There was nothing crackpot about him.
Sorry, I've spoken to quite a few people with 'alternative' theories at conferences and so on and tragically he does share some characteristics with some of the more stubborn and determined ones. By 'alternative' here I mean, of course, 'pet' - his approach instantly set alarm bells ringing which sadly coloured his presentation, to my mind.
Here are two interesting references...
I have no doubt that there are serious issues with objectivity in scientific research - politics and 'orthodoxism' are two cancers that need to be removed. However, data is always available to those who request it - you might not get exactly what you would like, but you can usually dig interesting facts out of other observations which have already been made. I didn't like the style of this video since it was very pop-culturey and presented in a bit of a dramatic way which, while it makes it inclusive to people without a lot of background knowledge, can make it a bit dumbed-down. I certainly take the point that it is trying to make, however, and agree there are problems in research. Peer review is a LOT better than the alternatives, however.
NGC 7603
http://quasars.org/ngc7603.htm
This is a nice picture, but does nothing to discredit the hypothesis that it could just be a line of sight co-incidence (there are a lot of objects out there, so this will happen frequently) - there would need to be more evidence that the objects were linked and that we weren't looking at two distant objects behind two nearer objects (the light-bridged galaxies at lower redshift).
This frame dragging is very interesting... loop binding corrections as well... thank you... what do you mean by GR-based?
This is where I start to get a bit uncomfortable, since the paper I'm basing this on seems to imply that you can make local measurements of the absolute gravitational potential that you are in, which violates the principle that gravitation is a local theory (that is, locally all space looks the same). I personally don't have a
huge problem with the idea of there being some way of you telling what the local gravitational field is (the gravitational equivalent of an altimeter with respect to some 'true' zero-gravitation field), although it would mean that the strong equivalence principle was wrong.
The paper in question was written partially to address the next generation of GPS satellites and signals sent to and from the ISS, to account for GR effects such as frame dragging on timing signals and so on. The paper shows that there are effects that manifest as you transmit from a rotating body to an orbiting body high above... but the effects don't go away if you set the two altitudes to be the same (ie - in a lab, on a tabletop). This kind of lab-based GR experiment is becoming more popular but is still hated by general relativists. In turn, I think the majority of the GR community is disturbingly closed-minded and indoctrinated, but that's another story.
This is the paper in question...and has also been published in Phys. Rev. D, although I don't have the reference to hand. I believe the interesting effect enters at order (1/c
3), if you're interested.
I don't understand why this would happen. What would cause the universe to end up dominated by black holes? This assumes that nothing escapes a black hole. I am currently under the impression that large jets of energy and matter are spit out at its poles.
Large amounts of energy are emitted from the
accretion discs of black holes, not from the black holes themselves - it is true that you can extract work from the 'ergosphere' of a black hole, although again this does not constitute a large amount of energy emission. The 'black hole disease' originates from the idea that in the Big Crunch event itself, a true singularity is averted due to magical, horrifically complex things that I have no idea about (and I suspect the authors of the idea took some artistic license with the nature of physics beyond the standard model in concluding this) and that and singularities created in the Universe before the collapse could pass through to the 'other side' of the crunch, having soaked up loads of energy in the fireball. This leaves less and less available energy outside of the surviving black holes, eventually leading to a Universe composed entirely of slowly radiating black holes, endlessly expanding and collapsing.