On 9 March 2014 16:52, Russell Standish <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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. > This seems to fall foul of David Deutsch's analysis of the bleen/grue theory (I think it's called). That is, it's positing an unnecessary complication apparently simply for the sake of it. A theory with energy conserved isn't *just* a human choice, it's also the simplest choice available. Or at least it appears to be. Surely this is a constraint we normally use (Occam) ? And the simplest and most reasonable assumption is that that is how the universe actually works, although admittedly this is a metaphysical assumption. -- 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.
