Strange

Isn't the other big difference between the English and the Continental systems that the former is adversarial and the latter is investigative?

The mass is calculated from the number and types of stars, measurements of amounts of gas present in between, and so on. Orbital velocities measured either using Doppler shifts or, in some cases, direct measurements of movement over time.

And the oceans have nothing to do with it.

Ssshhh! I have got away with it so far... I agree. It is always possible to provide simple explanations at some level. But these require a lot of supporting information to be just accepted. Or it leads on to more and more detailed explanations to answer the questions that come up (as in this thread!). And, in the end, it stops being simple. The other problem is that the simple explanations are, necessarily, based on analogies, which can lead people to think they understand a lot more than they do. We have all seen people trying to disprove relativity, or whatever, by showing that some analgy or another is wrong. http://xkcd.com/895/

Without the force of the people holding hands (or galaxies being gravitationally bound) they would follow straight lines (lines of longitude on the Earth, geodesics in space-time). This would cause them to move apart over time. In other words, in the absence of force distance will naturally increase. It requires a force to move objects off those geodesics and keep them the same distance apart. This might help: "Expanding Space: the Root of all Evil?" http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.0380

I strongly disagree with this. And it certainly isn't true for the areas I work in (even though a large part of my job is explaining these things!) There is also, as far as I know, no evidence that Einstein said this. Similar statements have been attributed to Rutherford, Feynamn and many others. I suspect it is just wishful thinking on the part of some people. Einstein did say, when asked what he had got his Nobel Prize for, "If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize."

Then this is philosophy rather than science. You might want to read some of the interpretations of quantum mechanics and see if any appeal to you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics(you can pick whichever one appeals because they are just different descriptions of the same theory).

Correct. But you said, "This is what I mean by ‘paradox’ – unavailable to normal picturing" which is not, and never has been, the meaning. (I actually went and checked the etymology to see if it has anything to do with "picturing"; it doesn't.) But what it originally meant is irrelevant; that is known as "the etymological fallacy". (I'm afraid I don't understand the point of you astronaut analogy, so can't really comment on it.)

That is exactly what I mean by counter-intuitive. You ask, what is the "thing" What is an electron? It is an electron. What is a photon? It is a photon. Ultimately, as with all science, they are models that work. The question makes no sense. What would you expect the answer to be? "It is a little machine made of wood and brass"? I'm not being sarcastic, just pointing out that the question has no answer other than, it is what we measure it to be. That is not the meaning of "paradox". (It is rarely a good idea to use your own personal redefinitions of words.) However, if there is a word that means that, then I would agree it describes quantum theory.

That is about relative states of motion. Can you explain how it applies to chemistry? You seem to be using it as a metaphor that allows you to say "everything is relative". That is not what it means. I have already said that this is a distinguishing feature of life. Life is self-contained and self-sustaining. The chemical reactions of living organisms take place in cells (or collections of cells). So your hypothesis is immediately falsified by your own criteria. As was pointed out nearly 50 posts ago.

This is not paradoxical, it is just counter-intuitive. The things we encounter in everyday life (and that our brains have evolved to understand) do not behave like this. There is no reason that the quantum world must behave as our intuitions expect. And it doesn't. But it is a completely rational, logical theory able to make extremely precise theories. As result we have technologies such as your computer/phone that allow this conversation to take place. But there is a problem that a lot of popular science writing likes to play up the amazing/paradoxical/impossible mature of things. Note that there a lot of things called "paradoxes" in science (e.g. the Twins Paradox in relativity) but these are not paradoxes in the classiccal sense (self contradictory). They are all things that appear contradictory until the explanation is understood.

I don't think this is a very accurate description. All particles (always) have both wave and particle characteristics. It depends what you measure. And it is not generally agreed that consciousness is required for this. An "observation" is really just any interaction. I don't know anything about David Chalmers, but it doesn't appear that he would be a good person to get an understanding of quantum theory from. I would recommend someone like Feynman. And in answer to the question in the title: no.

Because within galaxies (and galaxy clusters) the gravity holds things together - they are all in orbit around the center of mass. As noted in post 107, the expansion of space is not a force pushing things apart. It is just that distance between things will increase over time if nothing else happens. In that post I gave the analogy of two people walking due south from the north pole: they will tend to move apart because they are following lines of longitude. But imagine they were holding hands - then they wouldn't move apart as they moved south.

Rest mass does stay the same. The "relativistic mass" is the rest mass plus the energy. This is why objects are said to increase in mass as the velocity increases. (A lot of people don't like this being described as relativistic mass, as it can be confusing.)

As you have presented absolutely nothing that falsifies the theory, your claims can be easily dismissed. Prove it. So you are claiming that light is slowed by gravity in the same way a massive object is? Please provide some evidence to support this claim.

In physics, that is not what it means. http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/1DKin/Lesson-1/Acceleration And remember that velocity is defined as speed and direction. One thing that should make this obvious: you need to apply a force to change the speed but you also need to apply a force to change the direction. And force = mass x acceleration.

Kinetic energy also has an equivalent gravitational effect.

Exactly. But of course, the effect has been measured using atomic clocks. So no one seriously doubts it is real.

The issue here is orbital velocity. You can consider each star, grain of dust or hydrogen atom independently. The only other thing that matters is the total mass inside the orbit.

Heat is energy. Energy has a gravitational effect, just like mass.

There are many reasons for red-shift in different contexts. Doppler effect, gravitational and expanding space. Which are you referring to?

No you didn't. You have made some incoherent arguments about a thought experiments and some claims about something you have seen. None of which does anything to disprove the theory of relativity. 1. Your argument is against a thought experiment and therefore cannot prove or disprove anything. 2. You have provided no maths to support your argument. 3. You have provided no evidence that contradicts relativity (personal anecdotes about thigns you may or may not have seen do not count). 4. You have offered no alternative explanation for all the evidence that supports the theory. So I think we can safely dismiss your claims. That is not an assumption of the theory. Why?

I don't think there is any (easy) way to directly measure length contraction. However, the complementary effect of time dilation is very easy to measure, and what is seen by one party as time dilation will be explained as a length contraction by another. For example, muons from cosmic rays would normally decay before they reach the Earth but (from our perspective) they are time dilated and so we detect them. But from their perspective, the distance to the Earth is reduced and so they arrive before they decay. Similarly for electric vs magnetic fields. Or the clocks on GPS satellites versus the triangulation of location. And so on and on. Furthermore, length contraction is part of the theory and the theory is incredibly well verified. So ... I don't think you will find one who disagrees.

I'm not sure why you bring metaphysical beliefs into this. You seem to confusing scientific theories vs beliefs vs reality. There isn't necessarily any connection between these things.

Maybe it would have been better (for the lay reader) to use something like "effective mass" or "total mass" to make the distinction a little bit clear.