Is it possible to disprove the laws of physics

Question

This is something I’ve been wondering about for some time. Is it possible that some laws of physics are straight-up wrong, and can be disproved as our understanding/technology improves? How concrete are the laws of physics? Is it possible for us to be absolutely certain about anything?

In: Physics

Answer 1

I feel like there’s a problem here with definitions so I’ll take a shot at it.

**Hypothesis**: “I have an idea that cows do not eat meat because they lack the proper teeth to chew it.” Basically this is someone saying that they have some **data** and have an idea on some sort of general case based on that data. Datum: Cows do not eat meat. Hypothesis: they don’t eat meat because they can’t

Note that hypothesis here is very close to the popular definition of **theory**.

**Theory**: this is a hypothesis that has been tested many times and been found to be true (so far). It should be able to explain many different sets of data using one coherent set of rules and also make predictions about what we will observe if we were to uncover new data.

**Laws**: these are rules that apply because all of the evidence we’ve found points to them being true. They are separate from theories because they are simple observations about the world and the universe around us. While there may be places where the laws of physics or chemistry or biology break down, we haven’t found any yet. Laws do not make predictions about future data, they simply describe all data to date.

So a hypothesis can become a theory but a theory never becomes a law because theories and laws are different things.

> Is it possible for us to be absolutely certain about anything?

Outside of mathematics, no. Even then, you can’t be 100% certain of everything in mathematics because of something called Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem which notes that a mathematical system cannot both be 100% error free and cover all cases. A simple way to look at this is 1/0 (1 divided by zero) which cannot be defined in our ordinary mathematics but does have solutions under different axioms.

So, the real answer is ‘No, we cannot be 100% certain of anything.” But we can be pretty damn sure we’re right.