Delta1212

"Accepting without question" doesn't seem like a particularly accurate description of how science actually works. It is, granted, something that a lot of people do with regard to scientific theories, but very few of those people are scientists (who spend a great deal of time poking, prodding and questioning even theories they think are accurate in order to further test them, refine their accuracy and discover their limits). Regardless, "science" doesn't ask you to believe that space is actually curved. You do, however, have to accept that the mathematics of curved space predicts the movement of matter due to gravity more accurately than anything else we've got, which we can state because the mathematical predictions have been repeatedly checked against what actually happens and been found correct to a high degree of precision. Whether you belief that the ability to accurately model gravity as curved space represents a physical truth or is merely an artifact of math that accurately describes the behavior of gravity but doesn't reveal deeper truths about its physical nature is entirely up to you. Just make sure you understand that most people who study it don't accept that space curves "because Einstein says so" (or whoever else). In general, they accept it because the math for curved space works really, really well for predicting the behavior of gravity in all of the many, many tests that have been done.

There is clearly such a thing as love. It may be largely hormonal, or applied to situations without rational basis (e.g. Loving someone who has no interest in you or two people who are fundamentally incompatible falling in love) but just because it's not the magic panacea for life that romcoms make it out to be doesn't mean it isn't real.

Fun? Religion? Alien motivations we don't understand because they're alien?

If cetaceans evolved from land dwelling mammals, where are the land whales?

Just for reference for you: If I generously assume that humans have a lifespan of only 60 years and take the long end of the fly's lifespan at 30 days rather than the low end at 15, a fly would have to eat a meal every 90 seconds for its entire life, non-stop, in order to eat the same number of meals as a human.

The initial confusion was over the fact that the description of when momentum is conserved is not identical to the description of when energy is conserved. Swansont provided an example of a system that is defined in such a way that it conserves one but not the other. Obviously any lost energy/momentum must go somewhere, but that isn't what the question was about.

Really, David and Goliath is the same scenario as that one iconic Indiana Jones scene, but with less attention paid to the humor of the situation.

What about one that is both alive and dead at the same time?

Has anyone ever had an idea so novel that it was incapable of being described in pre-existing words? I'm not arguing that we think only in language. Obviously, we don't or we wouldn't have moments when we "know" what word we want to use but can't think of what it is. We can think in concepts without matching them to words. I'm just not sure that "new idea we don't have a word for yet" is the best example of this since many things don't need a one-to-one concept-to-word correlation in order to be expressed in language.

Sink toward what?

The OP is terrible, but the question of how likely life is to appear is still an interesting one that, in itself, doesn't deserve to be dismissed simply because a certain subset of people abuse the hell out of it. What range of conditions can life arise in? What is the average time it takes in optimal vs suboptimal conditions for life to appear? How common are those conditions in the Universe? And then specifically to us: How close to the optimal conditions was early Earth? How long would (did) it take life to evolve in those conditions, and how long would those conditions have existed without life arising? Was life appearing on Earth near guaranteed? A cointoss? A fluke? We know what did happen, but was it the result of the same physical inevitability as the fate of an ice cube flung into a star, or did it require an extraordinary set of circumstances, like a meteor getting struck by lightning just as it crashed into the sole lake capable of sustaining life on the face of the Earth? That's being silly, but still, it's worth asking whether life is something that arises commonly (and whether it arises commonly on the conditions present on early Earth) or whether we're a rare and (from our perspective) lucky accident, even if I don't suspect we'll be able to answer those questions in our lifetimes. Edit: And after writing all that, I think I see what you mean. What are the odds of life evolving vs what are the odds of life evolving by chance aren't necessarily the same question. I flip a coin and it comes up heads. The odds of me getting heads were 50:50, the odds that me getting heads was based on chance alone are not 50:50, as that would mean there is a 50% chance that something manipulated the result (as, e.g., a two headed coin).

Liberty is "freedom to"; Security is "freedom from."

If I roll a seven in craps, and then ask someone what the odds of that happening were, does "1:1" adequately provide me with the information I was seeking?

Most people essentially think of a microwave as a magic heating box. When a magician (i.e. sciencey-looking guy) says he can reverse the polarity and turn it into a magic cooling box, it sounds reasonable.

It's been done with lasers. I'm unsure whether walking through it would be a good idea or not, though.

Assuming the left and right are from the perspective of the people in the picture and you are the girl and your mom's ex is in the blue shirt... You look like your mom's ex. If you showed the picture without labels and asked which was your father, that's who I'd have picked based on general shaped of the face, cheeks and smile. That's going off a single photograph, though, and without reference to what your mother looks like. It's also not a DNA analysis. I just had a close family member deal with an almost identical situation (it was a DNA test against a cousin for genealogical purposes. They came back unrelated. Further testing against a sibling came back showing them to be half-siblings). If you want to know for sure one way or another without involving your father (or potential father), getting tested against a sibling or someone on your father's side of the family would work approximately as well. Barring your mother knowing one way or the other (and she may legitimately think she does and still be mistaken, as was the case in the aforementioned situation), genetic testing is pretty much your one route to settling the issue. There's not much way around it that I can think of.

Saying the past doesn't exist in the present is like saying that ten feet away doesn't exist where I'm currently standing. It's true by definition, but you can't extrapolate to say that an object ten feet away doesn't really exist and that the entire concept of distance is all in my head. Well, I mean, you could. It's actually just as feasible as time being all in your head, but most people who like the idea that time isn't real have a problem looking at distance the same way.

The most widely accepted view is that we have no idea what, if anything, came before the Big Bang.

It happens the other way around.

"Observer" is more accurately understood in QM "anything being interacted with" rather than "person looking at results." If a photon reflects off a mirror and the mirror recoils, then that mirror "observed" the photon and it is no longer available to interact with the other mirror.

It's probably better to think of a photon as a smeary blob of probability spreading out from the source that condenses to a single location upon interacting with something than as a tiny billiard ball hurtling from source to destination.

Would the "solid" custard protect the egg from the shock or transfer it more easily, though?

If being intelligent made it impossible for me to be happy, and being happy made it impossible to be intelligent, then I would choose to be happy. Luckily, this isn't a plausible real world situation, and intelligence can lead to a great deal of happiness even if it also costs you some. Under those circumstances, I'd rather be intelligent and of average happiness than sacrifice my intelligence for greater happiness.

We're currently inside the singularity, as is everything else in the universe, or at least inside the space where the singularity used to be. That space has just gotten a bit bigger in the meantime.

I agree with everything except that our brains are evolving to handle "more" anything. At the very least not in any measurable way over timescales that are relevant to the development of physics.