It's not censorship, it's just a social seperation of professional concerns. Non-physicists have no chance in hell to understand arxiv papers, in fact most physicists don't have a chance in hell to understand arxiv papers, even the ones from their own field. (I'm saying this as a physicist.)

In this case, the MIT TR writes about a bleeding edge, unpublished paper written by a non big-name physicist that will most likely be discarded and never be talked about in 6 months.

The author is from a "Institute of Statistics" and the paper was written in Word with double-space formatting. That means the author is probably not a physicist, and non-physicists have a very low chance of being able to grasp the problems with current models and propose better ones, not to mention accounting for all the astro observations coming out every day.

Looking at the actual paper as somebody with a cosmology background, what he's saying is:

1. Let's take the classical Einstein equations

2. Let's see what happens if c, the speed of light, is not constant, but a function of time c(t)

3. Hm, but to not break the original equations let's also make G be a function of time G(t) such that c(t)^2/G(t) is fixed

4. Hm, but then in the derivations, where there are derivatives wrt. to time new dc/dt and dG/dt terms appear

5. and so on

There is no new physics in this paper, it's just a routine derivation with a twist. The TR blogger is probably not a physicist and/or has not read it, he just pushed out some generic bullshit about space and time.

There's no point in talking about this paper for non-professionals. First, professionals have to reach concensus whether this makes any sense and is compatible with observations (the former part is easier, the latter takes longer and more people). Once a result passes these tests, then it makes sense to tell people about it.

If the TR wants to push out some sciency newsitem, they could for example talk about recent Higgs data from the Tevatron, which is bleeding-edge fresh but fairly uncontroversial, as it is a measurement and has gone through the Tevatron team:

http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2010/07/higgs-still-at-large...

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Reply to scott_s (for some reason I can't reply to the comment): I agree, total seperation is not good. It's not good if all the physicists involved are pure academics, because it allows for sub-optimal incentives to dominate. I believe the good model is fOR physicists with no academic incentives (positions, grants) to also take part in the discussion, eg. somebody working at Morgan Stanley or doing a startup. This model would be similar to programmers donating their time to open-source projects. (The academic counter-argument which easily wins out today is that if you're not working in the field, you don't understand the issues and don't have a say.)