[Choc13]

Apologies, I wasn’t trying to call you a troll, more that your first comment seemed to me like it might have been made in jest, clearly it wasn’t.

The articles you’ve linked to are interesting and there are clearly many scientific discoveries to be made by studying the early formation of the universe which will test our current models. However I don’t feel like convention is the right word for laws like the conservation of energy, even if there are some difficulties with tying up these theories and new experimental evidence from events at the scale of the Planck length.

Convention to me would mean something that has been accepted just because it’s always been done that way and people didn’t really bother to question why, but I don’t think that’s the case here. But we’re verging on pedantry now so no point going down that route any further.

[deltasixeight]

>Convention to me would mean something that has been accepted just because it’s always been done that way and people didn’t really bother to question why.

You're wrong. The Thermodynamic laws are sort of axiomatic, meaning you really can't explain why energy is conserved. It's just experimentally shown to be maybe true, but no one knows why energy is conserved or has actually proved it to be true. It is totally "convention" as you defined it.

The caveat here is that entropy is not axiomatic. Entropy occurs as a consequence of probability. Probability is the real axiomatic assumption of the universe and entropy is a byproduct.

The thermodynamic laws were established before people fully understood the true nature of what was going on with entropy so these laws are sort of a hodge podge of axioms and derived theorems. From a temperature perspective these assumptions work so the laws still have their use. But the laws of thermodynamics aren't some elegant grouping of fundamental laws of the universe. It is a set of rules that are grouped arbitrarily.

>But we’re verging on pedantry now so no point going down that route any further.

I find this attitude rude. You called him a troll than apologized then gave your final answer and dismissed any further discussion as "pedantry." Like wow, you get the last word and shut down anything else he has to say? You were rude to assume he was in jest and you're being rude again by saying any further discussion after your final statement is pedantry.

Either way I disagree with you. It's not pedantry. This discussion is about convention and the conservation of energy. Your statement is wrong.

[ergocoder]

Thank you for writing this and introducing the word axiomatic. I was using the word convention as something that is defined and unquestionable. It's an assumption we base all of our physics equation on. Axiomatic might capture the meaning better.

This means, and I assume, we can also base all of our equations on say "energy is not conserved and always increase by 1 Joule", though the physics equations might be much more complex.

Pro-science folks are too enthusiastic about current science to the point that they become unscientific. Pointing out that these theories/laws/conventions might become invalid in the future is getting downvoted.

Newsflash: physics theories/laws/conventions are getting invalidated all the time.