On 3/8/2014 9:53 PM, LizR wrote:
On 9 March 2014 18:51, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 3/8/2014 9:36 PM, LizR wrote:On 9 March 2014 16:52, Russell Standish <[email protected] <mailto:[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.
Just don't get too cocky. Brent -- 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.
