I have repeatedly challenged certain atheists to read certain books, but up to now none of them had any desire to do so. Atheism is as much a religion as anything else. Everyone has belief-systems and we are all subjective. 

I 100 percent agree with you on this. I cannot stand atheists and their refusal to be open-minded.

Oh come on. You said Dark Matter == 1% and now you want to make me look bad? And you know veeery well that these numbers changeall the time.

Your corrections were completly off so I needed to point that out. You looked up wikipedia to try make a fool out of me and failed. My off hand guesses were incorrect too but at least they were cloes enough to the current percentage. 

''Is this some sort of jest? seriously.''

I don't understand why you asked me this question. You can measure the distance between stars in a number of ways: You can measure the intrinsic brightness of the star and then by looking at how bright it appears, it's distance can be measured. Novae tend to have average intrinsic brightness, sp their apparent brightness in say a distant galaxy tells us it's distance. Cepheid variables such as the north star can be used to determine the distances to groups of stars.

Red shift is used for objects outside our galaxy because the amount of red shift within our galaxy would be extremely small if it were not totally overcome by the gravity of the galaxy.

Although it was fiction Gene Rodenberry had an intresting theory that black holes actually warp time (i stand corrected on all this). So perhaps wormholes and blackholes are on in the same?

Just a layman's question, If black holes were to somehow pass energy/matter to another place or universe, shouldn't we be seeing galaxies come apart instead of sticking together. The mass still stays in the black hole does it not?

@svennjo

It would seem that way but its not here is why. After you passed the blackhole the rest of the universe is past. What matters here is relativity. What we percieve if we look from outside someone entering a blackhole. He gets slowly near the hole and stops forever frozen in time. Thats our reality. He sees it differently he looks onto the universe and the nearer he gets to the black hole the faster everything outside is moving he sees stars beeing born and die until he passes the schwarzschild radius from this point on the whole old universe is past outside everything already happened from his view and from our view inside nothing happened. So if a white hole would be reality then there would be two universes in two different times totally seperated through time. But its all just theory we lack the physics to describe what happens really. And even if true you couldnt pass, on the other side new physical laws would be created and you cant survive a big bang. A singularity cant be passed.

Yep, that's a common misconception and one you obviously emphasized for good reason. About the stuff above that, I just can't stomach it, even though everything you say seems fair and correct to me.

No problem, I honestly didnt expect someone calling me out so I was sloppy here.

Seeing as we're probably the only two physicists on here and (oddly enough) you agree about my sentiment towards atheists, I'd rather apologize for giving you the impression that I'm trying to make a fool out of you, as this was not my intention. I was in the mood for giving you the 3rd degree though I think that's partly due to my recent tendancy to discard our observational sciences for the more abstract and elegant mathematical models

Lately all the nuclear selection rules have been a major disappointment to me - It's like studying engineering. After studying the absolute beauty of Hillbert spaces and trying to wrap my mind around the Topological structure of Quantum Field Theory I have become convinced that our fundamental assumption: 'Observable  <=> Real Eigenstate' leaves more questions than answers. It's as if the mathematical structure was ripped out of the hands of the Mathematicians and glued together for the sake of being practical. The non-real solutions and the subspace their wave-functions represent must be explored to the fullest, yet all the funding and brain-power has sailed to less elegent waters. At least the string-theorists are allowed their fun - somewhat.

With regards to the intrinsic brightness issue, I wanted to get to (wiki again): '

'Since the sun's luminosity is the standard, comparing these parameters with the sun's apparent magnitude and distance is the easiest way to remember how to convert between them.''

Now this is something I happen to really have a problem with. I'd rather you not go into detail here, we can save it for another day - as I know the actual correlation and propagation of error is not something I can really take in without pen in hand. Also, it'll probably be long and complicated and derail this thread even more. I'd like to go through that model at some point though, so feel free to advise a book on the 'structure of cosmological models' that does the trick.

I was under the impression that their was an alternative theory that the black hole just spits up all the matter again when it dies. The problem with that (and certainly related to your excellent description of venturing into a black hole) is the live muuuuuuch longer than the current estimated age of the universe. We don't have a chance in hell of ever spotting anything like that.

SO the experiment will never happen, and the fact has to be deduced from theory and incremental experiments.

Was I wrong?

As for the singularity that pops up in these theories - That's a fundamental problem we are not even close to solving. It seems beyond human grasp at present.

@Maverick

BTW, seeing as there's a 50/50 chance that the SKA will be built in my country you'll probably get a job offer here soon

@Netyaroze Ahh that makes sense, thanks.

Another question I have is with dark energy. It seems it was introduced to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe. The acceleration is deduced by measuring distances to a certain type of supernova, at different points in the past, that are considered to always occur at the same color and brightness.
How can we be sure of that? Is it possible that in the distant past these supernova might have been slightly different?
Is it possible that the expansion of the universe isn't accelerating after all, that it's an optical illusion?
Maybe constants changing over time is an even worse explanation then dark energy?