Sisyphus

This is about going downwind faster than the wind, though. Or are you talking about sailboats? That's a good point.

Well, I disagree with several of your premises, but I don't want to go off on a tangent for no reason. So, I'll keep it narrow: why would our not having free will negate a god having free will? Are most views of god not of a being in some way outside the physical laws of the universe?

Ah, so you just mean proving that the universe is deterministic. How does that rule out a sentient god?

How would that prove that every religion is wrong? (And what definition of "free will" are you talking about?)

The sail is curved like the top surface of a wing. Both. Nope, it's legitimate. They've managed to go almost 3 times wind speed.

So you don't know what I'm talking about, but you've decided it's without merit anyway? That's absolutely not true that nobody has studied alternatives. There have been lots of alternatives studied. In fact, the term "big bang" was originally a joke term making fun of inflation theory. However, currently the only viable models that have not been falsified in some way involve inflation. So no, there are not "other very good explanations," though there were candidates in the past, and there may be in the future. Being incomplete is not a problem, else no science would ever be valid. What matters is contrary evidence. What do you mean? Of course it means something. It's predicted by theory, fits all new observations, and is fully describable mathematically. Perhaps you mean it's counterintuitive?

This is not actually true. There is no such thing as absolute speed, just speed with respect to a given reference frame. You can't approach the speed of light. Person A can move with respect to person B, but it is just as valid to say that person B is moving with respect to person A. There is a reference frame in which A is motionless and B is moving (and time for B is moving slowly) and vice versa. That's the "relative" part of "relativity." GPS satellites are adjusted not because they are moving fast, but because they are higher up in the Earth's gravity well, and they are accelerating constantly. These effects are measurable and documented, and they don't have anything like the effects you hypothesize. None of these premises are true. That's an awfully ironic accusation to make. Keep your own speculations in your own threads.

An unfalsifiable statement is one which, if false, would be impossible to prove it is false.

I disagree completely. Inquisitiveness and skepticism go hand in hand (and are what science relies on), and accepting miracles at face value is a failure of both. But I think this video explains it better:

Well, if it's only reflecting red light, then it would appear black, just like something that only reflects infrared appears to us. However, an object that appears red to us is not necessarily a "red object" in the sense that it is only reflecting red light. That something is "really" one color is pretty rare, so the animal would interpret the color of the object based on the ratio of the stimulus of the color receptors it does have. Just like we do - pretty much everything around you is emitting infrared light, but we can't see it, so our perception of color is based only on what we can see. And even that is easily confused. We interpret color based on the ratio of how stimulated our three different color receptors are. For example, green falls between blue and yellow in wavelength, so it stimulates our blue and yellow receptors to the same amount. Therefore we can't distinguish between green light and a mix of blue and yellow light. Similarly, all the colors that a bichromate could see would be mixes of two primary colors.

Nothing. There will always be definitions of "god" that are unfalsifiable.

That site seems like a big oversimplification. The big bang is not a traditional explosion. It did not take place at a single point and throw stuff outwards. In fact, there is no "outwards" - by current models, the universe has no center and no edges, and may or may not actually be infinite. I don't know why that site chose to represent it the way it does. The big bang took place everywhere at once, so the size of the universe is not limited by how far stuff can travel from "there." The "expansion of space" does not mean objects traveling away from each other - in fact, it's a lot more literal than that. "Space itself" is expanding, so that, for example, every light year of distance actually grows by X inches per year. A consequence of that the distances between all objects on a large enough scale are increasing without them moving, and the rate of this increase is proportional to their distance. (If every light year grows by X inches per year, then an object Y lightyears away is getting farther away at a rate of X*Y inches.)

I was a double major in physics and philosophy, for reasons similar to your present dilemma. There is indeed a lot of perspective that each can lend to the other, and I don't regret it. And despite the common jokes, philosophy majors certainly are employable. Just not, generally, in the same sorts of jobs as physics majors. It's not synergistic in that sense, or probably in course load. And get used to people having very vague notions of what you study but judging it anyway, and get used to idiots who think they are "philosophers." (Of course, we have lots of people here who think they are physicists, too.) Also, you would have to be prepared for a lot of work. Philosophy is going to involve the most difficult reading of any subject, and physics the most difficult math (except for pure mathematics).

