@mcc Recently learned that Einstein was pretty bearish on black holes also. In that case, it was because (IIUC) his process was often "Think about a possible model for how the universe works, think through the consequences of that model, test those consequences against reality..." And when he applied that reasoning to the gravitational singularities in the math he went "But that would imply there would be these... holes in space. We've been looking for thousands of years and we don't see any holes; where are all the holes?"

I can't remember if he lived long enough for astronomers to get back to him with "Well now that we know we should be looking for 'wild bullshit happening around nothing'... We turned our telescopes towards that and UH-OH!"

@mcc Yes, I love this.

This is the thing I sometimes think is missing from a lot of science education--- We can get so hung up on having students memorize explanations for things that we can forget that the whole point of the explanations is that there are real phenomenon that make no intuitive sense whatsoever and the explanations are the best we can do with unifying all these otherwise disparate, random, mad world behaviors into something approaching a human-shaped story.

Time dilation sounds like nonsense idea a person made up to troll you until you find out the history of people conducting experiments to figure out the speed of light and getting baffled by the observation that the damn thing doesn't change!

@ianholmes @mcc @BillyGlennHoya Couldn't tell you; I haven't followed Pokémon since Red and Blue.

@BillyGlennHoya @mcc these guys don't get enough credit for asking some very fair questions.

I hear that lyric and I'm reminded of the story Richard Feynman would tell about how he got into physics because he had questions about how a ball in his little red wagon worked that his dad couldn't answer... And after years of working in the field he came back to his dad with an explanation of momentum and inertia and his dad hit him with something to the effect of "Sounds like you just gave names to the stuff we don't know; you didn't actually explain it."