Strange

What about it?

Indeed. I would like to thank aViolentBee for asking the question; it prompted me to go and find out what the final results were!

It is nothing to do with accelerating expansion; it is just the expansion.

<cough>engineers</cough>

Here's a deal: you learn to use the

This is more about newspapers wanting to make money, rather than scientists. I don't know how much of science funding is determined by the size of Daily Mail or New Scientist headlines. Most of these headlines and exaggerated/innaccurate sories are due to the journalists. The New Scientist, for example, is very fond of headlines like Darwin Disproved or Einstein Was Wrong. Not surprisingly, the stories are never consistent with these. And the "God Particle" was named by the publisher, not the scientist (admittedly, he should have refused to allow it but ...) I have never seen such a dialogue. I have seen things along the line of: Ordinary person: Why is sky blue? Scientist: Because blue light is scattered more than red light OP: Why is that? S: Because shorter wavelengths are scattered more than longer ones. OP: Why is that? S: Well, it starts getting complicated. You need to understand about Raleigh scattering and molecular polarizabiltiy and ... OP: Why does it have to be so complicated! Can't you explain it more simply? S: It's because blue light is scattered more than red light OP: Elitist! Why should I believe that if you can't even explain it! But there is a limit to how much can be explained or understood, without the necessary background. Some scientists and science writers do a great job of getting complicated across in an understandable way. But this can backfire and result in some of the dubious threads we see on forums like this. For example, will take the analogies and simplifications used to explain these simple ideas, and stretch them beyond their limits. They don't understand all the background. They often don't even know that there is any background in terms of the theory, mountains of evidence, and years (decades, centuries) of work that has gone into developing the theory. They often seem to think that scientists just make up a good-sounding story and insist it is right (that would be elitism!) so why shouldn't they make up a plausible sounding story as well. They then get upset when their story is rejected, even though they can't see any difference at a superficial level. I'm not sure I agree. People love to hear the amazing and counter-intuitive results from these theories. And I think they are generally accepted. There are a few people who will reject them because they are counter-intuitive (e.g. "it must be wrong because it isn't logical") and a smaller number of those will try and come up with their own ideas. But the ordinary world is never going to (fully) catch up. You can't expect "ordinary" people to spend the time learning differential geometry so they can fully appreciate GR. And there is no reason they should. And no reason scientists should expect them to. But if people want to challenge GR, then they do have to learn the mathematics behind it. Challenging it on the basis of "common sense" is a sort of anti-elitism, which is even more dangerous. Would you let someone do open heart surgery just because they once read a children's book about medicine? Or is it elitism to say they must master the necessary skills?

Indeed. There will always be unknown unknowns. And that is what makes science so exciting.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say, here. However, there is thought to be a "cosmic neutrino background" equivalent of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This would consist of neutrinos released 380,000 years before the CMB and hence would be at an even lower temperature. If we were able to detect these low energy neutrinos, they would give us a lot of information about the early universe. But it seems unlikely they can ever be detected.

I agree there are lots of things we don't know. (And, in general, we know what it is we don't know.) But the article talks about science needing to be in some sort of "crisis" due to a fundamental gap or contradiction in existing theory before a paradigm shift will be accepted. (I'm not completely convinced by that, but it is an interesting idea.) The only such gap that I am aware of currently is in reconciling quantum theory and GR (which might answer the "dark energy" question). This may well require some totally new breakthrough. And that may be developed by some very clever individual (or two) but it is perhaps just as likely to be reached by an incremental series of advances by many people over time. But it isn't the sort of thing that can be stumbled across by chance (thinking of the Curies and Pasteur, from the article). That's what I meant by the "easy" things; the sort of thing any bright researcher could discover/work out.

I doubt anyone else does, either.

Well, it is up to you to provide some evidence for this undetectable thing. Until you do, there is no reason for anyone to consider it. You might as well say that invisible pink unicorns are what cause motion.

Because, if they were not the same, you could detect your abolute motion. If everything is identical, regardless of your state of motion, then any one state of motion is the same as any other. So it is a religious view. You don't care about the evidence, you are just going to believe it anyway.

Citation needed. "Scientific"

Evolution has created the emotions of pleasure and pain you are obsessing about, as well as altruism, a sense of good and bad, music and art, love and hate, and various other things that give meaning to life. As Ophiolite noted, you have a rather limited view that these things are meaningless because the substrate is mechanistic. That is just silly.

No one expects matter and antimatter to respond differently to gravity. But scientists do like to check these things. Well, almost no one: there are a few pretty speculative/fringe theories that predict otherwise.

If it happens rarely (e.g. the number of people killed by falling rocks) then it will have no selective effect. But if the population lived in an environment where falling rocks killed a significant number of individuals, across the population as a whole, then it could be a selective pressure. Individuals with keener hearing, thicker skulls, eyes nearer the top of their head, faster reactions, etc. might be selected for. Delicate, slower moving individuals would tend to be eliminated. Many plants (e.g. California redwoods) depend on forest fires to propagate. There are plants and animals that have adapted to regular drought. So yes, these "random" events (which actually tend to be fairly periodic) can drive evolution. Can't think of any related to epidemics. Although pandemic diseases can be significant. For example, the development of sickle cell and similar disorders as a response to malaria. Actually, thinking about it some more, without epidemics, our immune system probably wouldn't have evolved the way it has.

So, by your argument if materialism is true then your words are meaningless. That explains a lot. Stop pretending that your opinions are "scientific facts". If that were so, you would be able to provide objective evidence in support of your opinions. So far all you have is logical fallacies and unsupported assertions.

Because God decided to punish people for using the free will he gave them. That is a little bit like the school bully's claim that it is your fault they are hurting you - if you did what they said, the pain would stop. Terrorists make similar irrational arguments. So it isn't free will that caused the suffering, it is back to God doing it. Perhaps he can get off with a diminished responsibility plea. I have heard many theologians and senior church figures discussing this as being a major problem. I wonder what they have missed ...

We have at least one of those...

Today's XKCD is a live (-ish) commentary on the landing: http://xkcd.com/1446/

0.998749217771909 c 186049.3982884262 mile/second 299417.48292141786 km/s http://www.1728.org/reltivty.htm (I haven't checked those numbers, but they look about right)

Of course it doesn't. You might as well say that Newton's law of gravitation explains why I don't like garlic. As you clearly don't have anything sensible to say, I will take no further part in this.

Nonsense.

Lasers generate coherent light (because the photon emission is stimulated by other photons).

How does free will cause famine, floods, earthquakes, and epidemics?