Talk:Laws of science

laws and theories
Theories CANNOT become laws because laws are general statements about nature. That is why gravity's principles is a law, while gravity itself is a theory. I will fix this. -intranetusa

Subscript textHow about, "Thou shalt not fudge the data"?

Hmm, isn't computer simulation and modelling an institutionalized form of fudging?

(Sorry for my bad English!) Would it be posible to distinguish between "real" laws, ie those which may be used as "axiom" by well-established subfields of physics, and "theorems"?

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chani " "law" differs from those as hypotheses, theories, postulates, and principles, etc., in that a law is a general statement about nature that is considered proven beyond doubt." Corrected it, taking out theories of the statement. Not the way it should be corrected, but better than leaving people thinking theories might not reflect truth.


 * A law is an analytic statment, the law may be empirically determined or the law maybe the result of a theory. Also a theory could be the result of a law. A law is NOT a theroy which is know really well. The article of scientific law makes this distinction much better. Aiden Fisher 23:08, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
 * I am taking an astronomy class right now. Relativity is not a law. Quantum Mechanics are not laws John196920022001 (talk)

Page move query
I suggest we move this page (List of laws in science) to: Laws of science. Any objections? --Sadi Carnot 09:40, 29 November 2006 (UTC)


 * It's moved. --Sadi Carnot 14:12, 3 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Per wiki policy, this article should be renamed to "Law of Science". Right?  --68.122.193.47 (talk) 02:38, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

What about biological laws?
They are not laws of science? Laws of nature? Mendel's laws? Hardy-Weinberg principle? --Filll 18:49, 16 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Universal laws apply anywhere in the universe; earth-related genetic mutation laws, for example, might not apply in other parts of the universe. --Sadi Carnot 01:10, 19 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Lots of things we call laws might not apply everywhere in the universe and for all time.--Filll 01:11, 19 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I guess you could classify this page as the "laws of hard science". --Sadi Carnot 21:52, 1 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Biology is classified as a hard science. So if that is the criteria for inclusion we should include the laws of biology. Joja  lozzo  15:06, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Question on einsteins laws
I thought they were theories but that newtons general law of gravitation was the law that the theory of einsteins general relativity was based on and so i thought it would be consider a theory.


 * Relativity is based on the idea that the laws of physics are of the same form in every reference frame, which actually leads mathematically to Einsteins formula for gravitation. It is not based on Newton's equation, although at low energies the two formulas are pretty much the same.  Newton's law has been found to not always hold in certain situations and so no longer is a law in that sense, although the idea of universal gravitation is still a law, but you must use Einstein's formula to describe it if it is to be valid everywhere. Roy Brumback 05:23, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

What about the assumption that nothing can travel faster than light in Einstein's general/special theory of relativity? I understand that it is a pretty obvious postulate that the laws of physics are the same in every reference frame is certainly reasonable but to suddenly assume that nothing that travel faster than light brings some speculation over if it can be proven or not. Then going into quantum mechanics. Like the existance of super high energy gamma rays contradicts that there will be a limit as to how much hv a light wave/particle can carry. even if it was a proton going .99999 the speed of light the theory of relativity says that it would be incredibly massive and that there is not enough energy to make a proton go that fast. Scientist are planing to make protons go that fast at a particle accelerator to create a higgs particle to see if it exist and have made protons go near the speed of light not using the incredible amount of energy required by the special theory of relativity says as protons do have a rest mass. Just some thought on that aspect. Oh well back on Newtons laws, (taken out of "A History of Pi")"Contrary to widespread belief, Newton's laws of motion are not contradicted by Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity. Newton never made the statement that the force equals mass times acceleration. His Second Law says F=d(mv)/dt and Newton was far to cautious a man to take the m out of the bracket. When mass, in Einstein's interpretation, became a function of velocity, not an iota in Newton's laws needed to be changed. It is therefore incorrect to regard relativistic mechanics as refining or even contradicting Newton's laws: Einstein's building is still anchored in the 3 Newtonian foundation stones, but the building is twisted to accommodate eletromagnetic phenomena as well. True Newton's law of gravitation turned out to be (very slightly) inaccurate; but this law even though it led to Newton to the discovery of the foundation stones, is not a foundation stone itself." written by Petr Beckmann. Even thought Newtons general law of gravitation may not be true his 3 laws of motion are laws.Barry White 03:58, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Incorrect description about force
Force is not always equal to rest mass times acceleration divided by Lorentz Factor. Indeed this only holds true when the force is parallel to the velocity. In Special Relativity, force may not be parrallel to the acceleration. Thljcl 09:12, 6 October 2007 (UTC) ]]

...a law is ...?

 * "...a law is an analytic statement, usually with an empirically determined constant...."

I have no idea what this means.

