TED Conversations

Farrukh Yakubov

Student, Purdue University


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Which law of physics is wrong, if any?

From scientific perspective this question might seem to be a bit strange, but I want you to answer based on what you personally think. You may even answer according to your intuition even if you know that it is scientifically wrong. Any comments are appreciated.
Thank you.

  • Jul 29 2011: Hubble's law!
  • Jul 26 2011: gravity is a wave(and just like a home network exstender amplifies the signal of the home network)so can gravity be amplified.not a popular school of thought but i personally believe in it(just my opinion and that in my mind neither makes it right or wrong)thanks for you alls time and have a great night/day and take care.
  • Jun 29 2011: If you believe in the Scale Expanding Cosmos then moving bodies come to rest and rotating bodies stop rotating i.e as I understand it Newton's first law of motion.
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    Jun 29 2011: I don't like dividing things into right and wrong because our knowledge is incomplete. What's right and wrong is very relative in the sciences so I will just point out what was relatively wrong in the sciences in the past compared to what we know today.

    Bohr's theory of the atom is wrong, but it predicts results so it's useful.

    Law of Conservation of energy is wrong, with nuclear energy it was dicovered that mass and energy is interchangable so the law now integrates both the convervation of "mass and energy"

    The existence of universal "ether" is wrong.
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      Jun 29 2011: so the law of energy conservation is actually not part of physics anymore. it is just there as an approximate, practical rule, just as the newtonian dynamics.

      strangely, afaik, within general theory of relativity, you can't even define the conservation of matter-energy in a meaningful way.
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        Jun 30 2011: Yeah a lot of the classical laws are actually approximations now. Second Law of Thermodynamics is blatantly obvious about being an approximation. Entropy doesn't have to increase it just increases on average because of the probable outcomes of matter distribution.

        Ideal Gas Law is obviously another approximation. Even modern physics though has some approxmations like in quantum mechanics the "particle in a box" equation is an approximation

        But all of these laws are useful and can be applied under certain conditions (like Newtonan physics) that's why they are mentioned in physics textbooks.
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    Jun 29 2011: good that you allowed intuition. scientifically no law of physics can be wrong, since it ceases to be a law of physics if disproved.

    however, i simply don't believe in quantum mechanics. nor any of its offsprings, like the string theory. i personally believe that Arthur Fine is right about true randomness in quantum mechanics is not yet proven, and a local hidden variable theory is possible.
    • Jun 29 2011: It might interest you to know that quantum mechanics started out with fraudulent data. Of course now that the fraudulent data has been excised we only have "good" data now.

      The charlatan Emil Rupp convinced Einstein and others that he was doing high class experiments, when, in fact, he was inventing data. It took a decade for physicists to detect the fraud; now some historians of quantum mechanics don't even mention Emil Rupp. This is not surprising because after he was unmasked as a fraud, it was "ordered" that his papers be stricken from the record and all references to his work be deleted.