The Philosophy of Science

The solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, forced a rethink of fundamental laws of physics

By Keith Tidman

Science aims at uncovering what is true. And it is equipped with all the tools — natural laws, methods, technologies, mathematics — that it needs to succeed. Indeed, in many ways, science works exquisitely. But does science ever actually arrive at reality? Or is science, despite its persuasiveness, paradoxically consigned to forever wending closer to its goal, yet not quite arriving — as theories are either amended to fit new findings, or they have to be replaced outright?

It is the case that science relies on observation — especially measurement. Observation confirms and grounds the validity of contending models of reality, empowering critical analysis to probe the details. The role of analysis is to scrutinise a theory’s scaffolding, to better visualise the coherent whole, broadening and deepening what is understood of the natural world. To these aims, science, at its best, has a knack for abiding by the ‘laws of parsimony’ of Occam’s razor — describing complexity as simply as possible, with the fewest suppositions to get the job done.

To be clear, other fields attempt this self-scrutiny and rigour, too, in one manner or another, as they fuel humanity’s flame of creative discovery and invention. They include history, languages, aesthetics, rhetoric, ethics, anthropology, law, religion, and of course philosophy, among others. But just as these fields are unique in their mission (oriented in the present) and their vision (oriented in the future), so is science — the latter heralding a physical world thought to be rational.

Accordingly, in science, theories should agree with evidence-informed, objective observations. Results should be replicated every time that tests and observations are run, confirming predictions. This bottom-up process is driven by what is called inductive reasoning: where a general principle — a conclusion, like an explanatory theory — is derived from multiple observations in which a pattern is discerned. An example of inductive reasoning at its best is Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which states that for every action (force) there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is a law that has worked unfailingly in uncountable instances.

But such successes do not eliminate inductive reasoning’s sliver of vulnerability. Karl Popper, the 20th-century Austrian-British philosopher of science, considered all scientific knowledge to be provisional. He illustrated his point with the example of a person who, having seen only white swans, concludes all swans are white. However, the person later discovers a black swan, an event conclusively rebutting the universality of white swans. Of course, abandoning this latter principle has little consequence. But what if an exception to Newton’s universal law governing action and reaction were to appear, instead?

Perhaps, as Popper suggests, truth, scientific and otherwise, should therefore only ever be parsed as partial or incomplete, where hypotheses offer different truth-values. Our striving for unconditional truth being a task in the making. This is of particular relevance in complex areas: like the nature of being and existence (ontology); or of universal concepts, transcendental ideas, metaphysics, and the fundamentals of what we think we know and understand (epistemology). (Areas also known to attempt to reveal the truth of unobserved things.) 

And so, Popper introduced a new test of truth: ‘falsifiability’. That is, all scientific assertions should be subjected to the test of being proven false — the opposite of seeking confirmation. Einstein, too, was more interested in whether experiments disagreed with his bold conjectures, as such experiments would render his theories invalid — rather than merely provide further evidence for them.

Nonetheless, as human nature would have it, Einstein was jubilant when his prediction that massive objects bend light was confirmed by astronomical observations of light passing close to the sun during the total solar eclipse of 1919, the observation thereby requiring revision of Newton’s formulation of the laws of gravity.

Testability is also central to another aspect of epistemology. That is, to draw a line between true science — whose predictions are subject to rigorous falsification and thus potential disproof — and pseudoscience — seen as speculative, untestable predictions relying on uncontested dogma. Pseudoscience balances precariously, depending as it does on adopters’ fickle belief-commitment rather than on rigorous tests and critical analyses.

On the plus side, if theories are not successfully falsified despite earnest efforts to do so, the claims may have a greater chance of turning out true. Well, at least until new information surfaces to force change to a model. Or, until ingenious thought experiments and insights lead to the sweeping replacement of a theory. Or, until investigation explains how to merge models formerly considered defyingly unalike, yet valid in their respective domains. An example of this last point is the case of general relativity and quantum mechanics, which have remained irreconcilable in describing reality (in matters ranging from spacetime to gravity), despite physicists’ attempts. 

