Bill, Thanks for this thread and the article, I'm enjoying it a great deal. And thanks to Stewart for the link to Dr. Park's daily column at APS. I can see I'm going to like this author. Among his archives I found the following.

2. MISSILE DEFENSE: PENTAGON SEEKS WAIVER FROM REQUIRED TESTING.
In April 2000, the APS Council stated: "The United States should not make a deployment decision relative to the planned National Missile Defense system unless that system is shown – through analysis and intercept tests – to be effective against the types of offensive countermeasures that an attacker could reasonably be expected to deploy with its long-range missiles." In fact, a law designed to prevent deployment of weapon systems that don't work was passed in 1983 after Ronald Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative. Now the Bush administration is proposing to exempt the Pentagon's controversial missile defense from testing. The request is in the 2004 budget. I called my friend Puff Panegyric at the Missile Defense Agency. "You've got to admit the law makes sense," I said. "Maybe it did in 1983," Puff sneered, "but North Korea has made the world a more dangerous place. We don't have the luxury of waiting until things work. There are leaders of some countries who would like nothing better than to start a war." "I see your point Puff."

And, just to be overly pedantic, Bill, I think it was the White Queen in “Through the Looking Glass” who said, “…I often believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

LH, I like your idea of personality types. I still recall the virtual rage in which Carl Sagan attacked the work of Velikovsky when most scientists simply ignored it. Sagan devoted most of a “Cosmos” episode to debunking a guy most people at that time had completely forgotten.

As far as “proving” things we can't experientially verify goes, mainstream physicists and cosmologists have long ago moved beyond theories that would seem like “common sense” to a layman. It is commonly accepted by scientists that the entire universe was either a singularity—having no dimension whatever—or had a combined size smaller than a single proton. Every atom and particle that is discovered seems to be largely empty save for a few much smaller particles that, in turn, are largely empty save for a few tiny particles. If I remember correctly, the latest “indivisible” particle, a superstring, is a two dimensional abstraction having no mass.

“ ‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice.”

      - Mark