From: utzoo!decvax!cca!JGA@MIT-MC@sri-unix Newsgroups: net.space Title: Philosophical note on disproving theories Article-I.D.: sri-unix.2572 Posted: Mon Aug 9 07:35:39 1982 Received: Tue Aug 10 00:59:33 1982 From: John G. Aspinall(From SPACE Digest V2 #266 ) On the topic of FTL, an interesting philosophical note: Why are people so hopeful about the existence of FTL and indifferent about the law of conservation of energy? It seems to me that people will bend over backwards to try and find a loophole in physics or some specious argument that will al- low FTL to exist, but when it comes to violating energy conservation (e.g. perpetual motion machines), anyone suggesting it is labelled a crank! Don Chan This is an interesting point you raise. I believe the difference is in the utility of the two theories. Conservation of energy is used over and over by chemists, biologists, engineers, and many others to design and analyze large parts of our daily lives. It works. It works, for many, not because it is "proved" in Chapter 1 of Goldstein [ask anyone who took a basic classical dynamics course], but because they (chemists, etc.) see their results confirmed every day. >From the miles-per-gallon estimates for your automobile to the recommended caloric intake of a marathon runner; from the wattmeter measuring your utility usage to the "R" value of the insulation that you install to cut those bills down: conservation of energy enters the analysis. If conservation of energy was broken, violated, or even relaxed, there would be a hell of a lot of unexplained things going on. Faster Than Light travel (FTL), on the other hand, doesn't impact our daily lives in nearly the same way. Oh, there are a few examples: I work on a Cray-1, and I've been told that its speed is limited by the speed of light transmission time, but frankly, that is of intellectual interest only. The theory has much less utility in my daily life. A good counter example to reinforce the point - I bet if you talk to physicists who really depend on the speed of light in their work, you'll find them as ardent defenders of the speed of light as they are of conservation of energy. John Aspinall.