Strange

Asimov wrote a short story about that, The Last Question: http://multivax.com/last_question.html

Believing that the human brain can do something without verifiable evidence of same is equivalent, in my view, to religious faith and belief in some supreme deity. We have a theory of computable functions. There is no reason to think that the brain can somehow (magically) compute things in a way that not included in the definition of computability. As such, anything we know that the brain is able to do can also be done by a computer.

Juts because computers currently do not do something says nothing about whether they can. I have seen no good arguments to convince me that the brain does anything that computers could not, in principle, also do.

There are standard libraries for this. For example: https://gmplib.org

The largest "supervoid" so far found is about 1.8 billion light years across. Also, voids are not empty, they just contain slightly less matter than other areas. So your suggestions is not really testable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_(astronomy) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/11550868/Giant-mysterious-empty-hole-found-in-universe.html The two events detected so far were 1.3 and 1.4 billion light years away (just a detail). But I don't see why you think the detection of black holes colliding is relevant to your idea. Can you explain that? There is a very close correlation between distance and increasing red-shift. The only place where we see blue shift is where local galaxies (e.g. Andromeda) are moving towards us. So it sounds like your (vague) prediction fails.

You just need to cite papers/articles that are relevant; it doesn't matter where they were published (as long as they are published in reputable journals). Google Scholar is a good way of searching published papers: https://scholar.google.co.uk

That is one of the traditional ways of getting published. You could send recordings to record companies and agents to see if any are interested. There are occasional stories of people stealing the songs they are sent. One way around this would be to put the songs on YouTube and then send them a link to that. In that way you have established very publicly that it is your song prior to them getting hold of it. (This will have little legal weight, but is better than nothing.)

So there are all sorts of speculative theories and hypotheses that might explain how space-time (and its curvature) and mass arise from something more fundamental. For example: https://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0785 But that will just leave you with even more "why" questions.

Gravity is not a separate thing that affects time. Space-time becomes curved in the presence of mass (or energy). One consequence of this is that different observers will see different amounts of time pass. Another consequence of this is the effect we call "gravity". Gravity is space and time.

So mass (and energy) is the property that causes spacetime to curve. Perhaps you (or Mike) will ask why it does that. Well, ultimately, why anything. Why do electric charges exert a force on one another? Why do electrons obey Fermi-Dirac statistics (the Pauli exclusion principle)? Why do photons have energy and momentum? Why are most phenomena quantised? Why does the universe exist? I am not saying that these questions are not worth asking, but they are not really science questions.

And yet they hold you in your chair, cause obvious visible effects like gravitational lensing, and allow us to detect events happing billions of light years away. How much more tangible do you need them to be? Any material medium that you propose is, by definition, totally undetectable and therefore not tangible.

1. It has you name on it. 2. You have spammed it repeatedly. 3. You are emotionally invested in it. Grow up.

The "medium" is space-time. That is what is curved by the presence of mass-energy. That is what the waves are "in" (or "of"?). But this is not acceptable to Mike. My question is: why is it not acceptable? He has reluctantly accepted that the "medium" of electromagnetic radiation is the complex mathematical abstraction called a field (which may or may not correspond to something that physically exists - that again is a philosophical, not scientific, question). But, for some reason, he is not prepared to accept the existence of the much more common-sense and intuitive thing we call "geometry". We are all familiar with distances, angles, lines, curves, etc. And we can accept that distances can be measured and can change. But somehow this isn't good enough. WHY?

If you enjoy people boasting about their profound ignorance, maybe.

What is the point? Either there is a need for your aether or there isn't (currently, there isn't). Either there is evidence for your aether or there isn't (currently, there isn't). What is there to bet on? That some new evidence comes to light in ... what, the next 24 hours? The next 5 years? The next 20 millennia?

See the thread above yours: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/66260-defining-god/

No one is saying there is nothing in space. There are all the things in space that have been mentioned previously. But those things are IN space. They are not "space". They are no relevant to the transmission of gravitational waves. Until there is some theory requiring that, or evidence for it, then your guess appears to be wrong.

If it was intended to be incomprehensible, then yes you have.

We have very specific and precise answers to these questions. But, apparently, they are not acceptable to Mike. This is a totally unreasonable comparison. You are comparing on the one hand a simplistic handwavy answer that doesn't really explain anything with a reference to a highly detailed explanation that admits to being incomplete. The first answer raises all sorts of questions such as: Where do those forces come from? Why does the air move that way? How is air able to exert a force on the wing? Why is air a gas and the wing solid? Some of these questions are just as hard to answer as anything about gravitation and, ultimately, come back to "because that is the way it is". Because we don't need there to be one and there is no evidence that there is one. If you think there is then you are not engaging in science; you are just making stuff up. You are missing the point. Science is constantly looking for new, unproven ideas. That is how it makes progress. But you vague "why" questions are not scientific. How would you model "why"? What experiments would you do to test "why"?

Only if you have a mathematical model that you can test against observation. It does;t sound like you do, so it isn't science.

And poets, perhaps.

Philosophers.

And there is some legal protection (in most jurisdictions) for the concept of a "trade secret" to protect products that cannot be protected by other IP laws.

Neither patents or copyright can protect ideas. Only secrecy can protect an idea.

It is still used in watercolour paints, though.