Does no one check stuff like this?
This curvature of spacetime by objects in motion is felt as gravity.
Nope. This has nothing to do with motion. Motionless (from whose perspective, anyway?) objects still curve space-time. Perhaps he is conflating Einstein’s Equivalence Principle with gravity?
One of the phenomena predicted by the general theory is the existence of spacetime singularities in black holes, a mass that is so dense that nothing can escape its gravitational effects—not even light.
This is misleading. Maybe it’s good enough for this article’s purpose. However, if you could somehow fill the entire solar system out to the orbit of Neptune with air at the density of sea level on earth and have it avoid gravitational collapse, it’d be a black hole as no light would be able to escape this “bubble universe.” However, you’d notice no difference.
The reason that physics can be used to predict things in nature is because the universe is deterministic.
Really? Tell me more. Please. Somehow this journalist has solved one of the most vexing problems of science and philosophy, but like Fermat did not have space to write it in the margins. This article is ridiculous. If you don’t believe me, here’s what Richard Feynman had to say about it:
“It is not a lack of unknown gears – a lack of internal complications – that makes nature have probability in it; it seems to be in some sense intrinsic.
Someone has said it this way: ‘Nature herself doesn’t know which way the electron is going to go.’ A philosopher once said (a pompous one): ‘It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same result.’ Well, they don’t: if you set up electrons in any way – I mean, you set up the circumstance here, in the same conditions every time, and you cannot predict behind which hole you’ll see the electron.
They don’t – and yet the science goes on in spite of him.”
The article also puts forward some highly questionable assertions such as this:
The important thing here is that determinism means that the past determines exactly one future.
Read the Feynman quote to understand why that is definitively not true.
Yet general relativity’s ability to describe gravity falters on the threshold of singularities, where the curvature of spacetime becomes infinite.
This is not what this means. This is just the solution to some equations. We don’t actually know what happens inside a black hole, hence the name “black.” That the equations “go to infinity” means we don’t have anything to describe what happens in a black hole, hence the search for quantum gravity, etc.
I can’t really speak to the rest of the article as most of that is new to me, but someone should’ve done just a bit more research here, in quite a few different fields.
