It makes my head hurt trying to wade through those strings of overlapping quotes and I end up replying to something I've already replied to messages back, or sometimes even myself, probably missed some of those in previews too.



Well science is often about pinning down the abnormal, or trying to figure out which abnormal things caused the freak result, the types of abnormalities I'm referring to aren't subjective. They'd either have a clear cause and effect that generated the abnormality, like all of the particles bouncing around inside a room suddenly ending up outside of the room, not because of quantum teleportation but because someone opened the airlock in the room onto the void. Or they'd simply be genuinely improbable, like winning the lotto, someone generally will in a large enough sample. Those aren't really subjective abnormalities. I'm talking more about the sort of effect where a town hires an extra cop, or a detective or psychiatrist go for a summer vacation somewhere, and you could get escalating rates of crime or insanity for two reasons. 1) Someone is now there actively looking for it, and 2) The actual existence of the observer might generate it, like someone deciding to try to pull of the crime of the century because Sherlock is vacationing there, or the presence of the psychiatrist makes people start questioning about their and their neighbor's sanity, or the observer is consciously or subconsciously falsifying data. All of those can pretty much apply to science at some level, and you might spot something like that when you say 'Hey, this region seems to have twelve times the unique species as the average' and have to wonder if it's the local Nuclear reactor making 3-eyed fish, the fact that the local university's etymologists and botanists all do field trips there, if you happen to be in a genuinely freaky place like Madagascar, or if there's a zoo or a lot of importation. What I'm getting at is just the reminder re: Anthropic Principle, essentially that no place effectively in a vacuum or under a spotlight should be assumed to actually be unique, until you can compare it to others.



That's basically the sum of vectors concept, yeah, the 'weird' aspect is the lack of emission or method of propulsion, in any Newtonian-Normal fashion. Presumably a line or cone or otherwise non-symmetric burst of 'gravitons'.



The words you're looking for is 'Gravity Well' or 'Dominant Mass', and galaxies don't really have dominant masses which is really more when everything local is moving in approximate ellipses around a foci that has something really big right about there. Most galaxies, like Nebula, don't really have those. Hence the generally queer orbital motion. Now, presumably everything in the local galactic cluster should end up, eventually in some big mega black around 10x Milky way masses but that's minus some ejections and that's it, red shift prevents us being gravitationally bound to the other crap in the Supercluster or the universe over all. We could easily end up ejected, many Milky-Andromeda collision models indicate a lot of ejections, and either way the sun shouldn't even be a warm cinder by the time we'd decay to the core without very heavy exterior effort, like something basically throwing us right on an intercept course. We have truly absurd levels of angular momentum relative to the galactic core, and the loss rate is very, very small compared tot he total, even on trillion year time scales.



Well, regardless of what causes the Hubble Red Shift, it clearly is happening, and outside of the handful of galactic neighbors near us everything else is already receding at greater than out escape velocity. Now, without knowing where all that energy came from to give those speeds, we can't actually rule out some weird ass universals witch that throws crap backwards, and you do get weird stuff like the Great Attractor, but at this time there's no reason to think we'd every have a super-galactic blackhole with our galaxy in it that was much more than a few times more massive then our galaxy, our gravitationally bound region is pretty sparse.

Also I'm not a huge fan of most of the current ex nihilo or 'mere instant after' theories, nor Dark Energy even. I consider them too thin for public discourse as implied fact... Dar Matter is much more solid, we can at least look at some place and say 'oh, there's a lot crap there'



Physicists are notoriously bad at naming crap, we've discussed that before. As to mirrors, not really, picture for a moment a circular sheet of paper someone has marked out all the 360 degree lines on, as little jets each spewing out 1 widget of stuff every time interval. Now picture someone pinching say, 330-360 between their fingers so that whole area now was condensed down to about 5 degrees, effectively making an apparent 335 degree circle. In this somewhat sucky analogy, the object at the center is still spewing out it's 360 widgets per moment symmetrically but 30/360ths of it is emerging from 1 5/360th sector while the other 330/360's are distributing over 355/360ths of it. It will start moving in the opposite direction from our pinch. Well, gravity, especially the kind you get right between to supermassive objects in close proximity, can do weird shit like that to space.



Personally I just have an almost fanatic hatred of attempts at over simplification of systems, I used to try it a lot as a kid and it drives me nuts. Like fantasy genealogies where some family manages to go hundreds of generations without a break or any cousins. Or pop psych. Our issue with calculating universal size for instance, often misunderstood but something Weingberg has addressed IIRC is the dual dillemma of not being able to see beyond a certain point as the light hasn't gotten here yet, and the infiinte measurement problem. If I take a teaspoon and a cup of water and dump a rule in the water, I can remove a teaspoon and measure a drop in the water height and say 'Ah, this cup has the following volume, base don this drop.' In theory you could do this with a large bucket, but you'd need to be pretty accurate, in theory you could do it to a swimming pool but you'd need to be very, very accurate. A teaspoon is .3 cu.in., there are 5600 in a cubic foot, a pool could easily have 3000 cu.ft., if it's 10 foot deep you'll need to remove 17 million teaspoons, or 140,000 per inch, a drop then of a mere 7 millionths of an inch will occur... even assuming you have tools able to measure that various effects from wind or evaporation all the way down to the slight tidal effect of your body's pull are going to be screwing with things. Knock that up to an ocean, potentially ~10^15 teaspoons per inch of depth, and you might need a device accurate to a proton's diameter to even try, making it effectively impossible even if you could find some place you could do it in. An infinite ocean and a normal sized one could never be differentiated from each other by the teaspoon test, however you could still set a minimum size on it, by seeing that it didn't measurably drop. If you have something accurate to 1/10,000th of an inch and 10 foot deep, then you know that if you can't measure a change with the teaspoon your minimum size is ~200 cubic feet, but it could be our 3000 cu/ft example from earlier, or the pacific, or the infinite elemental plane of water. No idea, just bigger than 200. Most guesses at Universal Size, which could factor into the cosmological constant, are like my teaspoon test... only degree of sophistication and accuracy varies, my teaspoon test being less of one and more of the other





