One of the things I learned later on in my physics classes was that physical laws don’t necessarily guarantee uniqueness. Of course, when written out, this sounds obvious — why would we expect a particular set of laws to always guarantee only one satisfying physical state? — but intuitively I didn’t recognize this until later on.
Category: Physics
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Laws and Initial Conditions in Physics
In this post, I argue that, in the grand scheme of the description of the physics of all reality (all objects in reality), the designation of which scientific assertions are “the laws” and which assertions are “the initial conditions” is relative and informal. A similar statement can probably be made about other branches of science too, especially “hard” science like chemistry.
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The Falsifiability of Newton’s Laws
Consider the following thought experiment: we setup an experiment consisting initially of objects and known forces, and we run Newton’s laws to predict the motion of the objects. We then run the experiment, and the observed results do not match the predicted calculations. Can we just attribute the discrepancy to a new force that we haven’t yet studied, and still satisfy Newton’s laws with this just-defined unknown force? Can we explain all discrepancies with Newton’s laws in this way? Then, are the laws really saying anything materially? Can we think of forces as convenient mathematical devices to represent “contributions of mass times acceleration”?
In other words, taken away from the specific laws of gravity and the other forces, are Newton’s laws themselves falsifiable?
Consider a two-qubit system in quantum state 
In this post, I discuss some philosophical questions concerning uniqueness and validity of theories in physics.
