What makes you so sure?

It's not a matter of being able to pray, Trip, it's about our children being forced to pray, in public schools, to the god chosen for us by the tyrants currently in power. It's about the loss of our freedoms.

the same 'spidey sense' that told me W would get another term

that's not true. 'gravity waves' are not a structure, they are an effect. the structure supporting the effect is 'spacetime', and the assumption is that 'spacetime' curvature (gravity) propagates at a finite velocity and thus must form 'wavefronts'.

also, there are other physical structures that are hypothesized to exist but remain unproven such as the 'higgs' field and the strings of string theory.

It's rare to find something that pushes me into so deep introspection as when I read this. Congratulations! And thanks.

Relationships ... a large part of my life is sorting out and teaching people to sort out "relationship bonds" - the "stuff" that holds people in relationships even when there are real advantages to leaving.

The "stuff" holding humans together in relationships is really dark matter. Bonds of guilt and hate seem to be much more common - and much more sticky - than bonds of love and joy. And worse, it seems that we do not allow ourselves to know this "stuff" - just knowing it will change the relationships it holds together.

Back to your post - the range of hypothetical ability is popularly called "chance" and more properly called "sigificance".

yes, this is the basic premise of general relativity that 'spacetime' is the replacement aether to the earlier 'mechanical' aether.

yes, and those 'things that do exist' would be another kind of aether.

Such a range should exists in the mind of a person who is concerned with such questions. I, for example, hold string theory to be 'way out in left field' while I hold the idea of the cosmos as finite and unbounded to be 'pretty sure it might be'.

Do you believe it to be a multi-dimensional universe within universe within.. and so on? That we arose out of the original primordial bubble in the fabric of space-time and are just one tiny insignificant universe within other universes?

And, what does this have anything to do with J.B. for Prez in '08?

We discussed this before and I have a new argument why infinite cosmos might be good. An infinite mass-energy universe might be able to avoid eventual heat death. There is no new evidence of the reality of this possibility, just a reason to be more wishful in our thinking.

Scroll back up and you will see that Dan's extra sensory perception as to the outcome of the '08 election inspired this philosophical detour into how we can know things to be true or not.

even if it is infinitely extended, it still cannot avoid an 'entropy death' given enough time.

I don't believe in an infinite nesting of 'universes'

As our bubble expands to the max it starts to contract into a massive black hole and eventually a singularity, which on the other side exists another dimension where the process repeats (history repeats it's cyclation) after which all that exists where the previous dimension was is a vaporous gas emitted into the fabric of spacetime.

Theoretically of course, yet to be proven, but is all, I believe beeing worked on in seperate factions all simultaneously.

Unfortionally not instantaneosly/at the speed of light/a quantum leap ahead.

Are you sure that you are not a 'string' theorist.

This requires/deserves elaboration.

Started making so many paralles as I read this.

The Pandora's box of human bonding delves into paradox and often confusion. What attracts us to people is rarely what motivates us to stay with them. And just knowing what really bonds us can threaten our relationships.

A woman who stays with an immature male partner may have bonded to him as a mother bonds to a son - and be unable to leave him despite his ignorance or abuse. The burden of guilt of a mother abandoning a child would prevent this. If the woman becomes aware of this bond, she may (quickly) leave.

This topic opens wide the nature of mental health, yet is hardly addressed in psychology or psychotherapy.

(I now leave to teach a group of therapists how to replace relationship bonds.)

See www.soulwork.net\sw_articles_eng\bonds.htm for more about this very rich topic.

I am interested in your thoughts about how our observations of cosmic relationships might affect those relationships.