As to the wholesale switching out of scientific theories, it may appear compelling to make the switch, based on accumulated new findings or the sense that the old theory has major fault lines, suggesting it has run its useful course. The 20th-century American philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, was influential in this regard, coining the formative expression ‘paradigm shift’. The shift occurs when a new scientific theory replaces its problem-ridden predecessor, based on a consensus among scientists that the new theory (paradigm) better describes the world, offering a ‘revolutionarily’ different understanding that requires a shift in fundamental concepts.

Among the great paradigm shifts of history are Copernicus’s sun-centered (heliocentric) model of planet rotation, replacing Ptolemy’s Earth-centered model. Another was Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection as key to the biological sciences, informing the origins and evolution of species. Additionally, Einstein’s theories of relativity ushered in major changes to Newton’s understanding of the physical universe. Also significant was recognition that plate tectonics explain large-scale geologic change. Significant, too, was development by Neils Bohr and others of quantum mechanics, replacing classical mechanics at microscopic scales. The story of paradigm shifts is long and continues.

Science’s progress in unveiling the universe’s mysteries entails dynamic processes: One is the enduring sustainability of theories, seemingly etched in stone, that hold up under unsparing tests of verification and falsification. Another is implementation of amendments as contrary findings chip away at the efficacy of models. But then another is the revolutionarily replacement of scientific models as legacy theories become frail and fail. Reasons for belief in the methods of positivism. 

In 1960, the physicist Eugene Wigner wrote what became a famous paper in philosophy and other circles, coining the evocative expression unreasonable effectiveness. This was in reference to the role of mathematics in the natural sciences, but he could well have been speaking of the role of science itself in acquiring understanding of the world.

The Curiosity of Creativity and Imagination

In Chinese mythology, dragon energy is creative. It is a magical energy, the fire of the soul itself. The dragon is the symbol of our power to transmute and create with imagination and purpose.

Posted by Keith Tidman

Most people would agree that ‘creativity’ is the facility to produce ideas, artifacts, and performances that are both original and valuable. ‘Original’ as in novel, where new ground is tilled. While the qualifier ‘valuable’ is considered necessary in order to address German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s point in The Critique of Judgment (1790) that:

‘Since there can also be original nonsense, its products [creativities] must at the same time be models, i.e., be exemplary’.

An example of lacking value or appropriateness in such context might be a meaningless sequence of words, or gibberish.

Kant believed that creativity pertains mostly to the fine arts, or matters of aesthetics — a narrower perspective than today’s inclusive view. He contended, for example, that genius could not be found in science, believing (mistakenly, I would argue) that science only ever adheres to preset methods, and does not allow for the exercise of imagination. He even excluded Isaac Newton from history’s pantheon of geniuses, despite respecting him as a great man of science.

Today, however, creativity’s reach extends along vastly broader lines, encompassing fields like business, economics, history, philosophy, language, physics, biology, mathematics, technology, psychology, and social, political, and organisational endeavours. Fields, that is, that lend themselves to being, at their creative best, illuminative, nontraditional, gestational, and transformational, open to abstract ideas that prompt pondering novel possibilities. The clue as to the greatness of such endeavors is provided by the 16th/17th-century English philosopher Francis Bacon in the Novum Organum (1620), where he says that:

‘By far the greatest obstacle to the progress . . . and undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this — that men despair and think things impossible’.

Accordingly, such domains of human activity have been shown to involve the same explorative and generative functions associated with the brain’s large-scale neural networks. A paradigm of creative cognition that is flexible and multidimensional, and one that calls upon several features:

• an unrestricted vision of what’s possible,
• ideation, 
• images, 
• intuitions,
• thought experiments, 
• what-if gaming, 
• analogical reasoning, 
• metaphors, 
• counterfactual reasoning, 
• inventive free play, 
• hypotheses, 
• knowledge reconceptualisation, 
• and theory selection.

Collectively, these are the cognitive wellspring of creative attainment. To those extents, creativity appears fundamental to defining humanity — what shapes us, through which individual and collective expression occurs — and humanity’s seemingly insatiable, untiring quest for progress and attainment.

