max Geissbuhler and his dad dreamed of visiting space -- and armed with just a weather balloon, video camera, and an iPhone, in a way they did just that. The father and son team from Brooklyn managed to send their homemade spacecraft up nearly 19 miles, high into the stratosphere, bringing back perhaps the most impressive amateur space footage ever.
Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.
The duo housed the video camera, iPhone, and GPS equipment in a specially designed insulated casing, along with some hand-warmers and a note from Max requesting its safe return from whomever may find it after making it back to solid ground. All told, father and son spent eight months preparing for their homemade journey into space, in hopes of filming "the blackness beyond our earth".
Then, one day in August, Max and his father headed out to a nearby park to see their dreams realized. After attaching their equipment to a 19 inch weather balloon and switching on the camera, they watched as their simple craft disappear high into the sky.
After a little over an hour, the craft reached the stratosphere, 100 thousand feet overhead, capturing some incredible footage of space before the balloon popped and fell back towards earth. They found their spacecraft 25 miles away from where they had let it go, stuck up in a tree.
Although the camera's battery died some minutes before touching-down, the footage it returned is no short of impressive. And despite the fact that the craft didn't technically reach the boundaries of space, Max and his father are undoubtedly proud of their accomplishment.
Geissbuhler describes the experience on the video he uploaded to the Internet:
In August 2010, we set out to send a camera to space. The mission was to attach a HD video camera to a weather balloon and send it up into the upper stratosphere to film the blackness beyond our earth. Eventually, the balloon will grow from lack of atmospheric pressure, burst, and begin to fall.
It would have to survive 100 mph winds, temperatures of 60 degrees below zero, speeds of over 150 mph, and the high risk of a water landing. To retrieve the craft, it would need to deploy a parachute, descend through the clouds and transmit a GPS coordinate to a cell phone tower. Then we have to find it.
Needless to say, there are a lot of variables to overcome.
Just as the space-race of the 1960s was driven by a spirit of exploration and ingenuity, so too was the bold idea of Max and Luke Geissbuhler to film the darkness beyond our planet with their homemade spacecraft. And just as mankind was at once emboldened by the success of science and the realm of possibility was widened for an entire generation -- perhaps this father and son team can inspire others to follow their dreams, too, do-it-yourself style.
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More on Fantastic Flights
Amazing Photo of Earth Taken With Point-n-Shoot Camera and Balloon
Student Makes History with First Ever Human-Powered Ornithopter
World's First Flight Powered by 100% Algae Biofuels Completed
Sunday, September 05. 2010
Via Swissnex San Francisco
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San Jose digital art festival showcases “Build Your Own World” projects including a magic book, an Internet light source for space colonies, and the sounds of ripening tomatoes.
4 Sep 2010 - 19 Sep 2010
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Practical Information:
Location:
Multiple locations in San Jose, CA
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Cost:
Day pass $24 - Multi-day Pass $45. More information below.
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The 2010 01SJ Biennial (ZERO1) presents artwork, performance, special events, and talks from September 16th through 19th under the theme, “Build Your Own World.”
swissnex San Francisco supports three projects included in this year’s interdisciplinary, multi-venue digital art Biennial. I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, by fabric | ch, in the South Hall proposes an open source, artificial climate and public light source based on human metabolism that could be distributed through an imaginary “Deep Space Internet” to intergalactic colonies. Tomato Quintet, by Chris Chafe, Greg Niemeyer, Sasha Leitman, and Curtis Tamm, also shows in the South Hall. This piece both sonifies and visualizes the difference in air quality between a chamber housing ripening tomatoes and the ambient environment. At the San Jose Museum of Art, artist Camille Scherrer’s Le Monde des Montagnes (The World of Mountains) blends low and high tech in an interactive, ditigal fairy tale. Her augmented reality storybook lets viewers flip through the pages only to find magical animations appear on a nearby computer monitor.
With support from Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council. Stay tuned for related event announcements.
Purchase tickets
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Related events
Retro-Tech Gallery Talk
September 16, 2010 at 12:00 pm
With Kristen Evangelista, associate curator and curator of the exhibition and Camille Scherrer
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I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting (2010), by fabric | ch
fabric | ch is Christian Babski, Stéphane Carion, Christophe Guignard, and Patrick Keller. The Lausanne, Switzerland team formulates new architectural proposals and produces radical livable spaces. In 2001, architect Philippe Rahm and fabric | ch set up I-Weather.org, an open source, artificial climate based on human metabolism, circadian rhythms, and light therapy research. I-Weather.org envisioned synchronizing and distributing climate to any physical or digital space connected to I-Weather’s server.
