The so-called "Laws" of Nature...
@ChaoticBeauty (263)
United States
September 8, 2009 9:34am CST
Consider this: you see an apple fall from the tree, and automatically, you think, 'There's the Law of Gravity at work'...
Before the late 1600's, prior to the public introduction of Isaac Newton's defined Law of Gravity, basically nothing was known, or at least thought about.
Albert Einstein's theory of E=mCC, expounding on the then-believed notion that the speed of light was a constant, has since been turned inside out as well, as we now know that light (in a vacuum) can be slowed nearly to a stop!
Here's my thoughts...these so called "Laws of Nature" were defined long ago, and we are developing sciences and ideals that turn them upside down. What if, in another 300-400 years, we find these laws can be broken? Are the Laws of Nature as we know them, based solely on the relative knowledge of man?
What are your thoughts?
Dive Deep!
2 responses
@GADHISUNU (2162)
• India
8 Sep 09
Discovery of a New Law of Nature does not necessarily mean that we have broken any Law of Nature, but we have broken our undersatnding of that law on that day. Aristotle believed(speculation) that the speed of light was infinite. It was Galileo, who was convinced that light had a finite velocity, though his simplistic experiment did not corroborate his hypothesis. Thus our learning of the Laws of Nature is limited by our capacity to apply our enhanced senses to natural phenomena.
Right I agree with you that knowledge obtained by our senses is relative, in that there is always a limitation placed by our means of measurement. You might think of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, that gave some numerical measure to that uncertainty at least in respect of two important physical variables viz., Poition and Momentum.
But the error or the impossibility of direct study that I am talking of is due to the involvement of a mass of cells working like a camera-- the human eye-- being an instrument in observing, say the action of itself aided by another "enhanced" eye like an Electron Microscope studying another eye in action..Is it possible to configure such an experiment?
IOW is it possible to design a self-observing experiment/instrument? It is only then that the endpoint of a search for the Laws of Nature is in sight. Till such time what we discover as Laws of Nature are mere approximations to the real thing, and is alway gonna be elusive.