Societies tend to applaud those who excel at original thought, both for its own sake and for how it advances human interests. That said, these principles are as relevant to the creative processes of everyday people as to those who eventually are recorded in the annals of history as geniuses. However, the creative process does not start out with the precise end (for example, a poem) and the precise means to getting there (for example, the approach to writing that poem) already known. Rather, both the means and the end product are discoverable only as the creative process unfolds.

Above all, imagination sits at the core of creativity. Imagination is representational, of circumstances not yet real but that nevertheless can evoke emotions and behaviours in people. The world of imagination is, of course, boundless in theory and often in practice, depending on the power of one’s mind to stretch. The American philosopher John Dewey spoke to this point, chalking up every major leap in science, as he boldly put it in The Quest for Certainty, to ‘a new audacity of the imagination’. Albert Einstein’s thoughts paralleled these sentiments, declaring in an interview in 1929 that ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’. Wherein new possibilities take shape. Accordingly and importantly, imagination yields ideas that surpass what’s already supposed.

Imagination is much more, however, than a mere synonym for creativity, otherwise the term would simply be redundant. Imagination, rather, is a tool: freeing up, even catalysing, creativity. To those ends, imagination entails visualisation (including thought experiments, engaged across disciplines) that enables a person to reach out for assorted, and changing, possibilities — of things, times, places, people, and ideas unrestricted by what’s presumed already experienced and known concerning subjective external reality. Additionally, ‘mirroring’ might occur in the imaginative process, where the absence of features of a mental scenario are filled in with analogues plucked from the external world around us. Ultimately, new knowledge and beliefs emerge, in a progressive loop of creation, validation, application, re-imagination.

Imagination might revolve around diverse dominions, like unconstrained creative thought, play, pretense, the arts, allegorical language, predictive possibilities, and imagery, among others. Imagination cannot, however, guarantee creative outcomes — nor can the role of intuition in human cognition — but imagination is essential (if not always sufficient) for creative results to happen. As explained by Kant, imagination has a ‘constitutive’ role in creativity. Something demonstrated by a simple example offered by 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes:

‘as when from the sight of a man at one time, and a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a Centaur’. 

Such imaginative, metaphorical playfulness being the stuff not only of absorbed, undaunted children, of course — though they are notably gifted with it in abundance — but also of freethinking adults. Adults whose minds marvel at alternatives in starting from scratch (tabula rasa), or from picking apart (divergence) and reassembling (convergence) presumed reality.

The complexities of imagination best nourish what one might call ‘purposeful creativity’ — where a person deliberately aims to achieve a broad, even if initially indeterminate outcome. Such imagining might happen either alone or with the involvement of other participants. With purposeful creativity, there’s agency and intentionality and autonomy, as is quintessentially the case of the best of thought experiments. It occasions deep immersion into the creative process. ‘Passive creativity’, on the other hand, is where someone has a spontaneous, unsought solution (a Eureka! moment) regarding a matter at hand.

Purposeful, or directed, creativity draws on both conscious and unconscious mechanisms. Passive creativity — with mind open to the unexpected — largely depends on unconscious mental apparatuses, though with the mind’s executive function not uncommonly collaboratively and additively ‘editing’ afterwards, in order to arrive at the final result. To be sure, either purposeful or passive creativity is capable of summoning remarkable insights.

The 6th-century BC Chinese spiritual philosopher Laozi perhaps most pithily described people’s capacity for creativity, and its sometimes-companion genius, with this figurative depiction in the Teo Te Ching, the context being to define ‘genius’ as the ability to see potential: ‘To see things in the seed’ — long before germination eventually makes those ‘things’ apparent, even obvious, to everyone else and become stitched into the fabric of society and culture.

On Black Holes and Amazing Discoveries

In 2019, astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope system announced that they had captured what they described as the first ever image of Black Hole

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Black Hole discovered in far-off galaxy?

“A Black Hole has been photographed at the centre of the galaxy M87, 55 million light-years from us. It's now been named Powehi, a Hawaiian phrase referring to an "embellished dark source of unending creation.”

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Steve Crothers* begs to disagree...

It is not a discovery at all.