In 2008, NASA announced the first successful communication with a distant spacecraft 20 million miles away via the Deep Space Internet, a model for a forthcoming interplanetary Internet. At the 01SJ Biennial, fabric | ch takes this idea to its conclusion by setting up I-Weather Deep Space Public Lighting, a metabolic public light source distributed through the imagined Deep Space Internet spaceships and intergalactic colonies.
Tomato Quintet (2007/2010), by Chris Chafe, Greg Niemeyer, Sasha Leitman, and Curtis Tamm
Tomato Quintet (2007/ 2010) is a “musification” and visualization of the air quality differences between a container of ripening tomatoes and the ambient environment. Tent walls made from sheets of Mylar are induced to vibrate through transducers attached to the top and bottom. Visitors to the tent will find a Plexiglass chamber filled with green tomatoes. During the course of the show, the green tomatoes will ripen to perfection while air quality sensors measure the gas output (CO, CO2, NO2, plus temperature and light). The Tomato Quintet 2.0 software will compare the patterns and differences of air qualities in the two spaces and render them audibly through speakers and headphones. On the final day of the Biennial, the project will convert the ripe tomatoes into salsa for guests to enjoy during lunch, accompanied by the sounds of the tomato ripening data accelerated by a factor of 240X.
Le Monde des Montagnes (The World of Mountains) by Camille Scherrer
In Le Monde des Montagnes (The World of Mountains) (2008), Swiss artist and designer Camille Scherrer blends low and high tech to push storybooks into an interactive realm. She has created a digital fairy tale, enlisting both her background in illustration and new media art. As the reader turns the pages of an ordinary book, a nearby computer monitor displays the very same pages augmented with mysterious animations of birds and snowflakes. Scherrer created this magical illusion with custom software and a reading lamp that contains a hidden camera.
Scherrer likes to play at the intersection of technology and art, looking for new fields of investigation. In Le Monde des Montagnes, she created her own universe inspired by the mountains where she grew up. She graduated in 2008 from the University of Art and Design, Lausanne (ECAL) in visual communication and works at EPFL+ECAL Lab, whose mission is to foster innovation at a crossroads between technology, design, and architecture. Her project was awarded Best European Design Diploma (Talent exhibition, Design huis, Eindhoven) and has been exhibited and published internationally.
Friday, September 03. 2010
By fabric | ch
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fabric | ch will present a new work entitled I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting during the 2010 01SJ Biennial in San Jose (San Francisco Bay Area, CA, September 4-19, 2010).
Curated by Steve Dietz and assistant curator Jaime Austin, the 2010 01SJ Biennial will develop a full range of radical exhibitions in the Bay Area around this year's biennial theme, Build you own world. Our installation will be part of San Jose / South Hall exhibit: Out of the Garage into the World, which title takes its inspiration from the nearly mythological times of the early California's Silicon Valley, when young scientists supposedly started their future world scale business in their home's garage or backyard.
Curator Steve Dietz about this year's biennial: "Build Your Own World: The future is not just about what’s next. It’s also about what we can build to ensure that what’s next matters. How can we, as resourceful, innovative, and knowledgeable local and global citizens build and participate in a desirable future in the face of global climate change, economic meltdown, political instability, and cultural divisiveness?"
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I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting:
I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, yellow-orange phase.
I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, cyan-blue phase.
I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, full gradient and time rainbow.
In 2001, architect Philippe Rahm and fabric | ch jointly set up I-Weather, an open source artificial climate based on human metabolism, circadian rhythms and on the medical knowledge of the time about light therapy and chronotherapy. I-Weather.org intended to allow the growing number of de-territorialized locations and people to synchronize their atmosphere and metabolism with this Internet distributed climate: a parallel day of 25 hours, that diffused its colored “daylight” in any physical or digital space connected to the I-Weather’s server.
In 2008, NASA made an announcement about a first successful communication with a 20 million miles distant spacecraft on the Deep Space Internet, the model for a forthcoming interplanetary Internet.
Late in 2009, the team upgraded I-Weather to a new version, as scientific knowledge of biological rhythms has evolved, demonstrating that melatonin regulation is enhanced by using a minimum wavelength of 460nm (blue) and a maximum wavelength of 597nm (orange) rather than between 385nm (deep purple) and 509 nm (green). Actually, blue light suppresses the diffusion of melatonin in the body, while orange light allows performing actions without altering the body clock.
In summer 2010, fabric | ch will set up a project called I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, during the 01SJ Biennial in South Hall. It will propose a critical use of I-Weather as a model for a metabolic public lighting source, distributed and synchronized through an imaginary Deep Space Internet into the confined and conditioned environments of space exploration vehicles or into speculative public spaces of “distant colonies”.
