TV Tuesday

I follow a couple of youtube channels produced by young Americans from East Asian families, one group living on the East Coast, one on the West. The West Coast group in particular has bemoaned the fact that unlike African Americans, and Hispanics there really haven't been any TV shows centered on Asian Americans. Disney recently got in touch with them and sponsored a few videos to help promote the new ABC sit-com Just Off The Boat which premiered with two episodes last night. It's about a Chinese American family struggling to make a success in Florida after moving from the DC area. ( This, the rest of the evening, and general thoughts about my TV viewing these days. )

No Big Bang?

In Phys.org http://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html
Physicists from Canada and Egypt have collaborated on a new theory using a quantum mechanics correction to Einstein's general relativity, which now implies that the universe is not infinite, and essentially had no beginning moment and will have no end.

Obviously a lot of cosmologists are not going to like this one bit, since their careers are built on papers relying on the idea of a starting point for the universe specifically a big bang.

Who is right? Probably both are off in some ways. My engineering genes tell me that a big bang that no one can explain until after it is underway is nonsense. My psychology background keeps hinting to me that all of the early work by my lifetime's greatest cosmologist, Stephen Hawking, was colored by his devastating illness, and that it is not at all surprising that having unexpectedly lived so long, he has backed off from some of his earlier gloomy ideas about the universe. My cynical genes tell me, though, don't count out Einstein. Why cynical? Well, if Einstein was in major ways right about many things, forget about interstellar travel, ever.