Rather, this is how astronomers and cosmologists do science: fraud by means of mass-media induced mass-hysteria. It beggars belief. Think about it: according to the astronomers and cosmologists the finite mass of their black hole is concentrated in a 'physical singularity' of zero volume, infinite density, and infinite gravity. But no finite mass has zero volume, infinite density, and infinite gravity, anywhere!

Similarly, the astronomers and cosmologists assign to their black hole two different escape speeds: one of zero metres per second and one corresponding to the speed of light of 300,000,000 metres per second, and this in the same equation! At the same time there is no capacity for an escape speed (since nothing can even leave), simultaneously, at the same place (at the 'event horizon' meaning the boundary of a black hole beyond which nothing can escape from within it.). But nothing can have two different escape speeds and no capacity for an escape speed, simultaneously, at the same place! Furthermore, the astronomers and cosmologists assert that the escape speed at the event horizon is the speed of light, yet light cannot either leave or escape; indeed, nothing, they say, can even leave the event horizon. But since light travels at the speed of light, which is the escape speed at the event horizon, light must both leave it and escape! And, moreover, anything else can leave.

On the mathematical level, the black hole is conjured by violations of geometry. Geometrically speaking, the theory of black holes moves a sphere originally centred at the origin of a coordinate system to some other place in that same coordinate system but leaves its centre behind. By this means the two 'singularities' of the black hole are produced, the centre of the moved sphere, now thought to be an event horizon, and the left behind centre at the origin of coordinates, thought to be the 'physical singularity'. According to Black Hole theory, In the centre of a black hole is a gravitational singularity, a one-dimensional point which contains a huge mass in an infinitely small space, where density and gravity become infinite and space-time curves infinitely, and where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate.

Analytically speaking, the violation of geometry manifests in black hole theory as the requirement that the absolute value of a real number must take on negative values – which is impossible as I’ve argued in detail elsewhere. (For example, in a paper for Hadronic Journal called ‘On Corda’s “Clarification” of Schwarzschild’s Solution’).

The laws of thermodynamics require that temperature must always be an intensive thermodynamic property. (The first law, also known as Law of Conservation of Energy, states that energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of any isolated system always increases. ) To argue otherwise is a violation of both the 0th and 2nd laws of thermodynamics. The Hawking temperature of a black hole is however non-intensive, in violation of the laws of thermodynamics. (Stephen Hawking argued that quantum effects allow black holes to emit exact black-body radiation and that the electromagnetic radiation would be produced as if emitted by a black body with a temperature inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole.) So black hole thermodynamics is entirely nonsense as this video on the subject of Gravitational Thermodynamics demonstrates.

The conclusion must be that the black hole does not exist; proven with common sense and high-school science. Yet the astronomers and physicists have managed to image that which does not exist. To which we might say, of course they did - they have to justify their lucrative jobs and their vast grants of unaccountable public money.

Read more:

Stephen Crothers is a mathematician who has written and lectured on many of the problems with the standard model of cosmology. During his PHd thesis, at the School of Physics in the University of South Wales he studied General Relativity and Black Holes and found the concept to be inconsistent with General Relativity.

Crothers, S.J., A Critical Analysis of LIGO's Recent Detection of Gravitational Waves Caused by Merging Black Holes, Hadronic Journal, n.3, Vol. 39, 2016, pp.271-302,

http://vixra.org/pdf/1603.0127v5.pdf

Crothers, S.J., LIGO -- Its Claims for Black Holes and Gravitational Waves | EU2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev10ywLFq6E&t=496s

Crothers, S.J., Gravitational Waves: Propagation Speed is Co-ordinate Dependent, Poster Presentation, 2018 April APS Meeting, Columbus, Ohio, presented on 14th April 2018. http://vixra.org/pdf/1804.0399v1.pdf

Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered?

Posted by Keith Tidman

I’m a Platonist. Well, at least insofar as how mathematics is presumed ‘discovered’ and, in its being so, serves as the basis of reality. Mathematics, as the mother tongue of the sciences, is about how, on one important epistemological level, humankind seeks to understand the universe. To put this into context, the American physicist Eugene Wigner published a paper in 1960 whose title even referred to the ‘unreasonable effectiveness’ of mathematics, before trying to explain why it might be so. His English contemporary, Paul Dirac, dared to go a step farther, declaring, in a phrase with a theological and celestial ring, that ‘God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world’. All of which leads us to this consequential question: Is mathematics invented or discovered, and does mathematics underpin universal reality?

