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
The word “law” in science is mostly just used to describe simple statements that appear to be generally true, or that were thought to be in the past. Some “laws” are routinely violated – for example Kepler’s laws of planetary motion are not precisely correct as they fail to take into account general relativity and N-body effects. At the other extreme, the laws of thermodynamics seem to be pretty watertight, and any violation of them (at least at large scales) would be extremely surprising. Not because there is any a priori reason to believe that they *must* be true, but because countless experiments have found that all manner of systems obey them and nobody has found any that don’t.
> Is it possible that some laws of physics are straight-up wrong
Yes. It’s perfectly conceivable that somebody does an experiment under some kind of exotic conditions that nobody has looked at before and finds a violation of (say) conservation of energy. However, the law of conservation of energy (aka the 1st law of thermodynamics) would not be thrown out overnight, as there are many contexts in which we know it does work and has proved to be useful. Similarly, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion do actually give a very good approximation of planetary motion in many circumstances with very little effort, so they’re still useful even if we know they aren’t 100% correct.
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