On 9 March 2014 18:51, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 3/8/2014 9:36 PM, LizR wrote: > > 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. > > > Well sure, it seems like the simplest choice *now*, but for thirty > millenia or so before Newton, Carnot, Gibbs, Boltzman, et al, it was > *obvious* that everything on Earth tended to run down and come to rest, > *its natural state*. > > In other words, science has made progress.
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