I hope that sad sack — or at least the story he was relating that no-one paid any attention to — comes back to haunt us in a later episode!

If it’s any consolation, I don’t remember much about chemistry, and was never any good at it.

There’s no quantum anything in my answer. :-D

tl;dr: “radius” and “volume” are tricky quantities around compact objects (like neutron stars and black holes) and don’t grow like you would expect because 4d-spacetime-volumes deep in the interior get all squashed and stretched, making it tricky to extract…

That’s an excellent question. There are two families of answers. The more complicated one goes down the path of “how are we measuring lengths and durations” and mostly involves discussions of choices of coordinate systems. The other makes a choice of coordinate system from the start and leans on properties which are…

cannot be described analytically 

what “modified gravity” even is

Hossenfelder (on Facebook and Twitter) took your description of her as a vocal proponent of modified gravity pretty sarcastically. I think you should probably ask her for a more appropriate description of her stance and update the article accordingly.

Practically no physical cosmologist would bat an eyelid at calling it light, not even while being examined by an optometrist. It’s just not “visible light”.

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons at the surface of last scattering have almost exactly the spectrum of a blackbody radiator at a bit more than 3000…

Verlinde has been working on MOND

I’d say the problem is that alternative theories do offer new observables, but when observations are made they do not accord with the alternative theories any better than they do with General Relativity. The fit with all observational data is often much worse for alternatives to GR than for GR, even if one or a…

In the quote in Ryan’s article, McGauch was specifically referring to General Relativity, since MOND (and its nonunique relativistic completions) deal with gravitational phenomena. 1905 is the year of Special Relativity; what’s special about it of course is that there is no gravitation (more precisely, Special…

If only Stacy McGaugh (tritonstation) could restrain himself when tempted to utter attention-seeking comments like “we deify Einstein too much” when defending relativistic theories that reduce to MOND...

(That said, General Relativity did not freeze at publication in 1921, or with Einstein’s death in 1955; it is the…

I think Sanders [2014] section 8 https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.0531 has *you* covered completely.

I think you are confusing Erik Verlinde and Mordehai Milgrom. The latter originated MOND in 1983 (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1983ApJ...270..365M); the former is a string theorist who much more recently (i.e. in 2010) got some press for trying to derive Einsteinian gravity (in the weak limit) in very special…

exactly like matter

Nice article; there are a couple good turns of phrase in there.

I’m pretty sure you meant “National Science Foundation” (as in nsf.gov) rather than “Natural Science Foundation”, though.

Sorry that your comments are likely to be filled with nonsense.

Mira Furlan’s acting at the end was the cherry on the top of the best season ending of any show I can think of. It even makes up for the unfortunate-looking mushroom cloud animation that follows.

This is the sort of thing one expects from Arrowverse’s Barry Allen. :D

I think it was just some more toying with the native accents of some of the actors who have been through the show. They seem to enjoy doing that, but usually not so overtly.

PS: