It's not a religious comparison, but I dislike "Government should be run like a business." It's an absurd, indefensible platitude that has no place in discussion between reasonable people.
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Isn't there some weird fundie thing about "Natural Law Theory" or some such crap?
Yeah. They think that if there is a "law" then there has to be a lawmaker. We had a discussion on that a while back here.
Personally I would like to know how natural laws came to be what they are. Things like why the speed of light is specifically the value it is. There are a bunch of universal constants, and I would love to know why they are what they are. I am probably asking too much though. "They just are" will probably be the best answer anyone can provide.
Essentially, that's about it. When the word law is applied to scientific principles, it isn't actually a set of rules as to how something has to behave. It is more an explanation of how things behave and why. As for the speed of light, for example, we have found by careful measurements that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. We know this to be a constant in the natural universe. But it isn't a rule that it has to be that speed, just that we have found it to be that speed. Laws, as in the rule of law, which is a man-made construct, can be changed and broken. The Laws of Physics, at least as far as our current level of knowledge and understanding, cannot.
Actually, the
speed of light has now been
defined to be exactly 299 792 458 meters per second—the meter is now defined in terms of the second via the speed of light.
In the next few years, we're going to make
similar changes to the kilogram, ampere, kelvin, and mole, so that all units will be defined in terms of the second:
- The Planck constant will be fixed, which will define the kilogram in terms of the meter and second.
- The Avogadro constant will be fixed, which will define the mole.
- The Boltzmann constant will be fixed, which will define the kelvin in terms of the kilogram, meter, and second.
- The electronic charge will be fixed, which will define the ampere in terms of the kilogram, meter, and second.
These definitions come about because, according to our best physical theories—theories that have been so well demonstrated that it is impossible to do modern physics without them—, several important measurable quantities are
quantized, i.e., may only take on certain specific values. This means that there are preferred
natural units:
- According to special relativity, massless particles are constrained to travel at a unique speed. That means that the speed of light is the natural unit for speed.
- According to quantum mechanics, orbital angular momentum can only arise as integer multiples of the smallest possible orbital angular momentum. Hence, the reduced Planck constant is the natural unit of angular momentum.
- According to atomic theory, matter is composed of discrete units, meaning that there is an indivisible, smallest amount of chemical substance. Thus we have the inverse Avogadro constant, the natural unit of chemical amount.
- According to statistical mechanics, at high temperatures the entropy can only take values equal to the Boltzmann constant times natural logarithms of positive integers. The Boltzmann constant is therefore the natural unit of entropy.
- As described by the Quantum Electrodynamics sector of the Standard Model of particle physics, all free charges in the universe come in integer multiples of the electronic charge, which makes it a natural unit of charge.
The lesson to be learned from this is that it doesn't make sense to ask questions about the magnitude of
dimensionful quantities, because their values are just a vestige of our primitive unit system; only
dimensionless quantities matter. So, when you ask a question like "Why is the speed of light so very fast?", you are actually asking the question "Why are human beings so damn slow when compared to light?"
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