Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 2380956" data-attributes="member: 177">Again, yes and no.  In some ways, we can see farther away better than we can see nearby - we know the structures of distant nebulae better than we know our own Oort cloud, for example.  Distant stars are easier to see than most asteroids, and so on.And, in terms of determining what the very basic rules of physics are, the stars and high-energy objects are a darned good source of information, and we see them pretty well.  In terms of the fundamental interactions, we know quite a bit.Yes, and the age of that information is a help, rather than a hindrance.  One you've seen one main sequence star, you've seen them all.  Looking back in time allows us a greater bredth of information over a larger range of conditions - it increases our understanding, rather than limiting it.  To link this to another part of this thread - we cannot say how much we know (a sort of scientific agnosticism).  Only a third party who knows a great deal more than us could say that we only have a small part of the picture.  Unless you've been in contact with such an entity, no estimation of the completeness of our models can be made.You're making an unfounded generalization that what is possible on a micro level is also possible on a macro level, that quantum mechanics trumps all other laws on all scales. You're also hiding behind the word "very".  "Very" conceals many things.  "Very, very unlilikely" covers everything from winning the lottery and getting hit bylightning to a thing that would not have happened once even if the Universe were several thousands of times older than it is.  With probability, as with spacial and temporal measurement, you eventually hit a scale where measurement becomes meaningless - you can't measure a distance shorter than a Planck length, and beyond a certain point, an improbable event becomes impossible.   I don't know your education, but to a professional scientist, "law" equates to "sufficiently well-tested theory".  And, like Newtonian gravity and Ensteinian Relativity, quantum mechanics has been put through the ringer.  It makes every single piece of solid-state electronics on the planet run.  The current models give amazingly accurate predictions from zero energy up through and beyond the energies found within stars.  Up at that high end, it needs refinement. And up beyond that, when gravity starts to be an issue, we need work, yes.  But, down around where we live, in my room where this pig is supposed to show up, it works just fine, thanks. The "certain instances" you mention are the conditions seen throughout the billions and billions of cubic light years of space we can see.  "Certain instances" means - "the visible Universe".</blockquote>

Verification