Is changing a physical law like changing a speed limit sign?

[Neatras]

Changing some laws on earth is more like changing a speed limit sign.

Is the above true? If so, how does one demonstrate this to be the case?

If not, what are some physical consequences of changing a physical law outside of what one might expect?

My debate position is this: It is extremely uneducated and willfully ignorant to believe that changing a physical law only affects a limited domain of physical phenomena. For example, changing the speed of light to be faster doesn't just affect how quickly light reaches us; it also affects how quickly particles interact, the energy required for all physical interactions, and other sundry details that would, in essence, be very telling if they suddenly altered in an instant.

However, I am aware that both dad and Kent Hovind maintain that God is some sort of master engineer, complete with a box and dials that he can play with, turning some physical laws on and off while the rest remains unaffected. This is a position maintained by and expressed via ignorance and incredulity, with no physical basis or rationale behind it besides "God is awesome enough to get away with it."

So, any creationists wanna try and put it across that changing a physical law is like changing a speed limit sign?

[benchwarmer]

[Replying to post 58 by benchwarmer]

Thanks.

"An intermediate-mass star begins with a cloud that takes about 100,000 years to collapse into a protostar with a surface temperature of about 6,750 F (3,725 C). After hydrogen fusion starts, the result is a T-Tauri star, a variable star that fluctuates in brightness. This star continues to collapse for roughly 10 million years until its expansion due to energy generated by nuclear fusion is balanced by its contraction from gravity, after which point it becomes a main-sequence star that gets all its energy from hydrogen fusion in its core." (Emphasis added) (supplied link)

And they observed this!!!!! That's a lot of patience and a lot of telescope time.

Have a good day!
Still small

Please quote from the links I gave where it said "they observed this". I'll wait.

In the mean time perhaps a thought experiment for you:

You are on the side of a single lane highway with a radar gun, hiding in the bushes such that you can only see straight ahead. You clock a car going by at 100mph. Do you need to observe what the car was doing 5 seconds beforehand to know where it was?

Going by what I think your logic might be (feel free to correct me) if you didn't observe something, we can't hypothesize what happened at some other point in time based on the data we do have. There seems to be no room to work backwards or forwards. Is this where you are going?

You'll note that the linked article uses the words 'about' and 'roughly'. Maybe you missed that. And the part where I said this is ongoing science.

[benchwarmer]

"An intermediate-mass star begins with a cloud that takes about 100,000 years to collapse into a protostarl

In other words, no one has seen it! Science is a few hundred years or so old?

I haven't seen you either. Yet with the data at hand, there are only a few possibilities:

1) You are chatbot (piece of software autonomously responding to debate posts)

2) You are a normal person

Given the data at hand, I wouldn't hypothesize that you a newly created entity that blinks into existence each time a post appears from 'dad'. Yet the people who push the Bible as truth are essentially proposing this could be a valid hypothesis.

[dad]

"An intermediate-mass star begins with a cloud that takes about 100,000 years to collapse into a protostarl

In other words, no one has seen it! Science is a few hundred years or so old?

I haven't seen you either. Yet with the data at hand, there are only a few possibilities:

1) You are chatbot (piece of software autonomously responding to debate posts)

2) You are a normal person

Given the data at hand, I wouldn't hypothesize that you a newly created entity that blinks into existence each time a post appears from 'dad'. Yet the people who push the Bible as truth are essentially proposing this could be a valid hypothesis.

Regardless of what people push, the claims of ages and what time things took to do things in far space are based on specific, known, actual criteria. That criteria wholly involves a prerequisite that time itself exists in far space and exists the very same as we know it here. That is only a belief, it is certainly not known. Therefore all the ages assigned to stars or anything at all in deep space are only as good as that belief.

[Still small]

benchwarmer wrote:

Please quote from the links I gave where it said "they observed this". I'll wait.

Sorry, I thought that was the point you were trying to make in Post 54 in response to my saying that star/planet formation had not been 'observed'.

In the mean time perhaps a thought experiment for you:

You are on the side of a single lane highway with a radar gun, hiding in the bushes such that you can only see straight ahead. You clock a car going by at 100mph. Do you need to observe what the car was doing 5 seconds beforehand to know where it was?

Going by what I think your logic might be (feel free to correct me) if you didn't observe something, we can't hypothesize what happened at some other point in time based on the data we do have. There seems to be no room to work backwards or forwards. Is this where you are going?

You'll note that the linked article uses the words 'about' and 'roughly'. Maybe you missed that. And the part where I said this is ongoing science.

From the information supplied and required in your thought experiment, no it doesn't matter but all you can assert as fact is the current velocity as observed. Then again, you would not be able to determine the driver's velocity yesterday, last year or when they first starting driving. Nor can you determine when or where the driver began the current trip. (Unless, of course, you ask the driver.) Just as with a fossil, it is just a single 'snapshot' in an ongoing process. And just like the palaeontologists, the astronomers/cosmologists may attempt to place numerous similar 'snap shots' in a sequence but that would only be speculation according to their particular paradigm/theory, (conformation bias).

