Delta1212

But those rolls came up because you chose to throw the dice. That low probability result required intelligent intervention in the form of your decision to roll dice in order to arise. I call this the Theory of Intelligent Dicing.

I wouldn't call it a mismeasurement so much as an unexpected result that required a more thorough explanation than a surface interpretation. The neutrinos did arrive before the light from the supernova. That wasn't an incorrect measurement. It just didn't mean what the initial, obvious, interpretation would have implied that it meant (i.e. That the neutrinos were traveling faster than light).

And, following off of this, the Martian sky is red because there are red rust particles physically floating in the air. It's not because the sky is somehow reflecting the color of the ground, and neither is the Earth's sky blue because it is reflecting the color of the oceans.

The observer effect has nothing to do with consciousness. A tennis ball "observes" the position of a brick wall when it bounces off. An observation in physics is more or less synonymous with an interaction and doesn't require the involvement of any kid if intelligence.

I think repeatability is really the important part. A one-off observation could be interesting. Repeated one-off observations (see: Ball lightning) can be very interesting. But until we know how to either produce the effect ourselves or at least predict when and where the effect will occur so that we can plan to observe it, it's very difficult to treat a phenomenon scientifically because there is no way to test any hypothesis about what is going on. Without that repeatability, you can't tell whether a particular result is fabricated, inaccurate, an outlier or a real result. If you tell me that you saw something move faster than light, there are three possibilities: You did see something move faster than light, you think you saw something move faster than light but are mistaken, or you are lying. Unless you can either show me how to make something move faster than light so that I can time it for myself, or at least show me where something moving faster than light is so that I can test that, I have absolutely no way of knowing which of those three options it is. There's no basis for judging the validity of your claims if they can't be checked by anyone else. At a bare minimum, having some readings of a particular event and specific information about where, when and how it happened allows other people to go over them and check for alternate explanations or ways in which the results could fit with a new theory. Without even that, there's no real way to treat an idea scientifically. If other people can't be privy to the same information you have in formulating a conclusion, you can't expect them to treat that conclusion as science.

So once I throw a ball, it doesn't know that it was thrown from the moving surface of a planet and should immediately go shooting past my head at a thousand miles per hour?

Length contraction remains in exactly the same way that time dilation does. When you sync back up with the given rest frame, the rate your clock is ticking at syncs up as well, but you only travelled through time (see: aged) as far as you did while your clock was ticking at the slower rate. You don't suddenly age a bunch to match up with what you would have aged if your clock had been in sync the whole time. We all agree on that. So, with length contraction, I see a star 10 light years away. I speed up to the point that length contraction causes to the star to only be 5 light years away. I travel to the star and then decrease my speed to sync up to the rest frame I started in. The distance is now 10 ly, but my 5 ly journey still covered the full distance. I'm not dragged backward 5 ly to where I would have been if length wasn't contracted during my journey. Maintaining the distance you've travelled is the equivalent of maintaining the amount you've aged. Something remaining length contracted after speeding back up isn't the equivalent of something maintaining its age. It's the equivalent of maintaining it's clock speed. Something remaining length contracted after accelerating back to your rest frame would be the equivalent of it remaining time dilated in the same circumstances; that is, continuing to have its clock tick at a slower rate. The lasting effect of time dilation isn't the time dilation itself, it's the discrepancy between how much the traveling object aged and how much time the resting observer measures to have passed. The lasting effect if length contraction isn't the shortening of the object, it's the discrepancy between how far the object measures itself as having travelled, and the distance as measured by the resting observer.

That was supposed to be a clever response to both major questions in the OP. That said, I'd still say science doesn't say much if anything about the existence of God. It does say a few things about the human belief in the existence of God, though.

I'm aware of the more efficient method of mixing weighed and unweighed balls, but I can never remember how to do it properly on my own.

Nothing.

That is correct.

I'm usually interested in those sorts of arguments, but generally I find that they wind up being justifications for pre-existing philosophical positions rather than attempts to draw scientifically valid conclusions from the available data. And I'd also wonder if, in the case of swapping out the matter making up a pre-existing person one atom at a time, when they stop being the person in question.

How far back would we need to go for the CMBR to be visible to the naked eye, both in terms of wavelength and intensity?

Or would it be the same person? If you swapped a person's body out one atom at a time, would it still be the same person? If you used all of the original atoms to build an exact copy if the person, which would be the real one?

I'm not sure where the political correctness comes in, but you do have to be exact in your use of terminology. Playing fast and loose with terms is how you get misunderstandings.

There's no push for greater fitness. It's an inevitable consequence of heritability and differential reproductive success. Things that reproduce more will be better represented in the gene pool. That's trivially true and since humanity still experiences a great deal of differential reproductive success (which generally doesn't have much to do with what we value in terms of success or "fitness"), we don't have much say in the fact that natural selection happens to us or what is getting selected. Whether our social philosophies are Darwinian has little to do with whether Darwinian processes apply to us, and they apply to anything that replicates with variation.

Really the only two subjects I'm seriously interested in that aren't covered here in some form are history and linguistics, so if a history forum is being considered, sign me up.

Imagine a cylinder on a slant. Each cross section is a circle, and because the cylinder is slanted, as you move up the cylinder each cross section is a little further to the side. If you look at each cross section sequentially, it looks like there is a circle moving to the side. But the cylinder isn't moving, and each circle isn't a copy of a previous circle, nor is it just a circle that is moving up as well as to the side. It is a single object extended through space that has circular cross sections when viewed two dimensions at a time. You could even make it a cone and it would look like the circle was growing as you move up the cross sections. Similarly, you could be represented as a 4D object with you-shaped cross sections. The difference is that the cross sections are three dimensional. The 4D object that is you wouldn't look like you. It would look like an extended you where each cross-section is you at any given moment. The 4D you isn't a single you that is moving through time, nor is it a million copies of you that exist throughout time. It's one single 4D object that exists within a block of 4D spacetime that can only observe itself as 3D cross sections of itself. And it exists in a pattern that encodes information about the shape of the portion of the object "behind" it but not "in front" of it so that each cross section provides itself with the appearance of being the current end of the 4D object when you look at it one cross section at a time. But there's no forward movement of time. The whole object exists as a unit without having to change in 4D spacetime.

I don't know, ego puffs are pretty tasty. Especially if you puff them yourself.

You're asking science to scientifically define something that has been scientifically determined not to have an objectively defined existence. Taxonomy isn't an empirical science. It can use empirical evidence in defining its categories, but ultimately it is the business of drawing up categories that do not exist in nature. "Life" is one of those categories and cannot, therefore, be defined in a way that is not heavily dependent upon culture rather than empiricism.

No, but you need extra space to travel through space.

The reputation that matters most is what others actually think about you based on what and how you post. The number in your profile is just a number.

I can believe something to be impossible while accepting the possibility that that belief is wrong. It's the difference between possible in the "this is physically capable of happening" and possible in the "I don't have enough information to say whether or not this is true" senses. I currently believe that it is impossible for anything with mass to travel faster than c locally, but I accept the possibility that new physics may someday render that belief outdated. That's not to say that I necessarily believe it will, but I know that I don't know for sure that it won't and so, in that sense, it is a possibility even if physically it may very well be completely impossible.

I think you mean fission.