Re: Earth's future alignment of doom?

Chris L Peterson <clp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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.

Yes, I think so too.

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.

Really? We wouldn't simply observe that c fluctuates randomly and
build that fact into our model of the universe?

What about Brownian motion?

What about an individual radionuclide's time of decay?

Wave particle duality?

The uncertainty principle?

Quantum entanglement?

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.

I think we're basically on the same path. As you suggest, I take it
one step further. I hold that if we observe something, then we by
definition extend our description of nature--and the universe--to
include it.
--
Dave
.

Relevant Pages

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