Goodbye to Relativity's Bendy Time and the Block Universe?

No qualified person, so far as I am aware, questions the validity of the Theory of Relativity as a means of solving questions relating to mass, time, and motion. As a non-qualified person I therefore I have no questions about the practical validity of the theory either. However, as a way of visualizing the nature of space and time the theory has always seemed to me to be nonsense. In particular, two implications of Relativity Theory seem absurd.

One is the idea that mass bends time and space, or as one writer put it,

... things that slip out of your hand accelerate toward the floor because Earth's mass warps time.*. 

Really? Bendy time? As I have questioned elsewhere, can that mean anything at all? I rather doubt it.

The other implication of Relativity that, as I have written elsewhere, seems ridiculous to me is the existence of a Block Universe: which is to say, a universe where nothing whatever happens, but in which every thing that ever existed or occurred in every moment throughout eternity exists or occurs now and for ever in a four-dimensional space-time continuum, through which for some bizarre reason, our consciousness evolves along the temporal axis creating a false perception of "now".

Happy I am, therefore, to learn that some people at North Carolina State University have come up with a way of solving problems relating to mass, energy, space and time that achieve the same results as Relativity without need to invoke the bizarre notion of the space-time continuum. Here, one of the authors of this new approach provides a non-mathematical outline of the theory and the evidence of its validity: 

Fragments of energy – not waves or particles – may be the fundamental building blocks of the universe:

By Larry M. Silverberg

Matter is what makes up the universe, but what makes up matter? This question has long been tricky for those who think about it – especially for the physicists. Reflecting recent trends in physics, my colleague Jeffrey Eischen and I have described an updated way to think about matter. We propose that matter is not made of particles or waves, as was long thought, but – more fundamentally – that matter is made of fragments of energy.

Read more: 

————
* George Musser in "Spooky Action at a Distance." Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2015.