note: this discussion has turned for the better;read pgs/Where do the laws come from?

Suppose you start with stuff (could be particles, energy, whatever), and suppose that there are interactions within the stuff.Some of the stuff configurations (or arrangements) will be unstable, some might be highly stable, and some might be somewhat stable.The unstable configurations will break up, allowing the stuff in them to interact with other stuff. The highly stable configurations will tend to persist. The somewhat stable configurations will persist for a while, but might eventually break up.The effect will be some sort of self-organization of the stuff, just by virtue of the persistence of stable configurations and the breaking up of unstable configurations.Scientific laws are just human constructs that attempt to describe the resulting self-organized system.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

If there weren't any laws, we would have to invent some.Come to think of it, that's exactly what happened, as already mentioned by Nutcase in Message 2.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

It's a waste of effort. Those proofs never work anyway.The whole point of such a proof is to bamboozle people (perhaps including yourself) by hiding the circularity where it is hard to find. But such proofs are always circular if you look hard enough.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

Try "aphelion" and "perihelion".I don't quite agree with your reasoning. If the earth were to settle in a circular orbit at current aphelion, things might get a bit cold.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

Sure, I agree with that.I guess I didn't explain my point all that well. The actual distances from the sun at aphelion and perihelion are not all that important. The earth could move into an even more eliptical orbit without much affect. It's the average distance that is mainly important (ignoring, for the moment, the effect of greenhouse gases). And therefore crashfrog's reasoning that used aphelion and perihelion is a bit of a red herring.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

People have been answering your question. You just don't like the answers they are giving.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

I'm wondering why you challenged me on this, but did not challenge Nutcase over Message 2. How could they not be invented. Perhaps you have not noticed, but science has given us a great deal of control over nature. That's likely. But I expect you have plenty of company in that.If I walk around, I might be able to pick up an apple. It will help, of course, if I am walking under an apple tree. However, no matter how much I walk around, I will never be able to pick up a length or a metre or a time or a second. These things (length, time, etc) are not themselves part of nature. They are abstractions that we find useful when describing nature. And if they are abstractions, then they are human invented abstractions.If you look carefully at the so-called "laws of nature", they are not laws of nature at all. They are statements of relations between human invented abstractions. So how could then not themselves be human inventions?Granted, we use these abstractions to talk about nature. That's why they were invented. It is pretty hard to talk about nature without having suitable abstractions such as length and time. But inventing abstractions is not enough. If we invent abstractions and make up rules about them, what we have is mathematics. In order for our abstractions to be useful for describing nature, we must connect those abstractions to the natural world. Although this may be poorly understood, connecting our abstractions to the natural world is one of the most important parts of science.We connect our abstractions with the natural world, by means of procedures we carry out. Incidently, science students learn how to use these procedures in their lab classes, and that is why lab time is such an important part of science education. These connecting procedures are often measuring procedures.Many of the most important laws of physics are just formalized statements of the procedures that we follow to connect our abstractions to nature.To summarize:In order to describe the world, we invent abstractions (philosophers might call them universals). As part of that invention, we develop (i.e. invent) procedures that connect our abstractions with the natural world. Many of our scientific laws are formalizations of these procedures, and hence are inventions.I hope that helps to clarify.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber