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
Let’s say you decided you wanted to know what colors of cars existed in the world. Every day, you wake up bright and early at 7am and start watching the road in front of your house. You keep a tally of all the different colored cars you see. All day you watch, until you go to sleep at 10pm.
You saw tons of cars – some blue, some silver, and some black. But never a red car. You theorize that there are only blue, silver, and black cars that exist.
Every day you continue your observations and they are confirmed. Only blue, silver, and black cars.
One day you happen to wake up early – 6am – and look out your window to see a red car driving by! Holy shit! A red car! You’d never seen a red car before. You thought they didn’t exist!
It turns out the neighbor up the road that drives a red car has to be at work by 630, and so you never saw him drive by in your previous experiments.
Now you update your theory to include the existence of red cars.
You tell your friend about your theory and he looks at you like you’re crazy because he’s been doing the exact same experiment from his house and he only ever sees red and yellow cars!
Now you both have to update your model of the world to include this difference – there exist red, yellow, blue, silver, and black cars, but there are some special rules about when and where they can be seen.
That’s how science works. You make a theory based on available evidence, then you find new places to look to see if your theory is still accurate. If not, you update your theory, and repeat the process!
We’ve been looking at some things in physics long enough that its unlikely that we find a new, every day situation where, like, gravity ceases to exist. But if we look in rarer and weirder situations like inside a black hole or in the nanoseconds following a particle collision or something, we may find exceptions for some of the physical laws we know.
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