The blog of Hilton Ratcliffe

 
Dear Malcolm,
Thank you most sincerely for your response last month to my April 2009 Breaking News column in Ndaba. I wish more of our readers would express their views and exchange ideas. I fear though that objectivity may be on thin ice here (pun unintended) because we both, by our own admission, engage for ethical [...]

Well, I have after trial and tribulation managed to watch all of “The Age of Stupid”. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a free download site that offered the entire movie in one chunk, so ultimately I resorted to YouTube and watched it in 9 episodes. Given the emotional style of the production, which requires uninterrupted flow [...]

And a very good morning to you. It’s 4:30am, and I was awakened by a cat and this oppressive, sweltering Durban heat. I do have aircon in my home, but don’t like to use it continuously. I suppose that subliminally, I’m embracing the warmth as we start an irreversible slide into the headwaters of a [...]

Is the Universe expanding? It would appear not. What do we see? We do not see, let alone measure, large objects systematically moving away from all other large objects. On the contrary, it would seem to be quite the opposite, at least in the case of colliding spiral galaxies. Every observable large scale system is [...]

We live in a dynamic and violent universe, and the emissaries of time gone by lie scattered in their trillions throughout the Realm. They are part of a cosmic archive, a virtual treasure chest of secrets waiting to be explored. A seemingly endless array of lights from prehistory fills the heavens, and the better we [...]

Dr Tom C Van Flandern 26 June 1940 - 9 January 2009.
On that overcast Saturday morning, after yet another starless night, I awoke with great sadness to the following email from Tom Van Flandern’s son Mike:
“At 8:54AM on Friday January 9, 2009 Tom Van Flandern passed on. I cannot begin to express what this man [...]

What is this blog about? Let me state some assumptions that I make, and you are welcome to comment.
1. The Universe is infinite in both space and time.
2. Space is 3D Euclidean. No other space exists besides that.
3. A vacuum does not exist.
4. The Universe is the product of pre-emptive design.
5. The speed of light, [...]

Is Cosmology fact or fiction, science or fairy tale? Do we need it? is it good for us? Does it have any useful purpose? Should we be confined to a Standard Model?