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Science is an exacting, meticulous process of continuously discovering that most of what we think we know about the universe is wrong, discarding it, and replacing it with something incrementally closer to the truth as measured by how much of the universe it manages to successfully and self-consistently explain.
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What if there is no "Truth-with-a-capital-T"?
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"Law" in science just means "Rule of thumb", in general.
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Perfection is the enemy of 'good enough'.
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Or not.
Thank you Mr. Webster, I'll stick with the real dictionary.
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I'm certain you could do better, so I'm only giving you 5/10.
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I'm freezing this thread before it gets any pettier. Play nice, please.
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Check this out, it's a great little piece on "open mindedness" and how purveyors of woo use it to promote closed-mindedness.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI&feature=player_embedded
(part 1)
Science tends to declare something a "law" when it is believed that a specific formula has been found which completely describes the behavior of a substance, an object, or a system of objects, under any conditions. Examples include Newton's laws of motion, to which we have found no exceptions; Newton's law of universal gravitation; Boyle's ideal gas law; or the law of conservation of parity.
But wait! No gases actually obey Boyle's law perfectly. Well, true ... that's because they aren't perfect ideal gases. This is something that's been understood for a long time. Only rather more recently did we learn why there can be no such thing as a perfect gas ... we have approximations to ideal gases, and they approximately obey Boyle's Law, with greater or lesser degrees of fidelity depending on their exact physical properties — enough so that we can have good confidence in saying that an actual ideal gas would follow Boyle's Law perfectly. And more recently, we've found that certain exotic states of matter actually approach ideal gases more closely than anything we normally encounter in the everyday material world, and they do indeed obey Boyle's Law to astounding degrees of precision.
Newton's laws of motion still have no exceptions known to us, in this universe.
Newton's law of universal gravitation, though? ... Well, almost 30 years ago now, Mordehai Milgrom observed that certain anomalies found in astronomical observations could be explained if we speculated that gravity does not behave precisely as Newton thought it did. More specifically, he proposed that the anomalies could be explained if gravity were very slightly stronger at extremely low accelerations than Newton's law said it should be. This theory came to be known as Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND.
But MOND was inconsistent with relativity. (Of course, classical Einsteinian relativity is inconsistent with quantum mechanics ... But I digress.) This was a problem. Also, Milgrom proposed no physical mechanism to explain why it should be so; he merely pointed out that if it were so, it would explain the observations.
So another group of researchers, seeking to make MOND compatible with relativity, started playing around the idea. Their basic idea was, "What if gravity is more complex than we realize?" And what they came up with was something they called TeVeS, for tensor-vector-scalar gravity. It proposes that there are multiple components to gravity, of which only one component is significant and observable at everyday scales. Unlike MOND, it is consistent with relativity. But like MOND, it is still only descriptive, not prescriptive; and like MOND, it cannot explain all of our observations.
At the same time, another school of thought was studying the problem from the basis of what it would take to explain the questioned observations on the assumption that Newtonian gravity is both correct and complete. This led into what's become known as the cold-dark-matter theory. CDM has its problems too, though; so far, to make the math work, it's been necessary for CDM theorists to invent a new, so far unobserved kind of matter (the dark matter of the name) making up as much as three quarters of the mass of the universe, necessary to account for the observed velocities of starts orbiting galaxies; a new kind of energy referred to as dark energy, required to account for expansion of the universe in the presence of all that dark matter; and possibly even a fifth basic force in the universe. While widely believed, this theory has its flaws and its things it cannot explain, too, among them the ever-increasing complexity that seems to be required to make the math work in every case.
(part 2)
So, state of Newton's law? Still hanging in there, but it may be showing cracks.
Well, how about conservation of parity?
Oops. That one went totally out of the window in 1956, when experiments at NIST proved that parity was not conserved in beta decay of cobalt-60 nucleii. (http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Parity/expt.html) Junking conservation of parity actually laid the way for making a heck of a lot of physics a lot more consistent, and allowed a lot of major new work.
So, yeah. There will always be rigid thinkers who regard anything called a law as inviolable. But I think for every scientist who assumes without question that something must be incorrect or experimental error because it appears to violate what's believed to be a known physical law, there's another who thinks "How can I explain this phenomenon in a physically consistent way without violating this law?", and another who asks, "What if this law isn't entirely correct, or is actually wrong?"