It will be question of public space, public data, public technology and artificial climate.
fabric | ch, May 2010
I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting
fabric | ch
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Exhibition:
Build Your Own World
2010 01SJ Biennial
September 4-19, 2010
San Jose, CA
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Workshop:
I-Weather: open source artificial climate (how to)
Christian Babski, Patrick Keller
2-4 pm, September 16, 2010
San Jose, CA
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Conference:
Deep Space, Public Space, I-Weather as Public Climate & Technology
Patrick Keller
1-2.30 pm, September 19, 2010
San Jose, CA
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Project, conception and programmation: fabric | ch
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Ligths: 3B Lighting
Structure: Stages Unlimited
On site supervision: G. Craig Hobbs
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Curatorship: Steve Dietz, Jaime Austin
Produced by Zer01
I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting has been produced with the support of swissnex San Francisco and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. It is a 2010 01SJ Biennial creation by fabric | ch.
Personal comment:
Like for previous exhibitions, new posts will follow while (and after) we set up the work in San Francisco.
Friday, August 27. 2010
Via Gizma
There are airplanes and swimming pools that give prospective astronauts a taste of what a zero-gravity environment will feel like, but the sensations that they will feel upon returning from such an environment are also important to simulate. Astronauts coming back to Earth’s gravity often experience disturbances in their vision and neurological function, to the point that they can have trouble walking, keeping their balance, or even safely landing their spacecraft. By utilizing a Galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) system, however, scientists can give them a sneak peek of what to expect, so they can better compensate for it when it happens in the field.
The system was developed by Dr. Steven Moore of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI). It consists of a small box, which sends a 5 milliamp current to electrodes placed behind the subjects’ ears. Those electrodes deliver electricity through the skin to the vestibular nerve, which in turn sends signals to the brain that result in sensorimotor disturbances. Because the box is portable, subjects can carry it with them while attempting to walk – no doubt a big hit at the NSBRI’s office parties.
Moore tried his system out on 12 test subjects at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Each subject flew 16 simulated shuttle landings, half of those landings with the GVS and half without. He compared the results to data collected from over 100 shuttle landings. Subjects using the GVS, he concluded, experienced disturbances similar to those experienced by shuttle pilots on actual flights.
Without the GVS, subjects tended to land the shuttle at a simulated speed of 204 knots, which is right on target. With the GVS, the average speed increased to around 210 knots, which is at the upper limit of the safety zone. Likewise, GVS-using subjects also had more difficulty performing a routine landing approach braking maneuver that required them to bring the craft from a 20-degree glideslope angle to a 1.5-degree angle. This is a point in real shuttle flights at which pilots often experience sensorimotor disturbances.
Moore stated that his system could be used as an analog for other space vehicles and operations, and that it could even be used to prepare people with vestibular disorders for the effects following surgery. The NSBRI research team is now trying to determine if people can adapt to the effects of the GVS over multiple sessions.
Tuesday, August 10. 2010
Via inhabitat
Architect Yasuhiro Yamashita, who brought us the Lucky Drops micro-house, displays his playful vision of small-space living in this Cell Brick home located in Tokyo. This fascinating Japanese micro home is built from a series of steel boxes that are stacked like bricks and extended through the interior to provide endless shelving. The tiny lot (not much wider than the crosswalk) holds a two story home with a basement and creates a hypnotic interior that is a joy in form and function. The windows set into the wall’s grid are simply spaces between the boxes.
The home’s interior spaciousness is enhanced by a well-lit visual grid that creates tremendous depth. The home’s walls consist of a series of a boxes measuring 900mm wide × 450mm high × 300mm deep that are bolted together, providing a sturdy support system in this earthquake-prone region. Between each horizontal box is a small window that provides diffuse light from the surrounding city while maintaining privacy. The exterior is clad in low-maintenance ceramic tile, which enhances its thermal performance and helps to insulate the interior from the noise of the street.
The home combines a kitchen, living room and bedroom on the main floor. A small basement, an upper floor, and a roof deck complete the floor plan. The box’s gridded interior allows for robust storage, eliminating the need for furniture. The design is a fascinating example of the micro home movement in Japan that was bred from prohibitively expensive land prices. The money saved by building on such a small lot was used to create a unique and powerful vision instead.
Friday, July 16. 2010
Via TreeHugger
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by Michael Graham Richard, Ottawa, Canada
Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt standing next to boulder at Taurus-Littrow during third EVA. Photo: NASA, Public domain.
