Duality is one of the most important insights in physics and philosophy of physics. What does duality mean? It means that there are dual descriptions of one and the same observed physics. Duality implies that you cannot possibly decide whether the one description T or the other, to T dual description T’ is right or wrong, because both descriptions lead to the exact same observations for the observers who live in a universe that can be described by the theories T and T’. Both are equally right or wrong, as they are dual descriptions.

Pickering is quite a name in the philosophy of science, or science studies, sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), or science and technology studies (STS).

He is especially interested in physics and writes about so called “old” versus “new” science.  He means and to this day insists on the difference being soft versus hard scattering in particle collider experiments, the latter being something that happened around the time he started to look into physics more than 30 years ago (oh coincidence).

Black holes draw audiences, because they are weird, they are profound, they are Albert Einstein and Steven Hawking rolled into a singularity. Or some such – except, none of this is actually the case. The black hole is a much more mundane concept, older than relativity, and despite much misinformation in popular and pseudo science, black holes have in a certain sense little to do with relativity (and I say this although and because I worked for many years on black holes and used general relativity when doing so).

Does my space-plunger sound profound?  It isn’t.  That space absorbs energy is confusing talk.  You could desperately try to make it work:  Firstly, the “space-plunger” is not moving slowly and the energy lost is partially recovered in the kinetic energy of the expanding space.  There is also energy in the gravitational potential, but it is negative, so it cancels the energy being created when a universe comes into existence.  Adding all up, the total energy of the universe may be zero, if you fudge it until you get zero.  Sounds profound?  It isn't.