The article closes by asking press officers and reporters to be a little more critical of the material they pass on. Unfortunately, that is extremely unlikely to happen. There is too much information to be critical of and incentives are not aligned to make that happen. If the press passes on a breathless press release that turns out to be false, they just point the finger at somebody else, but in the meantime, they've driven traffic to whatever organization they're working for.
Ultimately, the scientist should be held accountable for this in his community. Similar to the massive black eyes Fleischmann and Pons got for cold fusion[1], Quach should be dragged across the carpet for this.
"If the press passes on a breathless press release that turns out to be false, they just point the finger at somebody else, but in the meantime, they've driven traffic to whatever organization they're working for."
I think this is overwhelmingly the toughest problem to solve here for any mainstream rag. Take the Sydney newspaper mentioned in the article for example. If their competitors publish the more dramatic version of the story replete with the sensationalist headline while the Sydney Morning Herald in an attempt to maintain some semblance of journalistic integrity don't, guess which papers the public are going to buy. It's obvious where the incentive lies.
Unfortunately the reality is the public isn't going to change as it is in human nature to pay attention to the more "surprising" news (Tiger! in caveman days). So if the public isn't going to change and the market rewards yellow journalism what's left? Regulation? I don't know.
> "Thousands of years later, Albert Einstein assumed that space and time were continuous and flowed smoothly, but we now believe that this assumption may not be valid at very small scales," Quach said.
My only source of knowledge is having read a pop-physics book or two, but I thought it was well-accepted that at "small scales", the universe is very non-continuous and chaotic?
And, reading the PR, it doesn't seem to be that breathless nor does it say it's overturning the Big Bang. It read more like "hey there might be another thing that happened during the Big Bang and that might make 'cracks' that we might be able to see".
"but I thought it was well-accepted that at "small scales", the universe is very non-continuous and chaotic?"
It is and the funny thing is this guy has a funny definition of "now" considering Max Planck discovered light travels in discrete quanta. In 1900. Around the time of Einstein submitting his first paper and before his paper on Special Relativity. I would imagine whoever signed off on the PR copy is aware of this as well as other inconsistencies. Makes you wonder.
"A number of theories have been proposed over the years to explain why there are four dimensions (three space, one time) instead of some other number..."
Time is not a dimension. It is a property of space, hence "spacetime".
Time is very much a dimension: spacetime is well described as a 3+1 dimensional manifold.
Reading your link, I have no idea what those researchers are talking about (nor did it inspire me to look at their actual article). The "1 time + 3 space dimensions" structure of the universe is exceedingly well established experimentally by the essentially perfect verifications of the predictions of relativity that we use every day (in GPS, for instance). It's possible (though unlikely, from what I've seen here) that they have some deep new insight into the nature of time, sure. But any successful theory of time will have to be almost indistinguishable from standard 3+1 dimensional spacetime under "ordinary" conditions, or else it will contradict a huge body of experimental evidence. So even if what these folks are saying somehow makes sense, saying "time is not a dimension" would still be wrong in many important ways.
Ultimately, the scientist should be held accountable for this in his community. Similar to the massive black eyes Fleischmann and Pons got for cold fusion[1], Quach should be dragged across the carpet for this.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion (my poor alma matter :)