‘In every department of physical science, there is only so much science … as there is mathematics’ — Immanuel Kant

If mathematics is simply a tool of humanity that happens to align with and helps to describe the natural laws and organisation of the universe, then one might say that mathematics is invented. As such, math is an abstraction that reduces to mental constructs, expressed through globally agreed-upon symbols. In this capacity, these constructs serve — in the complex realm of human cognition and imagination — as a convenient expression of our reasoning and logic, to better grasp the natural world. According to this ‘anti-realist’ school of thought, it is through our probing that we observe the universe and that we then build mathematical formulae in order to describe what we see. Isaac Newton, for example, developed calculus to explain such things as the acceleration of objects and planetary orbits. Mathematicians sometimes refine their formulae later, to increasingly conform to what scientists learn about the universe over time. Another way to put it is that anti-realist theory is saying that without humankind around, mathematics would not exist, either. Yet, the flaw in this paradigm is that it leaves the foundation of reality unstated. It doesn’t meet Galileo’s incisive and ponderable observation that:

‘The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.’

If, however, mathematics is regarded as the unshakably fundamental basis of the universe — whereby it acts as the native language of everything (embodying universal truths) — then humanity’s role becomes to discover the underlying numbers, equations, and axioms. According to this view, mathematics is intrinsic to nature and provides the building blocks — both proximate and ultimate — of the entire universe. An example consists of that part of the mathematics of Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicting the existence of ‘gravitational waves’; the presence of these waves would not be proven empirically until this century, through advanced technology and techniques. Per this ‘Platonic’ school of thought, the numbers and relationships associated with mathematics would nonetheless still exist, describing phenomena and governing how they interrelate, bringing a semblance of order to the universe — a math-based universe that would exist even absent humankind. After all, this underlying mathematics existed before humans arrived upon the scene — awaiting our discovery — and this mathematics will persist long after us.

If this Platonic theory is the correct way to look at reality, as I believe it is, then it’s worth taking the issue to the next level: the unique role of mathematics in formulating truth and serving as the underlying reality of the universe — both quantitative and qualitative. As Aristotle summed it up, the ‘principles of mathematics are the principles of all things’. Aristotle’s broad stroke foreshadowed the possibility of what millennia later became known in the mathematical and science world as a ‘theory of everything’, unifying all forces, including the still-defiant unification of quantum mechanics and relativity. 

As the Swedish-American cosmologist Max Tegmark provocatively put it, ‘There is only mathematics; that is all that exists’ — an unmistakably monist perspective. He colorfully goes on:

‘We all live in a gigantic mathematical object — one that’s more elaborate than a dodecahedron, and probably also more complex than objects with intimidating names such as Calabi-Yau manifolds, tensor bundles and Hilbert spaces, which appear in today’s most advanced physics theories. Everything in our world is purely mathematical— including you.’

The point is that mathematics doesn’t just provide ‘models’ of physical, qualitative, and relational reality; as Descartes suspected centuries ago, mathematics is reality.

Mathematics thus doesn’t care, if you will, what one might ‘believe’; it dispassionately performs its substratum role, regardless. The more we discover the universe’s mathematical basis, the more we build on an increasingly robust, accurate understanding of universal truths, and get ever nearer to an uncannily precise, clear window onto all reality — foundational to the universe. 

In this role, mathematics has enormous predictive capabilities that pave the way to its inexhaustibly revealing reality. An example is the mathematical hypothesis stating that a particular fundamental particle exists whose field is responsible for the existence of mass. The particle was theoretically predicted, in mathematical form, in the 1960s by British physicist Peter Higgs. Existence of the particle — named the Higgs boson — was confirmed by tests some fifty-plus years later. Likewise, Fermat’s famous last theorem, conjectured in 1637, was not proven mathematically until some 360 years later, in 1994 — yet the ‘truth value’ of the theorem nonetheless existed all along.

