I never got the "exercise high" and I wish I did. :(

Dark matter doesn't participate in the electromagnetic interaction, so it doesn't interact with light. Everything interacts with gravity because it's the curvature of space.

It's kind of the other way around: what we experience as gravity is the effect stress-energy has on time (and space, a little bit). Massive objects curve your future toward themselves.

It's not that contrived, unless General Relativity is contrived. It was baked in to that before anybody even knew it was a thing.

I mean, every time you accelerate, particles seem to emit from empty space.

I guess my question is how do we know what we are observing is what is happening and is not being skewed by another variable even a neurological/psychological/philosophical feature?

We don't! Physics doesn't really deal with ontological questions like "what is it really?" It's all predictive models.

So, once again, the US has fucked the Iranian moderate faction?

"Burns up" doesn't mean "goes away", just "has chemistry happen to it."

Fellowship was alright, but everything after definitely suffered from "I'm the director! I know better than the author!" in a big way. The less said about the Hobbit movies, the better.

I wish Bakshi had been able to finish the series. :(

So now we're automating that whole "person surrounds themselves with sycophantic yes-men until their grip on reality finally slips" thing.

Sure, if you want to kick photosynthesis (and like, farming) in the nuts.

Not so much being absorbed and re-emitted (that would be scattering) but a weird thing where the light's electromagnetic fields get tangled up in the material's electrons' electromagnetic fields, leading to quasiparticles that have an effective mass (and thus a speed c). Shit's weird.