Bill Angel

Those are good questions. I believe that the current consensus of opinions is that dark energy and the Casimir effect are not related. See this FAQ on Dark Energy: http://supernova.lbl.gov/~evlinder/defaq.html#casimirOf course consensus opinions can turn out to be wrong.

This is a good explaination of the mechanism of love for another human being from the point of view of an atheist. But I believe that some atheists profess a love for science.

You are right, and your assertion echos the premise of the classic work The Great Illusion by Norman Angell, published before before World War I. This author received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933 for his work, which just goes to show how influential Nobel Peace Prize winners are.

My understanding of the concept of the multiverse is that there could contain an infinite number of universes, each with its own set of physical laws that could differ from the laws of the other members of the multiverse. But it is unclear to me what physical laws might be applicable, if any, in the void outside of any universe. Is it meaningful to talk about the speed of light in the void in which physical laws are undefined?

I'm unclear what an "infinite series of simultaneous big bangs" would correspond to, but the idea of universes pushing against each other is discussed in the context of colliding branes, in String Cosmology. It's called the Ekpyrotic universe. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekpyrotic_universe The ekpyrotic model maintains that the universe did not start in a singularity , but came about from the collision of two brane universes.

If you have not already read it, you should check out the book "Flatland: a romance in many dimensions" by Edwin Abbot. (1884) The author of this work also considers as you have what it would be like to live as a two dimensional creature, but in his scenario in a two dimensional universe.

I would agree, and would add that the book "The Hidden Reality" by Brian Greene is another excellent and comprehensive work covering aspects of modern physics. The book could prove to be tough going for a high school student, but Dr Greene and also Dr Lawrence Krauss have put good material out as videos available on YouTube, aimed at appealing to a broad audience.I have also found that "audiobooks" versions of some science books, including "The Hidden Reality" by Dr Greene, can prove to be an alternative to the printed version worth investigating.

Your thinking has elements in common with theorizing about whether we are living in a Brane Multiverse, which looks something like this: Here is an article about multiverses: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse There is a folk legend that says that when you cannot sleep at night it's because you're awake in someone else's dream. Perhaps you are awake not in someone else's dream, but in someone else's universe that is a component of the multiverse?

The multiverse scenario is also one prediction that comes from string theory cosmology. One attractive aspect of string theory cosmology is that it provides a way to encompass or reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics.

I would have to disagree with you here. Any discussions of dark matter that I've read about have not suggested that there might be enough dark matter in the universe to stop the universe from expanding and to start the universe contracting.

The reason the dark matter does not slow down is because unlike ordinary matter it does not interact electromagnetically. Here is a quote from the WIKI article about the Bullet Cluster: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster

The discrepancy in observations could be more dramatic than that. The person entering the back hole observes himself just falling in uneventfully, but the observer watching him from outside the event horizon observes him being incinerated near the event horizon by Hawking radiation. Such is the assertion made by Brian Greene in his book "The Hidden Reality".

The Obamacare website isn't the only Government social services portal with chronic problems. I tried today to create an account at the Government's Social Security website, the access point titled "MY Social Security" : http://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/ I could not do it! I have an active account with Social Security (I'm 65), but when I attempted to create a login ID and password to access my account info online, the Social Security system refused to properly validate my personal info and create a userid for me . The problem sounds eerily similar to the problems people are having with the Obamacare website.

Number of planets in our galaxy that could support life > 10^8 (galaxy contains 4 x 10^11 stars) Number of galaxies in the universe > 5 x10^11 And as estimated by the Multiverse view in cosmology: Number of universes > 10^350 I believe that these numbers are sufficiently large that the human mind's grasp of the possible and reproducible might not be up to the challenge of understanding how life originated at least ONCE in the entire cosmos.