Our Savior in the Sky
While Japan would like to build a solar power station on the Moon, the European Space Agency is thinking even further ahead: What if some terrible catastrophe (for more info, read about existential risks) were to wipe out a large fraction of humanity? A lot of knowledge would be lost, many species could be completely wiped out, and the survivors would have to almost literally reinvent the wheel. How would a a base on the moon help them get back on their feet? It's pretty clever. Read on for the details.
Photo: Flickr, CC
The construction of a lunar information bank, discussed at a conference in Strasbourg last month, would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race.
A basic version of the ark would contain hard discs holding information such as DNA sequences and instructions for metal smelting or planting crops. It would be buried in a vault just under the lunar surface and transmitters would send the data to heavily protected receivers on earth. if no receivers survived, the ark would continue transmitting the information until new ones could be built. (source)
So the goal would be to have a kind of Wikipedia accessible to the survivors, except that this Wikipedia would try to make it as easy to understand things and follow instructions to reacquire various technologies. It would also contain DNA information to eventually allow the revival of various species of plants and animals that might have also disappeared. It's a bit similar to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, except in an even more robust location.
Photo: NASA, Public domain.
The databank would need to be buried under rock to protect it from the extreme temperatures, radiation and vacuum on the moon. It would be run partly on solar power. The scientists envisage placing the first experimental databank on the moon no later than 2020 and it could have a lifespan of 30 years. The full archive would be launched by 2035.(source)
The information would be in many languages (such as Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish), and there would be at least 4,000 "Earth repositories" that would provide shelter, food, a water supply for survivors.
Of course, it's still much better to prevent catastrophes from happening in the first place (which is why we need a better system to monitor asteroids and comets, as well as super-volcanos, and we need to make the likelihood of thermonuclear war as small as possible), but it can't hurt to plan for the worse case scenario. Right now, all of our eggs are in the same basket. After all, existential risks might be unlikely, but they only need to happen once.
Via Daily Galaxy
More Green Space Tech
Luna Ring: A Giant Solar Power Plant on the Moon
Japan's Moonshot? $21 Billion Invested in Space-Based Solar Power
Tuesday, July 13. 2010
Via Technology Review
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A small change to the theory of gravity implies that our universe inherited its arrow of time from the black hole in which it was born.
"Accordingly, our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe." So concludes Nikodem Poplawski at Indiana University in a remarkable paper about the nature of space and the origin of time.
The idea that new universes can be created inside black holes and that our own may have originated in this way has been the raw fodder of science fiction for many years. But a proper scientific derivation of the notion has never emerged.
Today Poplawski provides such a derivation. He says the idea that black holes are the cosmic mothers of new universes is a natural consequence of a simple new assumption about the nature of spacetime.
Poplawski points out that the standard derivation of general relativity takes no account of the intrinsic momentum of spin half particles. However there is another version of the theory, called the Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama theory of gravity, which does.
This predicts that particles with half integer spin should interact, generating a tiny repulsive force called torsion. In ordinary circumstances, torsion is too small to have any effect. But when densities become much higher than those in nuclear matter, it becomes significant. In particular, says Poplawski, torsion prevents the formation of singularities inside a black hole.
That's interesting for a number of reasons. First, it has important implications for the way the Universe must have grown when it was close to its minimum size.
Astrophysicists have long known that our universe is so big that it could not have reached its current size given the rate of expansion we see now. Instead, they believe it grew by many orders of magnitude in a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, a process known as inflation.
The problem with inflation is that it needs an additional theory to explain why it occurs and that's ugly. Poplawski's approach immediately solves this problem. He says that torsion caused this rapid inflation.
That means the universe as we see it today can be explained by a single theory of gravity without any additional assumptions about inflation.
Another important by-product of Poplawski's approach is that it makes it possible for universes to be born inside the event horizons of certain kinds of black hole. Here, torsion prevents the formation of a singularity but allows a HUGE energy density to build up, which leads to the creation of particles on a massive scale via pair production followed by the expansion of the new universe.
This is a Big Bang type event. "Such an expansion is not visible for observers outside the black hole, for whom the horizon's formation and all subsequent processes occur after infinite time," says Poplawski.
For this reason, the new universe is a separate branch of space time and evolves accordingly.
Incidentally, this approach also suggests a solution to another of the great problems of cosmology: why time seems to flow in one direction but not in the other, even though the laws of physics are time symmetric.
Poplawski says the origin of the arrow of time comes from the asymmetry of the flow of matter into the black hole from the mother universe. "The arrow of cosmic time of a universe inside a black hole would then be fixed by the time-asymmetric collapse of matter through the event horizon," he says.
