Re: FN-FORUM: OT: Friday funny, sort of, also kinda scary

date posted 11th November 2007 14:04

On Saturday 10 November 2007 14:31:28 Adam Dyson wrote:
> Dom Latter wrote:
> > The laws of thermodynamics are strict, but fair, and do not make
> > exceptions.
>
> I seem to recall that the first principle of science is that any
> "theory" is just that and might be disproved at any time, and that

Unfortunately in every-day speech "theory" has come to mean
something that's unproven and speculative. To a scientist a
theory is anything but. It's something that has been tested.
An unproven idea is a hypothesis.

An essential part of a good theory (alongside it making testable
predictions) is, as you note, its falsifiability. The laws of thermodynamics
would be *every* easy to disprove. Just build a perpetual motion machine.
But nobody ever has and I'm prepared to say nobody ever will.

> nothing in science is anything more than observation and theory. We
> cannot know for certain that the laws of thermodynamics hold true in
> all cases. They don't even apply at the quantum level and so "science"

I say they do.