Medieval bishop's theory resembles modern concept of multiple universes

Taken directly (with permission, but it's still basically blogspam like everything on phys.org) from http://theconversation.com/medieval-bishops-theory-resembles....

This, although it looks like it ought to be blogspam :-), does appear to be the original location of that article, which was written by people actually involved in the research.

The recent paper they reference ("A medieval multiverse?: Mathematical modelling of the 13th century universe of Robert Grosseteste") is at http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/470/2167/2014... but isn't openly accessible. But at http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.0769 you can find pretty much exactly the same paper.

Nope. Unless this guy shows me a density matrix, the only resemblance are the most lofty of conclusions.

Yes, I have read the submission kindly made here. Alas, it is an even worse example than usual of Phys.org press release spam. (Here it appears to be blogspam, from another source, not professionally edited, and not directly linked.)

Ladies and gentlemen, the idea that a medieval bishop could have come up with a theory that will be useful guidance for physicists now working on multiverse theory is an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence (not provided in this submission) to be taken seriously. Meanwhile, this link from Phys.org, like most links from Phys.org I have ever seen either here on Hacker News or among my Facebook friends, reminds me of why several participants here on Hacker News over the years have suggested declining to make submissions directly from Phys.org, but rather always to look for a more professionally edited source.

Comments about PhysOrg:

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"Straight from the European Space Agency, cutting out the physorg blogspam:

http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1116/ (press release),

http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic1116a/ (video),

http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/scien... (paper).

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5276327

"Physorg? Ugh.

"Didn't even bother click, came here to read comments instead.

"Can HN please ban Physorg like everyone else?"

Comments about both PhysOrg and ScienceDaily:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689185

"Why hasn't sciencedaily.com or physorg been banned from HN yet?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3867348

"A useful rule of thumb is that whenever you see anything on sciencedaily.com or physorg.com, unless it's absolute nonsense there's another more direct (and often more informative) source you should link to instead."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875529

"Original source:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/news/pole-asymmetry...

"What ScienceDaily has added to this: (1) They've removed one of the figures. (2) They've removed links to the Hinode and SOHO websites. (3) They've added lots of largely irrelevant links of their own, all of course to their own site(s).

"Please, everyone: stop linking to ScienceDaily and PhysOrg."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3867361

"Those sources don't have RSS feeds, and ScienceDaily and PhysOrg have a bad habit of not linking to such things."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4083766

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