swansont

I don't see the distinction you are drawing, but yes, Phi answered the question that was asked. So you are bringing up a different topic, and yet claim that Phi gave an incorrect answer. The best you can say is that it is an unanswered question. There is no guarantee that you will be able to collect data for any arbitrary set of conditions, but that is not required. It doesn't stop some people from demanding it, of course, but they often have an agenda (in my experience) Gravity is not questioned, either. You reach a point where the weight of evidence is sufficient that it's a waste of time and effort to confirm the basic theory. You then move on to more advanced topics — but that doesn't mean that you have stopped testing the theory. It just means you have moved on to indirect tests, i.e. where the experiment would fail if the underlying paradigm were wrong, and will only succeed if the new idea (based on that paradigm) is correct. We see this all the time in physics. You don't need to confirm e.g. time dilation with every experiment, but can run experiments that would fail if relativity were wrong. It's a matter prioritizing your limited resources. The smart money is on a well-tested theory being right. You don't abandon that theory based on one outlier of a data point. We didn't chuck relativity in the trash when the Gran Sasso experiment indicated superluminal neutrinos, because we had over 100 years of experiments, combined with a solid theoretical framework, telling us that relativity is correct. By the time we'd gotten there, a contradictory result became an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and a single experiment isn't that. Nevertheless, relativity was being tested with that experiment, even if the purpose of the experiment was something other than testing relativity.

So in what way does this not agree with Phi's response, that current science is questioned all the time? That the answer is often "yes, current science is consistent with what we know" does not mean that it is not being questioned. We only occasionally find answers that require adjusting the current paradigm.

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No, not so much. If the theory predicts a clock will show a certain amount of elapsed time in an experiment, or the frequency will shift a certain amount, and that's what you measure, there's not a lot of room for "interpretation" Argument from personal incredulity is about as effective as a nerf® vibrator.

Fortunately, your comprehension is not the metric we use. Does a spherical or cylindrical coordinate system curve? GR uses non-Euclidean geometry. It is what describes spacetime, and it is curved. No. What makes it true is that experiment agrees with the theory.

! Moderator Note No, that's not going to happen. Big Bang is mainstream physics and discussion of it and the lines of evidence that support it can and should be discussed in the science sections. And you should stop hijacking discussions to air your dissatisfaction with the situation.

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! Moderator Note If you wish to discuss this, start up a thread in the speculations forum. Be sure to bring more evidence and detail than you have presented here. In this thread, it's hijacking. edit: since you've hijacked another thread, it has been split. Make your case there https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/115265-dark-matter-split-from-is-this-the-dark-matter-particle/

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P = E/c only applies to massless particles

Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck!

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