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It is nothing of the kind. It is a matter of perfectly ordinary empirical fact that we live in a universe that, so far as we can tell, is translationally, temp
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
It is nothing of the kind.
It is a matter of perfectly ordinary empirical fact that we live in a universe that, so far as we can tell, is translationally, temporally and rotationally invariant. There is absolutely nothing in Noether's theorem that forbids us from having theories that violate momentum, energy or angular momentum conservation if they happen to describe a universe that has aspects that violate those invariance conditions.
There have been theories that do so, like Dirac's weird large number thing. These are completely legitimate theories, and are entirely subject to absolutely ordinary observational, experimental and inferential verifiability (which is why we know Dirac's large number thing is likely false.)
- lucozade 11y agoYes indeed. However, for us to be able to scientifically verify those theories, something about them must be invariant in space, time and rotation. That's pretty much the definition of a scientifically verifiable theory. My point isn't that there can't be theories without those properties nor that the universe necessarily has them (or not). Just that, if it doesn't, we couldn't verify it scientifically.
- abecedarius 11y agoAccording to Feynman there once were people saying that since experiments need to be repeatable, to be scientific the laws of physics must be deterministic, by pure logic. Oh, quantum mechanics? Oops.