Honestly I don't give a damn about the Higgs Boson and never really have, or GUT, I simply take for granted we lack sufficient data for a complete theory and that sufficient data will probably tip the scales to something new. I applaud the efforts to find both, with a comfortable air of indifference and the certain knowledge that if it is discovered within my lifetime I will know within 48 hours. Excluding undergrads, newer grad students, and the small number of physicists actually employed in particle or astro, that's pretty much the majority viewpoint. Physics is a huge field, we all have our pet areas and semi-hobbies, I just don't inflict mine on people like astro/particle kind tend to, albeit it's not exactly entirely of their own accord.



Well it's not about whether or not there are an abnormal number of improbabilities, this is a philosophical statement same as how one deals with solipsism. You can't be sure things are real, there is literally no meaningful counter-argument to that, and "I think therefore I am" is actually a pretty assinine statement as is, when it should be "I shall take as a core assumption to all of my actions that I do exist, that my memory is a meaningful recording of a reality around me which I can interact with and observe in a meaningful fashion", that doesn't make it true, the alternative is just simply variations on apparently futile modes of thought. Same applies with my comment. We can't do any science unless we work under that assumption, broadly anyway, doesn't make it true.



I'm including prior conversations, with me and others, as I said.



Meh, 'graviton' is just a place holder for a particle, group of particles, or effect that has to exist and needs a description. Gravity is a force, forces must be transmitted somehow, nobodies ever suggested an alternative to the normal particle/wave that was meaningful, thus we assume that is the probable means of interaction and we call it graviton. One doesn't necessarily need particles and waves, that's a Quantum thing and well we don't know jack shit about gravity at the quantum level. If one has a graviton, then one can expect it to obey quantum in some fashion. If the graviton doesn't exist, then it may be impossible to rectify it with QM for a QG. Personally I'm not a huge graviton as real particle fan or enemy, as I'm not cheerful with some of the handwaves explaining how gravitons would, for instance, escape a black hole (which they obviously must do if real) while that represents zero problem in GR.




It's cause for doubt, hence the 'theoretical' at the front of it, nobody's ever come up with a more graded scale then 'hypothetical/theoretical/factual' and it's comfortably beyond hypothetical. Also, much as I hate to disagree with the font of all knowledge that is wiki, it is entirely possible we might be able to find a way to shield/reflect neutrinos at some stage in fashion that don't require light-year thick sheets of lead.



I always preferred the theoretical particles of mindon and moron, the transfer particles for knowledge. Keep in mind that a lot of stuff is 'placeholder terms', you don't need to know the specifics to quantify something, you don't have to know why Y=MX² yields the right answer for a given value of M, you can figure out why M is M later.



I'm actually not a huge Hawking fan, not even including my contempt for the sorts of mysticism and cults of personality some scientists seem content to perpetuate. Also, bachelor's degrees exist as a way of pounding at least some useful knowledge into people too young and lazy to learn without babysitting. Look up a schools physics program in terms of courses, go to youtube and look for videos on the subject, watch in order, work along with a textbook, solve all the problems in the back. Complete.



If you're talking about some variation of the various Zero Sum ideas, I'll refer you to those. It is entirely believable to me that the Universes' net charge is zero, or very nearly, that it's momentum is (which is kind of trivial) that it's angular momentum is (which wouldn't be) or even that maybe some how the net energy was zero. There's no evidence of the latter and as mentioned, I don't like discussing the fringe stuff.... hypothesis, experiment, data, proof. Rinse, repeat. We have five types of energy, Potential, Kinetic, Thermal, Light, and Mass, which really boil down to 2 currently, potential and kinetic, since thermal is just locally random kinetic and light is all kinetic really and mass is just a type of potential. You're basically talking about Dark Energy anyway, since as I've mentioned before 'dark' merely means 'unknown'. Congratulations, you've proposed a Dark Energy theory.

Also no, a things mass energy is not half of what it would be when traveling at c. Spec Rev is not very complex, Gen Rev is, Special isn't. K = 0.5mv²γ is the corrected form, where gamma is the Lorentz factor. A one kilogram baseball has a mass energy of 9E16 Joules. In classic mechanics at .5 c it has a K of a quarter of that, and at 1 c a K of that. In special relativity the γ is 1.15, at .6 c of 1.25, at .7 of 1.4 at .8c of 1.67, and so on, increasing exponentially. Half mass energy occurs at around .45c or so, 44-45% of light speed, not 50%.



Might be better if you phrased them as questions



There's a lot I could say about that on a lot of fronts, and won't.