Underlying this discussion is the unsurprising observation by the early-20th-century philosopher Edmund Husserl, who noted, in understated fashion, that ‘Experience by itself is not science’ — while elsewhere his referring to ‘the profusion of insights’ that could be obtained from mathematical research. That process is one of discovery. Discovery, that is, of things that are true, even if we had not hitherto known them to be so. The ‘profusion of insights’ obtained in that mathematical manner renders a method that is complete and consistent enough to direct us to a category of understanding whereby all reality is mathematical reality.

Q&A On the Status of the Speed of Light

Pi’s New Year Q&A: Is the One-way Speed of Light a Convention?

Martin Cohen and former Pi contributor, Muneeb Faiq explore one of the claimed certainties of physics.

To introduce the issue, here's blogger Burt Jordaan wondering, way back in January 2010, about why the 'speed of light' suddenly became the one true measure of all things scientific.

Burt writes:

'In order to measure any one-way velocity, we essentially need two clocks: one at the start and one at the end. Obviously, the two clocks need to be synchronized and run at the same rate (and to be sure, they must not be moving relative to each other and also be at the same gravitational potential). Let we reasonably assume that the two clocks run at the same rate, at least close enough for all practical purposes. Now we need to synchronize the two clocks to read the same at the same moment. How is this done?'

Recall that Einstein himself clearly admits, in his 1905 paper on Special Relativity, that: "We have not defined a common 'time' for A and B, for the latter cannot be defined at all unless we establish by definition that the 'time' required by light to travel from A to B equals the 'time' it requires to travel from B to A."

Burt says from this that what Einstein terms as being 'by definition' is equally 'by convention'*. Consider: Is the radius of space's curvature related to the speed of light?

The Q&A


Martin: That's a four-guinea question, innit? I believe conventional accounts make space into 'space-time' and the speed of light is allowed to determine things like that, yes.

Muneeb: I don't understand why Einstein established a religion of special abilities and qualities of light. Though there are ways to measure the speed of light but there is no reason to believe that nothing can travel faster. I think a few thought experiments should be propounded to at least break the myth that light owns special physics and light makes nature asymmetric.

There is a lot of confusion about the harmony between the classical and quantum definitions of speed, for example. If both quantum speed and classical speed mean the same then a very interesting difficulty comes to the front. Suppose there exists only one body in the universe. Just a single 'point-mass' and space. Is it at rest or in motion? If, however, there come out two photons of light moving parallel to each other. Now what speed are they moving at? If an observer is stationed on the point-mass, then both the photons are moving with the velocity of light. Yet, suppose, all of a sudden, the point-mass ceases to exist. Now there are only two photons moving with same speed parallel to each other. After all, nothing else exists except space. Before, when the point-mass existed, the two photons were moving with the velocity of light. After, when it has ceased to exist, they seem to not be moving at all! And yet nothing has changed regarding the photons. I hope I have made my point!

Martin: Yes, I get your point... I've wondered about this sort of thing too!

Isn't the usual idea that the universe started with a single point, 'the singularity', and at this time indeed none of the usual laws applied. Then there seems to be a suggestion that the speed of light may not have become 'defined' in the key moments of the first 'explosions'.

Now what this caused me to puzzle a little about, is that if, in fact, the singularity was one particle - as you say, a photon - and if it travels, by definition, at the speed of light, then surely it can be everywhere at the same instant, because of those peculiar Einsteinian laws. In other words, could it be that the universe consists of just one photon, which is everywhere, creating both space and time?

Bear with me! Suppose this is the universe, then why would it matter what speed the photon travelled at, any more than where it was or when? Nothing would be meant by these comparative terms.
What do you think? Can we put our ramblings into a form that would make a suitable webpage? I'd like to try, PI is a good way to organise and explore ideas.

Muneeb: There is an interesting point to note: what are usual laws? Why are they usual? Are the laws of physics really laws in the first place - because if they would really be laws; then they should never fail to explain behaviour of everything that exists. This difficulty hovered around the intellect of many great physicists - including Einstein - and that is why he spent so many years in search of a unified theory that he hoped would explain everything.

Mathematics, theory and philosophy should go hand-in-hand in order to get a further insight into reality. Otherwise we all have to be convinced (like Stephen Hawkings) that there can never be a grand unified theory. But I am afraid in that case, then we have to be convinced that there are no governing laws at all. All physics will melt away.

