Universe probably is most unsolved thing, and don't want listen strange but anyone have any information if any physics, chemistry or any other science laws what work for us for 10's of years (till modern times) as them are is edited/updated for Universe? If not, isn't science then pretty immune about changed/updates in things what work for long time? Hmm... i just thinking about that we have explored about 4% of universe... do you think there is probability that in other universe regions is other physics laws then we have here?

Hope i write question in way it was mean to be. If anyone have more about this, link to more information about it can be great.

Thanks.

The universe is an incredibly mysterious place; we've hardly even formulated a fraction of the question we could ask about it and of those t hat we have formulated we've answered only a fraction of them.

This may sound like a strange question, but does anyone have any examples of laws (physics, chemistry, or any other scientific laws) that seem to hold for many years but then are updated as a result of new findings in the universe? If not, does that mean that science is immune to change?

I was just thinking that we have explored such a small portion of the universe; does it exist in such a way that other parts of the universe would have different universal laws than we have here? If so, which kinds? Which would be immune to change?

Hope this came across the way it was intended to. If anyone has any information they could share with me, that would be great.

Thanks

Probably better formation overall Pretty new here, English not first language, so having some problems to make clear questions in English about silence.

Is there a good reason why the laws of physics should hold uniformly throughout the Universe?

All swans we have seen are white.

Concluding from this that all swans are white is an example of inductive reasoning, right? Outside math, I never fully understood the term.

Yes. Very useful in real life. It is generally how we learn.

Every time you have dropped something, it has fallen towards the ground. Odds are, you probably believe, next time you drop something it will fall towards the ground.

How we learn what?

Is "if it fell yesterday then it will fall today" a law of physics, or logical consequence of such?

How to get around in the world, how to act, what to expect.

That bread is filling. That if you feel a rumble in your tummy you should probably head towards the bathroom. That when the wife says, "dinner time" there is probably dinner. That when she says "we need to talk" there is some sort of bad conversation about to happen.

Learning through experience, basically.

Neither. When something happens 99 times in a row, you naturally believe it will happen the 100th time. It is how your brain works. It is a nice survival skill to notice patterns.

Can I take it for granted that you believe that if you drop a ball right now, it will go down? Did you require a physics class to learn that as a child?

It might be confusing if we don't distinguish between "what happens if you drop it right now" and "what happens every time you drop it".

You may take it for granted that I believe it goes down every time you drop it.

You say that physics can't prove this belief, so why would it be taught in a physics class? As an example of something which might be disproved?

helium balloons though.

Cause then they wouldn't be laws? Outcomes might be very different but that's because of different variables, not because of different physics.

So when a person sees a roulette wheel for the first time in their lives and it hits black 3 times in a row, then naturally, they should conclude the 4th spin will hit black as well?

I'm being a bit ridiculous here with my example but it is obvious to me that while "all swans are white because all swans we have seen are white" is the best way we have figured out to understand things and make optimal choices in our lives we are still just a bunch of idiots (some of which who think they are smarter because they spend more time and have more intricate methods of guessing truths).

I don't think this is a ridiculous example.

Perhaps not conclude, but think it more likely to hit black. I'm not clear exactly how probability fits in here, but Brian introduced that idea so maybe he can elaborate.

Well yes it makes it easier to model and understand.

And uniformly is an extremely provocative and subjective word here. The laws of physics can and will be updated to comply with any new information as it becomes available.

And everyone I assume black swans were Vael's point.

Assuming the translation was accurate, what tends to really happen is that we have a certain scientific model for something that seems to work. But then it's discovered to either only work sometimes, or just be an approximation, and then we find a better model. So science does change and update, but I don't know that we'd call the first model wrong, it was just not as accurate as what we have now.

I like Isaac Asimov's take on this: The Relativity of Wrong

Unless they have other information, yes. Perhaps they have rolled dice or played a board game with a spinner. Perhaps they have learned in the past that there being approximately 50/50 black/red is important in these things. If not, they will (note I am not saying "should") expect black is more likely than red.

Of course, if they are good at this inductive reasoning thing, they will realize that they only have a wee tiny bit of information. Four trials isn't enough to be particularly confident that black will hit next.

I wouldn't worry too much about it. We have looked high and low for black swans and haven't found any. We've found tons and tons of white swans during out efforts to find black swans. It is the nature of the scientist to only feel great joy upon finding his colleages incorrect.

As for the smart people, it is usually better to listen to them than to listen to the idiot in the corner muttering incoherently about things he hasn't bothered to check against reality.

Yes, I wasn't sure what I meant by it.

If they are discovered to be "non-uniform" then they are, by definition, no longer laws?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_law

Does it come down to that scientific experiments must be repeatable: you have to be able to do the same experiment at different times and in different places?

That is a separate issue. Repeatability isn't an assumption, it is a technique to make sure you didn't screw up the first time around. It is to keep the scientists from screwing around and making stuff up, as well.

We generally assume that things 10 billion light years away are pretty similar to things around here because we have taken pictures and it looks pretty much the same. If things were different there, you'd think that things would look different. As it is, things look very much like we would expect them to look.

Not to say that we can prove that stars that far away are not made out of fluffy bunnies, but they do look like they are made out of the normal stuff of stars.

Tautology alert!

If a law must be uniform to be a law, then does not that mean a laws of physics cannot not hold uniformly throughout the universe? Which I guess will work out as meaning that if the universe is not uniform then it will not be describable by any laws of physics.

Semantics always does my head in.

[QUOTE]
A physical law or scientific law is, according to the Oxford English dictionary, "a theoretical principle deduced from particular facts, applicable to a defined group or class of phenomena, and expressible by the statement that a particular phenomenon always occurs if certain c

Yes, a trivial consequence of the fact that a law is "expressible by the statement that a particular phenomenon always occurs". A test of a law must therefore be independent of the time it takes place. The same, presumably, applies to space.

So better to say "independent of position in spacetime" rather than "uniform".

But science would still be possible if tests weren't repeatable?

I'm fairly certain that if when we did certain things random stuff just happened, science would be the least of our worries. When I brush my teeth (experiment), my teeth get cleaner (result).

Unless, you are getting at something different, I am confused. Are you trying to ask something about validating prior research through repeating it? Sometimes we do that, and sometimes we just have independent observers of the same thing because we can't actually do an experiment (or repeat it) for practical matters.

We can't do experiments on the stars, the sun and the planets, but we still have science. We look at them and a bunch of people take measurements, and then a while later a different (or sometimes the same) people take measurements to see if the first measurements still make sense or to see if something new and unexpected has happened (such as someone screwed up). Sometimes we look at similar things (not exactly the same experiment), and sometimes we do exactly the same experiment.

The whole idea that experiments have to be repeatable is a guideline. It is to keep out the goofy people who talk about how their uncle Carl said he saw a ghost, or other highly personal (inaccessible to the rest of us) nature. Unless the rest of us can see it, it doesn't belong in science.

Aren't they by definition?

If the way 'gravity' works varies then the law of gravity has to cover all variations.