Gravity.

When my alarm goes off at 6 a.m., I'm greeted by the station ID for a Colorado Public Radio station. It's followed by a daily feature called Space Crap or Space Quest or something like that. It's one to two minutes (I can never tell on account of my undeniable grogginess) of virtually useless astronomical information.

Today's Space Crap was about how we're finally going to figure out if Einstein was right in saying that gravity worked in the same way throughout the universe. Some scientists in New Mexico are going to do this by shooting laser beams at the moon. This will somehow enable them to measure the distance between the Earth and the moon to the millimeter.

First, that's crazy go nuts. A distance that takes astronauts days at very high speeds is going to be measured to the millimeter? Is that really possible? Are we sure that this is a measurement that doesn't constantly change with, say, the elevation of the measurer on Earth, or season, or the fact that the moon will kill us all someday?

Second, I have absolutely no idea how this is supposed to test the universality of gravity. They didn't really explain that in great detail, probably because 1. it's a short program and they just don't have the time, and 2. we're all idiots who wouldn't get it anyway. Just trust them. But they did say this: "If [they find that Einstein was wrong], scientists will spend the next few years coming up with a better theory of gravity." Ah, science. Is there anything you can't solve, given a few years? Truly perfection will be achieved in my lifetime.

Third, I strongly feel that it's about time people started shooting lasers at the moon. It's one step closer to blowing that blasted sun out of the sky.