- Oct 17, 2011
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Certain people here have asserted that things we learn in our labs here on earth today have no application to phenomena in outer space or in the distant past.
This is, at best, an unsupported assertion, but really, everything we know suggests it is false, as I and others have forcefully argued.
I bring it up, because the current Scientific American has an article about time crystals that addresses the topic quite clearly. Although it's brought up in a totally different context, it's certainly relevant to whether scientific knowledge can be applied to data derived from times and places remote from our own.
Without space and time translation symmetry, experiments carried out in different places and at different times would not be reproducible. In their everyday work, scientists take those symmetries for granted. Indeed, science as we know it would be impossible without them. But it is important to emphasize that we can test space and time translation symmetry empirically. Specifically, we can observe behavior in distant astronomical objects. Such objects are situated, obviously, in different places, and thanks to the finite speed of light we can observe in the present how they behaved in the past. Astronomers have determined, in great detail and with high accuracy, that the same laws do in fact apply.
This is, at best, an unsupported assertion, but really, everything we know suggests it is false, as I and others have forcefully argued.
I bring it up, because the current Scientific American has an article about time crystals that addresses the topic quite clearly. Although it's brought up in a totally different context, it's certainly relevant to whether scientific knowledge can be applied to data derived from times and places remote from our own.
Without space and time translation symmetry, experiments carried out in different places and at different times would not be reproducible. In their everyday work, scientists take those symmetries for granted. Indeed, science as we know it would be impossible without them. But it is important to emphasize that we can test space and time translation symmetry empirically. Specifically, we can observe behavior in distant astronomical objects. Such objects are situated, obviously, in different places, and thanks to the finite speed of light we can observe in the present how they behaved in the past. Astronomers have determined, in great detail and with high accuracy, that the same laws do in fact apply.