Instead, let physicists, philosophers and mathematicians come together and work in harmony in an open-hearted, interdisciplinary manner to understand what none of these disciplines will ever be able to get grasp of independently.

Martin:   Well, y'know, this is certainly a good question, but I'm not sure it is quite as clear a distinction as you imply. For example, we might say it is a law of physics that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, no? Without being obliged to throw that principle away just because (eg) some neutrinos evidently don't want to be part of the present theory about cosmic speed limits?

Muneeb:   Yes. You are right. We, of course, can say it is a law of physics that energy can neither be created nor destroyed without being obliged to throw that principle away just because some neutrinos evidently don't want to be part of the present theory about cosmic speed limits. But what is the applicability percentage of these well established laws? If energy and matter can neither be created nor destroyed, then from where did it blast into existence? Shall we then opt for the principle of first cause where these laws fail altogether? No Newtonian law holds good when we discuss atoms and sub-atomic particles. Einstein himself said that quantum mechanics (which is again a set of laws)is not absolute. Furthermore- quantum and classical worlds are composed of same material and, therefore, some basic underlying principles must be obeyed which we have not yet been able to discover. It is not the question of neutrinos only because most of the universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy which was concealed from over imagination for hundreds of years because of the over emphasis paid by physicists on the laws that are collectively described as quantum and classical mechanics.

The portion of the universes that the currently available laws explain is negligible as compared to the great splendour of dark matter and dark energy that fill the universes (previously we concieved only one universe but now we say universes). There may be some "extra-bright matter" and "extra-bright energy" awaiting our discovery. For that, we again have to wait for the failure of currently known laws of physics and those great mathematical equations that terrify all those who are not physicists and mathematicians. Once we fortunately fail, we will be obliged to look for an explanation for the failure and may consequently theorize existence of very weird materials and phenomena faintly conceivable as of now within the delineated perimeters of quantum and classical conditioning. That is why I emphasize on first understanding what makes the universe (what material and quality of materials and types thereof constitute everything), then we need to classify all that material and non material on some sound basis.

We also have to classify on the basis of discovered and not-discovered. Then we have to understand their behaviour. On the basis of the theory generated; we then can develope mathematics which explains things and helps us to imagine what we cant with the help of mere theory. I hope I don't sound insane!

Martin:   Mmmm, absolutely, I do agree that physics is full of 'black holes' to pun little! But I just want us to avoid addressing ill-founded assertions in conventional science with our own ill-founded assertions. For example, the 'dark matter' mystery - is this not a theoretical construct itself, intended to plug an experimental hole in current theory? You speak of it as a discovered reality, but isn't that to fall into the same way of thinking as the people you are critiquing?

Thinking about the 'problem' of where the energy in the universe came from, isn't it perfectly logical to simply say that there is no 'before' to be dealt with or explained?

Over to you, or anyone reading?

Muneeb: Haha! I am caught in a loop.I am not smart enough for arguments. However, though my writing apparently reveals that dark matter is a reality but I don't mean that. That is why I have guessed the existence of extra-bright matter and energy. What I am doing is to use the discoveries of physics to prove the inconsistencies in physics itself.

I should put a caveat here that I am not anti-science or anti physics. Dark matter was discovered by science to plug the black holes (as you say)and may be some other matter and energy will sooner or later be discovered which disproves everything. Does it mean that we should try to adjust our current theories without revising our basic understanding of the universes. Science has made aeroplanes fly etc. but that does not mean science is correct everywhere. Regarding your question of Un-important "before", please allow me to disagree with you because "before" is of great importance.

First question is; what time-point in the evolution of universes is the beginning? Why is a particular scale of past not a "before" and why all of a sudden we think of something as "before"? Cant it be that this "before" may give us inkling into the evolution of the behaviour of everything that apparently exists. What happened before big bang seems to me as important as what happened afterwards. This is because if we come to know the state, status and behaviour of matter, energy, space, time, void etc.before big bang, we will surely get some idea about how matter, space and time evolves to a better extent than if we stop at big bang. Thanks!