That is the point I'm making.
Have a good day!
Still small

[H.sapiens]

"An intermediate-mass star begins with a cloud that takes about 100,000 years to collapse into a protostarl

In other words, no one has seen it! Science is a few hundred years or so old?

I haven't seen you either. Yet with the data at hand, there are only a few possibilities:

1) You are chatbot (piece of software autonomously responding to debate posts)

2) You are a normal person

Given the data at hand, I wouldn't hypothesize that you a newly created entity that blinks into existence each time a post appears from 'dad'. Yet the people who push the Bible as truth are essentially proposing this could be a valid hypothesis.

He might as well be a chatbox. At best he is an incoherent sophist quite undeserving of a cognitive reply.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 59 by Still small]

"An intermediate-mass star begins with a cloud that takes about 100,000 years to collapse into a protostar with a surface temperature of about 6,750 F (3,725 C). After hydrogen fusion starts, the result is a T-Tauri star, a variable star that fluctuates in brightness. This star continues to collapse for roughly 10 million years until its expansion due to energy generated by nuclear fusion is balanced by its contraction from gravity, after which point it becomes a main-sequence star that gets all its energy from hydrogen fusion in its core." (Emphasis added) (supplied link)

And they observed this!!!!! That's a lot of patience and a lot of telescope time.

Remember that there are billions of stars just in our own galaxy, and billions of galaxies, and we can observe stars in all stages of their lifetimes. So there is no need to draw conclusions from just the observation of one star, one time. It is the observation of many thousands of stars at various stages of their lifetimes that allows science to formulate a consistent description of star formation, and eventually star "death", and the steps in between.

There are instances where material condenses under gravity but the resulting "star" does not have enough mass to cause fusion of hydrogen in the interior, so it doesn't become a main sequence star. These are called substellar objects (eg. brown dwarfs) and there are smaller objects still (sub-brown dwarfs) and larger objects called ref dwarfs in this category. Below the sub-brown dwarfs are large gas planets (eg. Jupiter), and above main sequence stars (in size) are a range of larger stars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_stars

So again, it is the observation of this incredible range of objects ranging in size from gas giants like Jupiter (and the now many exoplanets of similar size orbiting other stars), to gigantic stars millions of times larger than our sun, that allow the current description of star formation. In 1939 Hans Bethe first outlined the fusion process in stars (and won a noble prize for this work in 1967). Since then the physics of stellar nucleosynthesis has been studied at length and we know a lot about how the process works:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis

This adds further legitimacy to astronomical observations and until someone can come along and derail this train of understanding with repeatable observations that contradict the current theories, or find flaws in the physics, it wins as the "best" explanation we have. And it certainly trumps hand-waving diatribes from people like "dad" which can't be supported by anything but references to old religious texts written many centuries before people knew "where the sun went at night."

[Still small]

[Replying to post 59 by Still small]

"An intermediate-mass star begins with a cloud that takes about 100,000 years to collapse into a protostar with a surface temperature of about 6,750 F (3,725 C). After hydrogen fusion starts, the result is a T-Tauri star, a variable star that fluctuates in brightness. This star continues to collapse for roughly 10 million years until its expansion due to energy generated by nuclear fusion is balanced by its contraction from gravity, after which point it becomes a main-sequence star that gets all its energy from hydrogen fusion in its core." (Emphasis added) (supplied link)

And they observed this!!!!! That's a lot of patience and a lot of telescope time.

Remember that there are billions of stars just in our own galaxy, and billions of galaxies, and we can observe stars in all stages of their lifetimes. So there is no need to draw conclusions from just the observation of one star, one time. It is the observation of many thousands of stars at various stages of their lifetimes that allows science to formulate a consistent description of star formation, and eventually star "death", and the steps in between.

There are instances where material condenses under gravity but the resulting "star" does not have enough mass to cause fusion of hydrogen in the interior, so it doesn't become a main sequence star. These are called substellar objects (eg. brown dwarfs) and there are smaller objects still (sub-brown dwarfs) and larger objects called ref dwarfs in this category. Below the sub-brown dwarfs are large gas planets (eg. Jupiter), and above main sequence stars (in size) are a range of larger stars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_stars

So again, it is the observation of this incredible range of objects ranging in size from gas giants like Jupiter (and the now many exoplanets of similar size orbiting other stars), to gigantic stars millions of times larger than our sun, that allow the current description of star formation. In 1939 Hans Bethe first outlined the fusion process in stars (and won a noble prize for this work in 1967). Since then the physics of stellar nucleosynthesis has been studied at length and we know a lot about how the process works:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis

This adds further legitimacy to astronomical observations and until someone can come along and derail this train of understanding with repeatable observations that contradict the current theories, or find flaws in the physics, it wins as the "best" explanation we have. And it certainly trumps hand-waving diatribes from people like "dad" which can't be supported by anything but references to old religious texts written many centuries before people knew "where the sun went at night."