In other words, our universe inherited its arrow of time from its mother.
He says that daughter universes may inherit other properties from their mothers, implying that it may be possible to detect these properties, providing an experimental proof of his idea.
Theories of everything don't get much more ambitious than this. Entertaining stuff!
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1007.0587: Cosmology With Torsion - An Alternative To Cosmic Inflation
Personal comment:
When science catches up to fiction (or not...)
Wednesday, July 07. 2010
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by Andrew Price
The Planck space observatory has captured a "multi-frequency all-sky image of the microwave sky." There's more information, including a video that shows how the telescope rotated in space to create a 360-degree image, at the European Space Agency website. This is your home, and it's huge (though only a very small part of it is comfortable to be in).
Via Boing Boing
Personal comment:
Yes it's huge... hundreds of billions of galaxies which each coutain hundreds of billions of stars! For the visible part.
Monday, June 07. 2010
Via GOOD
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Back in March Cliff Kuang wrote about the Mars 500, a simulator that will put a crew of six men in a small ship replica in a warehouse on the campus of the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems—for 520 days. The Guardian reports that the mission has now "launched."
But as the six fearless volunteers this afternoon sealed themselves inside a simulated mission to Mars, grinning and waving goodbye to their families before "blast-off", scientists insisted they were embarking on an unprecedented experiment that was no laughing matter.
The crewmen – three are Russian, one French, one Chinese and one a Colombian-born Italian – won't emerge from their isolation until November 2011.
Their goal is to recreate a return journey to the red planet, spanning a year and a half, complete with simulated emergency situations and realistic psychological pressures.
All the crew members are male, which the organizers hope will prevent such occurences as a 1999 brawl between two men over an attempted kiss of a female astronaut during a similar experiment. Could you endure the psychological pressure of spending 520 days in that kind of isolation?
Personal comment:
With a bit of delay...
They need the new I-Weather artificial climate for their fake trip to Mars!
Tuesday, April 20. 2010
Via Pruned
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by Alexander Trevi
(Image by Thomas Ashcraft.)
Above is the spectrogram to this five-minute sound file of space dust particles hitting Earth's ionosphere as they are received and recorded on Thomas Ashcraft's forward scatter radio array. We could probably listen to it over and over, replace our CADing music with an extended version lasting hours. It's like Haydn's The Creation re-composed by Ligeti.
All night long eavesdropping on the earth infinitesimally accruing new terrain expelled by extraterrestrial landscapes.
Is Eyjafjallajökull producing similarly marvelous soundscapes?
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Comments
"Accordingly, our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe." So concludes Nikodem Poplawski at Indiana University in a remarkable paper about the nature of space and the origin of time."
Wow. The only thing remarkable about Nikodem Poplawski's paper is that such pseudoscientific hogwash can originate from an institution of higher learning in this day and age. I say, shame on the University of Indiana. The very idea of a black hole is based on the concept of continuity, an idea that is not only illogical (it leads to an infinite regress), but is not even scientific in the Popperian sense of falsification. Even Einstein, Mr. Continuity himself, had doubts about continuity.
Worst of all is the idea that somehow time has a direction of flow, i.e., an arrow. The idea that we are moving in time in one direction or another is a conceptual disaster. Why? Because time cannot change by definition. This is the reason that Karl Popper called spacetime "Einstein's block universe in which nothing happens" (source: Conjectures and Refutations). Absolutely nothing can move in spacetime for this reason. Why isn't Poplawski aware of this fact and how did his Star-Trek voodoo physics paper pass peer review? This is truly a sad commentary on the state of modern physics. This stuff is not even wrong.
The problem with the physics community is that theirs is an incestuous science that has been spawning hideous monstrosities for some time now. Their bunker mentality (the public is stupid and is the enemy) prevents them from considering other points of view, especially views that contradict their worldview. They have completely abandoned the search for a foundational understanding of nature and they insist on building up on their erroneous assumptions. Physicists do not even understand motion and yet they feel confident enough to create all sorts of silliness like wormholes, multiple universes and time travel. How dare they think that they are qualified to teach us about the origin of the universe when they are wallowing in ignorance about the most basic aspects of the universe?
Ask a physicist to explain why two bodies in relative inertial motion remain in motion and you'll come face to face with abject ignorance. Vast and profound ignorance is the norm in the physics community.
Let me add that I am deeply disappointed that publications like TR are still printing such pseudoscientific fairy tales under the banner of legitimate science. Paul Feyrabend was right when he wrote in Against Method, "[...]the most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in society." He might as well have been writing about physicists like Nikodem Poplawski.
Who will rise up to deliver us from this mountain of crap?