Looks like they did a lot of research to narrow down that Energy secretary short list. Arnie the actor, Colin the military guy (or the football player?) or a Nobel prize winning energy scientist. I dunno, my my gut feeling is to go with the Nobel prize scientist, but then I don't have much political savvy...

By who? You can't just throw out some far fetched idea like that without any reference. I think that you may have misunderstood something that you have read elsewhere. Could you point me to your source? Or your dealer :)

Indeed it does; it is called Gravitational lensing

You're not going to be happy with the new generation of telescopes then. First of all there's the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). What could be bigger than that? Wait for it ... the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL) of course!

Black holes do have a solid foundation in theory, and we can observe the gravitational effects they have on their neighbours. However, as far as I know, Hawking radiation is the only way to detect them directly and I don't think that this has been observed.

The authors of this article are showing observational evidence for a supermassive (millions of solar masses) black hole in the centre of our Galaxy - something that was thought to be at the centre of many galaxies but was still in open question. The observations made during this study have shown that our Galaxy has one, using techniques that are not an option for galaxies further away, thus giving us the best evidence that supermassive black holes exist.

Here is the press release from ESO

I'm not saying it shouldn't be done. I guess my point is that the Millenium Bridge is so simple by comparison, yet it needed ~2 years of repairs after opening because of a wobble. People could have been thrown into the Thames, but no big deal, I guess. The space elevator, however, seems so much more prone to failure and with much bigger consequences.

The engineering required for this elevator is mind boggling. After witnessing the amount of time and effort that went into a small suspension bridge spanning the river Thames in London (The Millenium Bridge), the mere idea of this elevator scares the shit out of me.

We would need monumentally large telescopes for this. The largest optical telescope on earth, the Keck, has a diameter of 10m. Using the Rayleigh Criterion, we can calculate the minimum resolvable detail at a given distance. For example, we can resolve details on the surface of the moon (in the visible) that are around ~20 meters across. If you want to resolve an apple falling on somebodies head you need ~10 cm resolution. So to see this happening on the moon we would need a telescope with a primary mirror ~ 2.6 km across. To see the same thing echoed back from a dust cloud near the closest star to our sun (4 ly * 2), you would need a telescope with a primary ~ 7e+10 m across or around half the distance between the earth and the sun. Not to mention that the signal would be very weak and completely lost in noise.