[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by Zapmeister:

quote:

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Originally posted by Jack Simth:
It is a very extravagant claim to say that the laws of physics do not apply past a certain point. Do you have any proof of this?

When you start talking about proof, you're no longer doing science. The Theory of the Big Bang is just that, a theory. No-one has proof that the Universe started that way, even though it does do a good job of explaining the isotropic background microwave radiation.

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I might point out that the only reason I asked for proof was because the person I had been actively debating at the time had just gone on a bit of a tirade about proof being needed for extravagant claims. I suppose I should have been clearer that I was mostly just pointing out that my opponent was slipping a bit of a double-standard into his arguments. I might also point out that the second question, immediately following the segment you quote, was considerably less strict - asking for an observed instance of a violation of the apparently constant laws his theory of the universe required as variable.

Originally posted by Zapmeister:

I thought we were talking about the state of mainstream contemporary scientific thinking here, which definitely doesn't support your theory.

Of course, having the modern, apparently unbreakable laws of physics not apply past a certain point is a variation on one of the four possibilies of the logical proof I listed, isn't it? After all, if the laws didn't apply once, under one set of conditions, it's almost certainly theoretically possible for a similar state of affairs to be manufactured on some scale, and thus to break them again, and so either conservation or entropy (inclusive use of or) can be broken (and thus one/both of those two laws aren't correct under their current form), no?

I notice nobody seems to be attacking an itermediary step in my proof without suggesting one of the possible outs from the proof-by-contradiction I listed earlier - people seem to just be picking one of the possible four, arbitrarily assigning it to what I mean and attacking it. A "straw man" approach.

I suppose there are other outs from that proof - induction isn't valid, say; it never has been logically proven (it's been off-the-cuff proven in a "how could it not be true" kind of way, and it has never been logically disproven, but to the best of my knoweledge, induction has never been logically, rigorously proven). Or perhaps logic simply isn't valid when discussing ultimate origins. Or perhaps there is an infinite amount of energy; entropy only really applies to closed systems; in an infinite-energy system, you can push some energy to a lower-order state and then throw it away into the distance to maintain a higher-order state on the energy that is important to you (Oh, wait - that would be a variation on entropy doesn't work). Or perhaps there are an infinite number of possible universes - in which case it is reasonable for us to live in one with probability 0 - after all, we only live in 1, and one possability of infinity has probability k*1/infinity = 0 for some defined k, doesn't it (oh, wait - I listed a variation on that one - although specifing time rather than universe - close enough to count as a variation). Or perhaps it's only possible for us to exist on the measureable entropy/some amount of order slice of history's infinitive, and so we on a probability 0 slice of time because that's the only slice of time we can exist on (of course, the slice of time itself still has probability 0...).

Of course, nobody's arguing on any of those bases.

Edit: fixed quote formatting

[ July 30, 2004, 02:22: Message edited by: Jack Simth ]