On Sat, Jun 7, 2025 at 1:52 AM Alan Grayson <agrayson2...@gmail.com> wrote:
*>> The conservation of energy is not a statement about pure mathematics or >> logic, it is a statement about the physical world, so it's not surprising >> that historically its derivation has come from observation and >> experimentation. Nobody has ever been able to derive the conservation of >> energy from logic alone, and I very much doubt anybody ever will. In fact >> nobody has ever been able to derive ANY physical law from mathematics >> alone, unless you want to say that it's a physical law that 2 rocks plus >> another 2 rocks is equal to 4 rocks. * > > > > *> You're mistaken. Try this, by > Feynman, > https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/8-01sc-classical-mechanics-fall-2016/mit8_01scs22_chapter14.pdf > <https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/8-01sc-classical-mechanics-fall-2016/mit8_01scs22_chapter14.pdf>If > you look, you'll see that Feynman shows that in classical mechanics, energy > is conserved on a closed loop. He proves many other things about energy > conservation in that link.* *NO! Feynman proved IF you assume that a system obeys the Principle Of Least Action AND you assume that the system has Time-translation invariance THEN, because of Noether's theorem, the system must obey the law of Conservation Of Energy. But both the Principle Of Least Action and Time-Translation Invariance are observations, NOT logical necessities. I can imagine a universe with different physics in which neither the Principle Of Least Action nor Time Translation Invariance are true, but I can't imagine a universe that contained a largest prime number. * *John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* 753 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1Pc%3Dk6n%3D8Hkth86rv17U%2Bwy%3Dxh3Te8feJg-6%3Di5F9snQ%40mail.gmail.com.
