I wonder whether claims about the inviolability of physical laws (in general, rather than any specific law) actually mean anything… at a fundamental level the distinction between a law with an exception and just having a different law is pretty difficult to pin down. Either the “exception” is due to differences in circumstances that were previously ignored, or it’s just random. In either case, you can probably always make a new “law” that accommodates the difference.
There’s a difference, I think. It’s just that we havn’t quite grasped it yet.
I had it until I read your post, and then I lost it.
It’s like in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality when Harry learns Partial Transfiguration.
In this Harry Potter universe, you can you magic to change things into other things, but you can’t change only part of a thing into another thing, for example you can change a wall into marshmallow in order to escape a room, but you would have to dispense the energy of changing the entire wall, and not just make yourself a little marshmallow hole.
Well Harry learns to violate this rule with science, because nothing in the world is really connected, it’s just an illusion in our heads. So Harry can now transfigure only part of a rubber eraser into steel, if he wants to. This is all making perfect sense, right?
But Proffesor MacGonagall is skeptical:
“Harry’s idea stemmed from simple ignorance, nothing more. If you changed half of a metal ball into glass, the whole ball had a different Form. To change the part was to change the whole, and that meant removing the whole Form and replacing it with a different one. What would it even mean to Transfigure only half of a metal ball? That the metal ball as a whole had the same Form as before, but half that ball now had a different Form?”
See, that makes sense too. And now everyone is confused. But partial transfiguration does exist (well, in the story) and the difference is that Harry could change a spot on the metal ball to glass in five minutes, instead of the thirty minutes it would have taken him to change the entire metal ball into a metal ball with a glass spot.
There’s probably a distinction between laws with exceptions and new laws that you and I just don’t know about yet.
I wonder whether claims about the inviolability of physical laws (in general, rather than any specific law) actually mean anything… at a fundamental level the distinction between a law with an exception and just having a different law is pretty difficult to pin down. Either the “exception” is due to differences in circumstances that were previously ignored, or it’s just random. In either case, you can probably always make a new “law” that accommodates the difference.
It does mean something. It’s a definition of “physical law”.
The idea that physical laws are simple is what has huge implications.
Hem hem.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ic/the_virtue_of_narrowness/
There’s a difference, I think. It’s just that we havn’t quite grasped it yet. I had it until I read your post, and then I lost it. It’s like in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality when Harry learns Partial Transfiguration.
In this Harry Potter universe, you can you magic to change things into other things, but you can’t change only part of a thing into another thing, for example you can change a wall into marshmallow in order to escape a room, but you would have to dispense the energy of changing the entire wall, and not just make yourself a little marshmallow hole.
Well Harry learns to violate this rule with science, because nothing in the world is really connected, it’s just an illusion in our heads. So Harry can now transfigure only part of a rubber eraser into steel, if he wants to. This is all making perfect sense, right?
But Proffesor MacGonagall is skeptical:
“Harry’s idea stemmed from simple ignorance, nothing more. If you changed half of a metal ball into glass, the whole ball had a different Form. To change the part was to change the whole, and that meant removing the whole Form and replacing it with a different one. What would it even mean to Transfigure only half of a metal ball? That the metal ball as a whole had the same Form as before, but half that ball now had a different Form?”
See, that makes sense too. And now everyone is confused. But partial transfiguration does exist (well, in the story) and the difference is that Harry could change a spot on the metal ball to glass in five minutes, instead of the thirty minutes it would have taken him to change the entire metal ball into a metal ball with a glass spot.
There’s probably a distinction between laws with exceptions and new laws that you and I just don’t know about yet.
Anyone care to enlighten us?
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