Re: Earth's future alignment of doom?

On Sun, 11 Jan 2009 04:41:49 -0500, Dave Typinski <möbius@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

It can if the phrase is used in its strictest sense.

If a phenomenon can be observed, it is part of nature. If a
phenomenon cannot be observed, then it isn't part of nature because,
obviously, nothing happened.

I considered that you might mean that, and it's an interesting point of
philosophical discussion. In my view, "nature" is limited to what we can
observe and know, even if only indirectly. If there were an entity
sitting outside our Universe, and that entity could simply change the
rules when it wished- altering c, for instance- I'd call that
supernatural. We would observe the effect, but it would be patternless,
unpredictable, with no detectable cause. No scientific theory could be
offered to explain the observation.

Of course, you could argue that this hyperuniverse merely extends nature
to a hypernature, and I wouldn't disagree. But for practical purposes,
I'd still call it supernatural, to distinguish it from _our_ nature,
which I believe to be fully describable.
_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com
.

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