I was explaining to him the difference between a law and a theory, which, despite the fact that he even looked up the words, he still did not understand.

Spuzzum wrote:

That's a pretty semantic definition, though. For our purposes, laws are unequivocally true. We've never seen them get disproved despite considerable experimentation, ergo, we hold them as proven.

Actually, Boyle's Law has been disproven under certain conditions. =)

There may have been a useful distinction between a law and a theory once, I don't know ... but I don't think there is now.

Spuzzum wrote:

3) Einstein's theories of General Relativity and Special Relativity are widely accepted in the scientific community, but there are still many people who strongly disbelieve in them.

I can understand most people with no real knowledge of physics not believing Einstein's theories. They go against what we seem to experience in everyday life. It's very much akin to people from centuries ago believing that the world was flat. Why wouldn't you believe this? It seems pretty darn flat (with a few bumps) as far as the eye can see. The earth's curvature is slight enough that anyone could travel for miles and miles without noticing any difference. Of course it made sense that the world was flat. To think it was a sphere would be absolutely insane!

Same with relativity. And quantum mechanics, for that matter. Neither makes sense in the context of human experience, because both describe phenomena that are observable only well outside the realm of our normal experience. But they describe those phenoma much more accurately than classical mechanics, and have been verified by countless experiments. I seriously doubt either theory is anywhere close to being 100% correct -- I feel like we're just scratching the surface in terms of truly understanding everything about the physical world. But it boggles my mind to see extremely intelligent people such as yourself write the theory off as patently false. :)

The same operation applied to two different vector or scalar quantities is, in my belief, invariable. 2 * 297,000 km/s is 594,000 km/s, without exception.

Sure, this is true. The problem is that velocities do not add using simple vector math. They must be added with the Lorentz transformation. This mathematically gives us the result that special relativity says must occur - that the relative velocities will not exceed c. Math still works, special relativity still works, and classical mechanics are still "close enough" for everyday measurements. Everyone's happy.

Oh well. Back to the original point of this thread, there's no real point in trying to make other people on the internet see things your way. Everyone has their own opinion, so who cares if some guy who overuses the letter 'u' doesn't always agree with you. :)

I do not know if you people noticed this, but this thread will never, ever end. All of you have your own "opinions" and you have been repeating it over and over again. This thread should be closed.

Stephen Hawking also lives his life making theories. We will never be able to prove 90% (or more) of what he says.

Jotdaniel wrote:

Stephen Hawking also lives his life making theories. We will never be able to prove 90% (or more) of what he says.

I think that we can't prove that 90% or more of what *you* say is true.

But then again, everything I say is a lie.