Who else dislikes this sort of pop-science writing? It seems to care more about evoking some mystical and philosophical idea of the universe than effectively communicating the science.
> Reality: The details of time diverge a bit from common understanding.
I think you may be underestimating the divergence a bit. The author is hardly alone in finding general relativity's implications on time to be of profound philosophical importance, for instance.
I love pop science writing. The thing is that this easy imagination helps a lot of people access hitherto unknowable principles of science. If you are science oriented or enquiry minded but do not have a background in the extreme detail required to access the specific subject/topic, you would have very likely never learnt anything about it given the arcane approach road to it. Popular science writing makes those spaces accessible, marks the roads, explains the possibilities and allows one to think through those abstractions. Then if you are sufficiently interested, you actually get into the hairy details of the actual science. But for most of us who are actually just traveling and understanding, this sort of writing gives us a grip of the "lay of the land."
I look at such writing as maps of knowledge, not the actual thing, but sufficiently detailed and made interesting to give people a sense of where they are. It's a jungle gym for the thinking mind.
What is wrong about mystical, philosophical idea of the universe? I like mystical, philosophical idea of the universe.
--R. Feynman
A: I like x
B: I don't like x
A: Why?
B: Because it is not science
A: Why is that bad?
B: It is not. Because R.Feynman said blah blah blah...
A: ??
How can it soften the principles of science, if it does not masquerade as science. Can you point me in the article where it tries to pass some mysticism or philosophy as science?
http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-ar...
@Westoncb: Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.