On Sat, Mar 08, 2014 at 05:10:25AM -0800, Edgar L. Owen wrote: > Russell, > > You actually claim that the conservation of energy and time invariance > depend on "how humans see the world"? > > If so I disagree, > > Edgar >
Yes. See Noether's theorem, and particularly Victor Stenger's discussion thereof, which is far better than anything I've written on it. Brent has posted quite a bit on this. In summary, conservation of energy is due to the time invariance of our physical theories, which is a constraint we have chosen for our theories. We could choose a non-time invariant theory, and such a theory would not have an energy conservation law. It may be a rather silly thing to do, but just like one can use Ptolemy's epicylce theory to compute the positions of the planets, it is certainly possible. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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/d/optout.
