On 3 March 2014 08:33, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > > I don't think Tegmark appreciates how much the "laws of physics" depend on > our demands that the "laws" be invariant, e.g. conservation of energy is a > consequence of requiring the lagrangian to be time-translation invariant. >
That isn't a demand, it's an observation. (Made by Emmy Noether, IIRC.) > See Vic Stenger's "The Comprehensible Cosmos" for full development of the > idea that all of physics can be seen this way. So the "laws" are the way > they are because we make them up to fit the observations and we only want > to make them up in certain ways that make them useful for prediction and > explanation. > So are you saying that the conservation of energy is no more fundamental to physics than the shape of Africa? Sorry, I don't quite follow what you're saying here (it seems either trivially correct or wrong but I can't tell which!) -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