It is impossible to have the entire surface of an object be polarized one way or the other. The north and south cancel each other out exactly, because magnetic field lines are loops, and they have to "double back." Look:

I see. From what you suggest, it sounds like you're thinking of the observable universe as a bubble of stuff inside a larger, empty volume. That isn't an accurate picture. The observable universe is just as far as we can see, as permitted by cosmic expansion and the speed of light. The universe, however, that thing for which the big bang was the beginning, is not a bubble. It is not any 3D shape, and so it makes no sense to refer to "beyond" it. The big bang was not a giant explosion. It was not in any location - even a very large location. It is where locations come from. It is not analogous to thinking the galaxy is all that exists, because the galaxy is a 3D shape with an inside and an outside (even if you thought there was nothing outside, but just empty space). The universe is not an object.

Source?

Hehe. I guess the best answer would be both, depending on circumstances. If you held the gun vertically, that would make it random again. Though perhaps you would still be able to tell where the bullets are by feeling the balance. But that too could be compensated for by forcing the choice of whether to spin before you get hold the gun. Of course, the real answer is that you turn the gun on the psychotic interviewer. If one of you wasn't leaving alive, then you weren't getting the job anyway.

Sure. If they're the same distance away when the light is emitted, it will take the same amount of time to reach you, always.

Do not roll the cylinder. The interviewer clicked on one of four empty chambers. For only one of those chambers is the next chamber a bullet. Chance of survival is 3/4. However, if you spin, chance of survival is only 4/6=2/3. For non-adjacent chambers, you should spin again. Two of the empty chambers have bullets after them, so chance of surviving is only 2/4=1/2, while with spinning it is still 2/3. With only 1 bullet, you should also spin again. 4/5 survival vs. 5/6 with spinning.

If the universe is finite, then it is not sphere, or any other 3D shape. A sphere has an inside and an outside, and the universe has no outside. It has no edges, and no center. Probably the simplest way to imagine a finite volume without edges would be to imagine it as "folded back on itself." What this means is that if you go far enough in one direction, you end up back where you started. Peer some unimaginably large distance and see not a wall but the back of your own head. Think of it like the game Asteroids - wander off one edge of the screen, and come out on the other side. (The real life geometry would be more complicated than that, but it is an example of a finite space without edges.) Basically, you have to stop trying to imagine what it would look like from the outside, because that perspective makes no sense. There is no outside. It is, however, perfectly intelligible from the inside, and it's perfectly intelligible mathematically.

Two guys in a hotel is not a supernatural or fantastic event, though. Perhaps the tooth fairy and a leprachaun meeting in NJ? That removes the objection of knowing who made them up. Still, I disagree that it is unreasonable to be agnostic towards such a belief. I cannot, by any of the means I would normally go about proving something, prove that leprachauns or tooth fairies do not exist. I just firmly believe they don't, for various reasons which I think make it difficult to justify a reasonable belief that they do exist, but which I'm aware do not constitute proof. I think it's mostly just a matter of what you choose to call that. And getting more on topic, I think anger would be a weird reaction towards such beliefs. Unless, I guess, someone who believed them were demanding others alter their behavior because of those beliefs.

Yup. The moon travels across the sky just like the sun does. And just like the sun, when it's on the other side of the Earth, you can't see it. It takes 24 hours 50 minutes to "circle" the sky (compared to 24 hours for the sun), so the moon falls behind, and the sun laps it once a month. The closer it is to the sun, the more overlap there will be between visible sun time (daytime) and visible moon time, and therefore the less overlap between visible moon time and night time.

When the moon is new, it is only visible during the day, yeah. It's in between the Earth and the sun, which means from our perspective it is in the same part of the sky as the sun, and is visible at the same times. People on the other side of the Earth don't have a sun at all, either. It's called night time.

Well right, so 4G of thrust fighting 1G of gravity for 3G of acceleration at takeoff (and no initial air resistance). Ion engines we have now are 10 times as efficient as chemical rockets, but are still three orders of magnitude too weak to accelerate anything at 1G.

But 1g is an enormous amount of acceleration to maintain for a year. For comparison, the space shuttle has a max acceleration of 3G at takeoff, and it burns off almost all of its vast external fuel tanks in a few minutes.