I'd go so far as to suggest that these kind of questions are very much harder to ask if there is not an existing framework of believed-correct laws. If you have no physical laws that everything is believed to obey, then something that behaves differently than you've hitherto seen is just something that behaves differently. But if you have a law that says it shouldn't, then sooner or later, some scientist is going to look at it, see that it appears not to obey one or another law, and think "Huh, that's funny. I wonder what's going on there...?"
And that's how the majority of the most dramatic and interesting new discoveries happen. Someone, somewhere, says "Huh, that's funny..."
The most true statement I have heard
Laws are simply a hypothesis that has not been challenged successfully by new discoveries in a very long time. It doesn't make the law correct, but it does give it some staying power.
I would argue that an ideal standard, that is never met, is far better for science than an overly complex explanation and model. Something that is simpler is much easier to extrapolate from, providing predictions and directing experimental scientists in what to look for. (Lots of opportunities for a, "That's interesting..." moment.) Something that provides a great mathematical explanation, that is too complex to predict from, is useless to science. My favorite quote along those lines,
Re: (part 1)
I'm reminded of the case of Roman numeral multiplication & division - which was broken when I was in high school in 1980. By a *high school student*.
Common theory always said that Roman numerals were a limited system because to multiply & divide them was nearly impossible. It was a 16 year old high school student who went home thinking "that's crazy - how could you build such a strong civilization with a limited mathematical system?" and solved the problem. Overnight. Because he refused to believe it was impossible. Something that mathematicians for centuries had been saying was "true."
He went in and showed the system to his math teacher - who didn't believe him at first. Because "everyone knows it can't be done." The math teacher had to take it to his college professor/mentor to get the article co-published in American Mathematics Monthly before anyone would take it seriously.
The reason I know? MY high school math teacher went to undergrad school with the student's teacher & studied under James Kennedy - and I learned it the semester it came out in AMM.
The word "law" implies that something can't be broken. Whether or not you believe that all scientific "laws" are only in effect until proven otherwise? You still make assumptions in your hypotheses. That's where the problem lies.
Re: (part 1)
(Well, actually, I should qualify that. No exception to Newton's laws has been shown, in the Newtonian frame. Einstein and Lorentz, among others, showed that Newton's laws do not apply, unmodified, in other frames of reference. The laws of thermodynamics have still proven unassailable to date, in any reference frame; most recently, even black holes have been found to obey thermodynamics, in that it has been shown that they do not in fact destroy information about what they consume.)
Your example of multiplying Roman numerals does not strike me as the counter-example you appear to think it is. In the first place, "Things everyone knows" and "Laws of science|mathematics" are not the same thing. Everyone "knew" that heavier-than-air machines could not fly, until the Wright Brothers did it. In the 1700s, it was common "knowledge" that the human body could not long survive the terrible stresses of speeds in excess of twenty-five miles per hour. And from Greco-Roman times until the Renaissance, everyone "knew" that there were only four elements — earth, air, fire, and water. But hah! Becher proved that old canard false in 1667, when he discovered phlogiston.
In the second place, is the crucial fact here that he was the first since perhaps mediaeval times to say "This doesn't make sense, the Romans couldn't have done what they did without multiplication and division", or was he simply the first person since people started saying that to not only say it, but also have both the necessary mathematical tools at his disposal and the key insight that enabled him to rediscover how to do it?
Re: (part 1)
I brought up the example to point out that starting out from the point that your mental perception is "well that can't be done" is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Do I think Newton's Laws will "be broken"? Not by anyone who perceives them as laws. Do I believe they are what's the word you used "unassailable"? No. My own life-experience has shown me otherwise... it's a locked entry, but I'll link it for you so you know part of why I'm saying what I am http://yndy.livejournal.com/610339.html
The whole point of what I am replying with is that one's ontology forms not just one's perceptions of the universe, but one's ability to perceive differently.
Examining the language is crucial.
Law (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/law)
"invariable" and "rule" are both inflexible terms.
Here's a different example that may illustrate what I'm trying to point out to you about your ontological map of the universe. Go look up the verb "sex" in any dictionary. Usually you'll get rerouted to sexual intercourse or coitus... despite the fact that recent years have seen a movement toward non-gender specific sex, the entries still show "esp. between a man and a woman" or "esp. inserting penis into a vagina". For literally decades (centuries?) anything that didn't include one of each gender was not defined as sex. So what exactly were gay men and lesbians engaging in?
How we as a society perceive words (no, not the individual 'well I define it thusly even tho that's not it's accepted definition' argument) limits us in how we perceive the universe - and also limits us into areas of inquiry.
"But why would we doubt that? No one has ever found a way around it...yet"
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Did I go into the wrong profession!?
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gah.