Or so the theory goes!

We have a bunch of 'snap shots' of different but current star formations which are assembled according to the prevailing theory which, in turn, is used to state that this is how star formation timeline occurs. Sounds somewhat like circular reasoning whether 'best explanation' or not. Certainly not 'fact' nor 'empirical data', being point of my original post Post 53 and my response to Post 54.

Have a good day!
Still small

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 67 by Still small]

Sounds somewhat like circular reasoning whether 'best explanation' or not.

I don't see how you can make a claim of circular reasoning from this process. It is simply taking a collection of observations, then trying to explain them in a way that is consistent with existing known laws of physics. Circular reasoning is where your conclusion is based on the assumption that the premise is true, when the premise itself has not been shown to be true. Using a set of observations on stars and their precursors (which IS empirical data by the way) to formulate a scientific explanation is not making any assumptions for the premise ... the premise is empirical data. You can question the validity of the empirical data, but using empirical data to arrive at an explanation is not circular reasoning.

We have a bunch of 'snap shots' of different but current star formations which are assembled according to the prevailing theory which, in turn, is used to state that this is how star formation timeline occurs.

If there is enough data to "fill in the blanks" in a reasonable and scientifically consistent way, then the explanation is not invalidated until it can be shown by additional observations to be false. It is not too unlike the Wheel of Fortune TV game where a word or phase is guessed based on seeing enough letters in a pattern. In that case there is usually a unique answer to the puzzle, and of course the more letters that are filled in the more likely the guess is to be correct.

There have been enough pieces of the "how do stars form, live and die" puzzle, provided by empirical evidence, to be able to formulate a theory that is internally consistent, and consistent with the known laws of physics. This is how the scientific method works, and as more observations are added to the puzzle the theory gets more refined, and is also more likely to be correct if these new observations are consistent with the theory and further support it. So unless and until new observations come along that falsify the current theory of star formation, it is indeed the best explanation we have and it comes from the scientific analysis of empirical data.

[Still small]

[Replying to post 67 by Still small]

Sounds somewhat like circular reasoning whether 'best explanation' or not.

I don't see how you can make a claim of circular reasoning from this process. It is simply taking a collection of observations, then trying to explain them in a way that is consistent with existing known laws of physics. Circular reasoning is where your conclusion is based on the assumption that the premise is true, when the premise itself has not been shown to be true. Using a set of observations on stars and their precursors (which IS empirical data by the way) to formulate a scientific explanation is not making any assumptions for the premise ... the premise is empirical data. You can question the validity of the empirical data, but using empirical data to arrive at an explanation is not circular reasoning.(Emphasis added)

This may be so if the "set of observations on stars . . . " were a series or set of observations of the same star over time. The observations used are of different stars assumed, according to a theory, to be at various stages of formation but are, in fact, all current 'observations'. It could well be that the currently observed state of each 'star' may be its original unchanging (or minimally changing) state throughout its existence.

We have a bunch of 'snap shots' of different but current star formations which are assembled according to the prevailing theory which, in turn, is used to state that this is how star formation timeline occurs.

If there is enough data to "fill in the blanks" in a reasonable and scientifically consistent way, then the explanation is not invalidated until it can be shown by additional observations to be false. It is not too unlike the Wheel of Fortune TV game where a word or phase is guessed based on seeing enough letters in a pattern. In that case there is usually a unique answer to the puzzle, and of course the more letters that are filled in the more likely the guess is to be correct.

There have been enough pieces of the "how do stars form, live and die" puzzle, provided by empirical evidence, to be able to formulate a theory that is internally consistent, and consistent with the known laws of physics. This is how the scientific method works, and as more observations are added to the puzzle the theory gets more refined, and is also more likely to be correct if these new observations are consistent with the theory and further support it. So unless and until new observations come along that falsify the current theory of star formation, it is indeed the best explanation we have and it comes from the scientific analysis of empirical data.

The problem with your 'Wheel of Fortune' analogy is that someone sets the original word in place, knowing when a correct letter is selected to meet the predetermined pattern. To use a similar analogy for 'star formation theories' would be having an unknown word of undetermined length and a bag containing an unlimited number of letters. When ever a letter is selected, it is placed in any order hoping that a recognisable 'word pattern' appears, whether it be the 'correct' word or not. There is 'no filling the blanks' as they are all blanks, unless the contestant gets to select a 'word' of their own choosing, (being confirmation bias).

Have a good day!
Still small

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to post 69 by Still small]

The problem with your 'Wheel of Fortune' analogy is that someone sets the original word in place, knowing when a correct letter is selected to meet the predetermined pattern.

It was only a rough analogy ... the point being that with enough observations a consistent explanation of something is possible without pure, random guesswork. In the case of star formation, there are enough observations of enough stars at enough stages of their existence that filling in the blanks isn't some total leap of faith. There is enough observational data to formulate a theory of star formation that makes sense and is consistent with known physics, and also enough observational data to deduce that similar, common processes apply to stars in general.