Ask a physicist anything.

The Higgs boson is a particle that gives objects mass. Particles exist in space, and space is filled with Higgs bosons. When they move through this field of Higgs bosons, they are attracted to certain particles and slow them down. We see this as mass.

Basically, the standard model for particle physics has been proven right at every turn, but it predicts that a Higgs boson should exist. If it does, then yay! the standard model is proven once more. If it doesn't, then yay! we know there is something fundamentally wrong with our picture of particles.

The LHC can accelerate particles to such a speed that, when they collide, the Higgs boson should become visable (in some esoteric form). There's a lot of other stuff the LHC will do, but the Higgs boson is essentially it's primary role.

Yes, though I'm not thrilled about the colloquial terminology going on; I feel you're going to lead me into a semantic trap .

Because a fly doesn't exert 13,000 Newtons on a truck . Flies, while fast, are extremely light, so the force exerted on a truck is tiny. Flies weigh about 12mg, so the force exerted when a fly hits a truck is about a millinewton. One Newton is about the force an apple exerts on your hand when you hold it, so a fly hitting a truck is hardly anything. Coupled with the facts that a) such a tiny force on such a heavy truck would yield an even tinier deceleration, and b) a truck has a big machine to accelerate it, you won't see any change when a fly hits it.

Basically, the fly's too small to do anything noticeable.

I've never heard of that, and I'd be surprised it's true. It seems a waste of components, space, and thrust, for such a superficial effect.

 

Hah, I know you too well. 'Course, this could be used as proof that Job 40:15-16 is allegorical, or that the Behemoth was in fact a placental mammal, or that "navel of his belly" refers to the middle where the navel would be had he had one.

That's... wow. I had no idea those things existed. Clever invention, if utterly pointless .

Pretty much all of it's reliable, though we've discovered a few more elements on the periodic table.

I know the flak I'll get for citing it, but I'm a massive fan of Wikipedia. Also, if you want the cutting edge, PubMed is really good.

However, without a doubt, the Britney Spears website is the best source of physics info.

Learning how things work, why they do what they do, and not what they don't. It was a real thrill when I finally sussed out how diodes work. Better than crack .

It's called a Newton because Isaac Newton was the guy to put together the idea of a 'force'. I think it's just a coincidence that an apple is about 1N

When a star reaches the end of its life, it can't fuse elements as well as it used to, so gravity begins to overcome the internal pressure. This causes it to collapse.
However, as it collapses, the internal temperature and pressure rockets, which makes the star suddenly able to fuse even the heavy elements (normally, if can only fuse the lightest elements, H, He, Li, etc), which massively increases its energy output. It's this energy that causes the outer layers to suddenly blow away, and it's also the energy that we see here on Earth.
But once that's happened, the inner core is no longer under enough pressure to undergo fusion, so it starts to collapse again under gravity. This is when the remaining, exposed, inner core can turn into a black hole (or something else).

A supermassive black hole. Basically, a black hole that's... big.

Black holes aren't that bright - that's why they're black holes . What radiation they do emit is paltry at best. That said, entire stars are sucked into the middle of the galaxy because of the black hole, which is why the middle of a galaxy looks so bright:

It's actually hotter in the middle. The surface is about 10,000 K, but the middle is millions of Kelvin. Maybe you're thinking of the Earth, with it's gooey centre?

It'd be a quirk of gravity. Two large masses moving through space, minding their own business, and they happen to come near each other. Gravity makes them double back, and they've been orbiting each other ever since.

We honestly don't know. There are all sorts of exotic theories, but I'm hedging my bets till we're more certain.

No, because we exist, and we count as somethingness.

 

Space isn't a true vacuum, mainly because of vacuum energy itself. A sea of virtual particles continually pop into and out of existence, so even the 'vacuum' of space isn't really much of a vacuum at all.

The vacuum, such that it is, exists anywhere that something else does not. That said, even in the deepest reaches of space, there's a very low-density plasma permeating through.

Almost certainly. The results of COBE show thermal fluctuations in space, which I believe are a result of quantum fluctuations when the universe was a wee nipper:

 

The truth is there's not that much of it around. It's so old and so redshifted, that it's a paltry 2.3 Kelvin. The light we look at when do things like COBE, is light that originated when the universe was very young. It's just taken it 13.5 billion years to reach us. There's light that originated at the same time, but it has still to reach us; that's why we can look up at any time we like and still see this primordial EM field.

There is, of course, some deflection, since space isn't a perfect vacuum. A cool image I came across once showed you the actual path a beam of light takes:



Another cool image is a (rather stylised) map of how dark matter is distributed:



Science is so sexy.