What Is A Law?

[Theland]

How do scientists determine what is a law?
I understand it to mean that if the same process or experiment, repeated over and over again, results in the same outcome, then that is a law.
Afterwards, any suggestion of a different outcome, or different initial conditions, would be recognised as a violation of that law.
Am I correct?

[Old_Geezer]

It's likely many truths will be untestable. Wouldn't stop them being true. Just implies that the scientific method can only take you so far.

It's value lies in that it's plausible, believable, and doesn't need a complicating further level of unexplained "intelligence" as a cause.

[jim360]

I don't dispute that -- it's an inevitable consequence of the fact that Science is never going to stop running out of new things to discover -- but, at the very least, my point is that we ought to exhaust the testable, as far as possible, before turning to the untestable. We haven't run out of ideas to try to explain the Universe's nature and origins based solely on what's within the Universe. Let those be exhausted first, before turning to other ideas about which nothing can be said other than conjecture.

[Theland]

Jim @ 07:53 - Naive? Why?
Of course I am not a scientist, but does that disbar me from trying to read and understand scientific research in order to question my own beliefs?

[Theland]

OG - Thank you for your polite posts.

Peter Pedant - @11:20 - Mad people? Well maybe. I don't hold a sanity certificate, but have been treated for mental health problems.

TTT - What do you mean by closed minds? Is my mind closed?
Is yours? Are you amenable to new ideas, or seeing the possibility of truth in old ones?
Do you feel somehow superior?

[1ozzy]

Theland, TTT and some others on here know everything.

Case closed ;-/

[Theland]

I know. I'm just trying to pick their brains :-)

[1ozzy]

Slim pickings ;-/

[Peter Pedant]

god there should be a law againt this thread

at the very least, my point is that we ought to exhaust the testable, as far as possible, before turning to the untestable.

very admirable Jim and first said by Herodotus ( 400BC) - events in the world should not be ascribed to gods until the actions of man had been exhausted

and as for truths which are untestable - no - they are by definitions not truths - they are something else,

a truth( hypothesis) has to be testable by an experiment that cd falsify it

see Popper Logic of scientific discovery
Hugely unreadable but have a go

so.... penicillin is NOT an antibiotic - test by a simple petri cough plate and pen - and show that around the pen, no bacteria grow

[mibn2cweus]

What is a law? A law is a law until such time as you find that it's been violated. This typically involves refinement of the law to better correspond to an improved understanding of reality except in cases where a law has been demonstrated to be fatally flawed . . . the law that never was.
Laws strike a remarkable resemblance to gods . . . don't you think?

[Theland]

Intersting analogy. A few flaws to point out, but first this :-

Information that must be involved in the collapse of the wave function to particles, (law), is empirically always traced back to a mind.
In our experience, information is transferred, passed on, but does not originate spontaneously.
It only ever originates from the thought processes of a mind.

[mibn2cweus]

Are you implying the Sun does not exist until we observe it? Why then do we observe it not where it is but where it was 8 minutes . . . ago? And how is it that our existence would have never been possible if the Sun had not already existed for billions of years prior to our arrival on the scene? Existence is perceived by the mind after the fact. Without existence there would be nothing to perceive or anything to perceive it with. Consciousness is subject to existence, the object of consciousness. Consciousness of nothing is a contradiction in terms.

[Theland]

No. I am suggesting that the creation is observed by a mind, the Creator, that sustains it, and is the originator of necessary information.

[jim360]

// Information that must be involved in the collapse of the wave function to particles, (law), is empirically always traced back to a mind. //

No, it isn't.

I don't want to discourage you, or anyone else, from asking these kinds of big question. I would very much discourage you, and everybody else, of pretending that you understand the answers.

In this case, you've taken the suggestion that consciousness causes wavefunction collapse, and turned into a requirement. It is not. There is nothing in Quantum Mechanics that specifies any role for consciousness, or a mind, alone. Ours, a creator's -- nothing at all is said about it.

[mibn2cweus]

I acquire all my information through sensory perception of an existing reality, not creation. I can only relate such information to others who have shared my perceptual experiences. Information is about reality, not the cause of reality.

[AZardoz]

https://postimg.cc/r0PQJYgM

[Peter Pedant]

as described by Herodotus 400 BC
but did not say - hey everybody I ve made a law!

very good Azard

[Atheist]

Unfortunately the word 'law' suggests to some people that there must be a lawgiver. I don't think that there are 'laws' of science, there are just observable patterns in what we see that enable us to predict future observations.