But we're not getting the money back in science. If the proposal was to cut JWST and take a ~billion dollars and add it to NASA grant-funded science or to NSF, then I'd love to have that conversation. But just cutting JWST just cuts the science.

Indeed. People should start asking the same question about the energy of manufacture vs. lifetime energy consumption of dining tables. Then they would realize they're not asking the right question.

Doing something remotely productive increases your self-esteem.

The payload is suspended from the balloon and is essentially a pendulum. Any buffeting or motion takes a while to damp down. Just the simple motion of the balloon itself might be enough (I don't know the damping function well enough to figure out what frequencies and amplitudes of forcing functions are relevant).

In the Big Bang theory, the Universe did not start out as an extremely compact volume. The theory states that it started at an infinite density and temperature. If the Universe is infinite, then it was also quite possibly infinite at the beginning. As other posters have mentioned, it's also the case that spacetime is allowed to expand faster than the speed of light.

My understanding of general relativity, special relativity, and cosmological expansion are perfectly fine. But my ability to explain things clearly and unambiguously are probably more suspect. I was trying to explain why there were perfectly reasonable reasons to talk about several different definitions of distance.
"In our frame of reference, it really currently is 13.2 billion light years away"
We have to precisely define "currently" and "away"? There are several reasonable and different definitions for each of those. What would you like to mean by those words? Once we define that, then we can calculate whatever distance is the appropriate one for those definitions.

It's not really about preferred frame of reference, it's the different meanings of distance that arise in general relativity. In this case there are two meanings being discussed:
1) How long has that photon been traveling to get to Earth ("light travel time")? 13.2 billion years
2) How far away is that galaxy right now ("proper distance"). I.e., if each galaxy had a clock that counted seconds since the Big Bang and could instantaneously extend a long ruler to the other galaxy and the ruler was sent and received at the same time has measured by those clocks, how long would that ruler be? 32 billion light years

There are other definitions, and you can make this arbitrarily more complicated by considering moving reference frames.

I interpreted the one of the poster's most immediate concerns is the students in the classroom talking to each other their networked devices.

Upholds the one tenet of press releases about science: The extreme bias toward "revolutionary" things means an extreme bias toward reporting about the things least likely to be true.

Discoveries are observations. Most discoveries are near opposition. It's only for special reasons that some surveys have been looking in other directions: either things like WISE that are in the infrared and so have special restrictions about where they can point, or targeted searches for near-Earth objects. In you click on the video you can read all about it in the caption. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_d-gs0WoUw

Anything that absorbs also emits. When we (IAAA) say "dark" matter, we mean matter that does not interact at all with photons. We've scanned much of the electromagnetic spectrum and do not see it.