To quote from the article I referenced: When a measurement was made of high-energy electron positron pairs in outer space, there were more than could be explained by production from cosmic rays, suggesting that something else, such as dark photons, produces extra pairs. Secondly, The muon has an anomalous magnetic moment. When the Muon g-2 collaboration measured the muons anomalous magnetic moment, its collaborators were surprised to find that the number they they measured didn't match the number they expected. If this is real, such a discrepancy could be explained by a dark photon of the type and mass that DarkLight experiment is searching for.

Does the visible photon have a counterpart, a dark photon, that interacts with the components of dark matter? http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/november-2013/connecting-the-visible-universe-with-dark-matter

There is also a tie in between what I suggested (above) and the so called Ekpyrotic Universe, which is based on the idea that our hot big bang universe was created from the collision of two three-dimensianal worlds moving along a hidden, extra dimension. See http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/npr/

I would like to inject a speculative idea. There is a form of matter that would only interact with visible matter gravitationally, i.e. only through the exchange of gravitons. This would be matter that existed IN ANOTHER UNIVERSE. The idea that matter in our universe could be interacting with matter in another universe is an idea taken seriously by string theorists. For example, the idea is discussed in the book "The Hidden Reality, Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene.

Here is an interesting article How The Sequester Could Affect Health Care http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/02/19/172415025/how-the-sequester-could-affect-health-care According to that article "Also not exempt from the cuts is most of the funding for the Affordable Care Act, despite the last-minute efforts of states and the federal government to prepare for next year's rollout of most of the law's big benefits ." It's possible that the testing of the Obamacare website software before the rollout was inadequate because of cuts in funding brought about by the Sequestration.

It's not that I'd like to prevent stockbrokers from trading the equities based on what they perceive their valuation to be, but I confess to registering a reaction of shock and disbelief at a story in this morning's paper: Read more: here Valuing a company that has no sales or business model at 3 billion dollars is crap, and asking the military to risk their lives to prop up such state of affairs is also crap. I'd like to see the stock market crash, if for no other reason to deflate such speculative bubbles that are being passed off as investment decisions.

I would not argue with what you are asserting, but still aspects of such a situation are disturbing to me. Here is an image taken Monday (Veteran's Day) at the site of the New York Stock Exchange: Members of our military visited the floor of the NYSE, where they received a warm greeting. I also served in the military 30 years ago, and had I been called upon to risk my life in order to achieve our national security objectives, I would prefer that such objectives be aligned with our values of defending freedom of speech, separation of church and state, due process under the law, rights of minorities, etc, rather than the economic agenda of stockbrokers at the New York Stock Exchange.

What does Liberty mean to me? Separation of Church and State, and freedom from religious persecution.

There are quite a few excellent books that have come out recently explaining the basic ideas of quantum mechanics without resorting to the use of sophisticated mathematics. Not only are such works interesting, even a pleasure to read, but they provide ammunition to those familiar with their basic arguments to rebut those goofy ideas people pick up from TV shows and science fiction movies.

What I am reading (actually listening to) right now is the audio books version of the book "Quantum Man, Richard Feynman's Life in Science" by Lawrence Krauss, read by the author. Here is a humorous quote from the book: "He's another Dirac, only this time human." Eugene Wigner speaking of Richard Feynman. Eugene Wigner was talking about Feynman when he was young and at that time unknown to the scientific community. The book includes a serious discussion Feynman's scientific work. It is not just a collection of humorous anecdotes from his life. For that reason, listening to Lawrence Krauss just read it is a frustrating experience as there are no illustrations or photographs to ponder while listening to his narrative. I figured that since I had available just the audio book version from the library, the actual printed version of the book would be better and would contain photos and illustrations. Well it doesn't. The printed version has some simple drawings, few in number, and unfortunately no photographs.

I grew up in Connecticut, which at that time still had "blue laws" on the books that resricted businesses from being open on Sundays. Until 2012 Connecticut still had laws on its books that restricted the sales of alcoholic beverages on Sundays. Those restrictions were lifted on May 20th, 2012.