Is "an analytic statement" as used here the same as an analytic statement of logical positivism? It doesn't seem to be. Ivar Y (talk) 07:37, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
 * A law is an observation of nature or how nature behaves.24.172.42.10 (talk) 14:45, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

What about the life sciences? social sciences?
A notable omission from this article are laws to do with the life sciences (and, perhaps, the social sciences). I propose to add more laws from other disciplines to this article. For instance, the two laws of Mendelian inheritance from genetics should obviously be included as well. However, the wording in the lead suggests that the term is only applicable to physical laws. This is clearly not a neutral point of view: our own article scientific law allows that scientific laws exist in the life sciences and social sciences as well. And any textbook on the philosophy of science worth its salt will allow that scientific laws may be other than laws of the physical sciences. Another way forward is to move the article to laws of physics or list of physical laws, if we are truly keen on restricting to the physical sciences. At any rate, I will flag the offending passage in the article as dubious until this matter is resolved. Sławomir Biały (talk) 14:16, 27 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I see that User:Filll has already pointed this out above, before being told off for the rather suspect reason that "laws of science" must apply everywhere in the universe, and that biology is not a "hard science". Try telling that to a biologist, by the way. Sławomir Biały (talk) 14:18, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Incorrect information about the status of laws.
This article states that there are 18 basic (which is ambiguous) laws, and lists them out. This information is dramatically incorrect. For instance, it lists Kepler's laws near Newton's law of gravitation. This is redundant, considering that Kepler's laws can all be derived from Newton's law of gravitation. This is also incorrect, as Newton's law of gravitation was disproven circa 1900 when it was found that it incorrectly predicted the orbit of Mercury, and Newton's law was replaced with Einstein's field equations, the "laws" of general relativity, as it were. Even things like Newton's laws of motion have been disproven by the discovery of the uncertainty principal and relativity, and they're listed next to each other.

Likewise, modern equations, such as the electroweak Lagrangian, the Lambda-CDM model, and others can be used to derive the principals of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, electromagnetism, chemistry, etc. Modern science does not point to 18 laws. —Preceding unsigned comment added by UniversumExNihilo (talk • contribs) 15:15, 11 September 2010 (UTC)


 * The present article is something of a mess. For one thing, it doesn't clearly (or correctly) say what a law is.  The article scientific law does so, and I think much of the present article needs to be revised in the light of that definition.  For one thing, there is nothing wrong with having Kepler's law and Newton's law of universal gravitation as being separate scientific laws: they are the distillation of repeated observations, in the sense that if one performs the same observations under similar conditions, then one will get similar results.  It isn't relevant to their status as a law that one can be derived from the other with some effort.  Likewise, these law aren't "disproven": they are empirical laws that remain as accurate now as they ever were, even though a theory that gives more accurate predictions under a wider class of conditions is now available (e.g., stronger gravitational fields).  I think a lot of the entries in the present article go a bit beyond "laws", particularly the equations of relativity and quantum mechanics, which belong more to the physical theory than the law.  For comparison, whereas the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a concise empirical statement, the Schrodinger equation does not seem to be.   Sławomir Biały  (talk) 20:24, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

Hopefully no one will mind, i'll change the section headings to subject material and re-organize the material, I will not remove anything. The sections are mixed between definite scientific material (ex EM, Thermodynamics, Chemistry) and laws due to specfic physcists (ex Einstein, Newton). The article is about the laws used in science, it would be better to group under subject headings and list all laws relavant to those fields to demonstrate a more logical structure to the field.

Eienstein's Laws will become Laws of Relativity, Newton's Laws become classical mechanics, equations relavant to classical and relativistic mechanics are to be moved to those sections. Other parts may be moved around. Some parts of formulation are not laws, but assumptions/postulates or proposals, which are then found to work so further classification may be introduced.

Maschen (talk) 16:32, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

(intensional) re-write
For an article of this importance - it’s not good enough. I'm going to rewrite most of the physics from a fundamental point of view, including odds and ends which may be useful, and similarly for chemistry. F = q(E+v×B) ⇄ ∑ici 15:49, 20 April 2012 (UTC)


 * The article now has at least some structure, all the "fundamental" (at least starting points for a solving problems) are in the tables, in some heirachy of importance. I haven’t the time right now to take the next step and re-write more of it though... It would be good for those experts in Biology to add things like (say) Mendelian inheritance laws, The Hardy–Weinberg principle, or anything else in statistical genetics or whatever else... same for specialized chemists (though surely chemical laws are absorbed in the physics sections...). Hope this is improvement at the minimum... =| F = q(E+v×B) ⇄ ∑ici 09:31, 7 May 2012 (UTC)


 * WikiProject Biology has been notified here. Chemistry is not much of a problem. F = q(E+v×B) ⇄ ∑ici 22:56, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

??? ...
I removed (at least for now) from Laws of Quantum mechanics:


 * "It is thought that the successful integration of Einstein's field equations with the uncertainty principle and Schrödinger equation, something no one has achieved so far with a testable theory, will lead to a theory of quantum gravity, the most basic physical law sought after today."

because there is no source, and surely there are many ways physicists are trying to find quantum gravity and unification... Add this back if it can be verified... F = q(E+v×B) ⇄ ∑ici 00:13, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

Merge Scientific law into lead here
See Talk:Scientific law and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Science. Thanks, F = q(E+v×B) ⇄ ∑ici 10:01, 7 May 2012 (UTC)


 * There is no more involvement and no (clear) consensus to merge, so I will remove the tags - they have been there almost a month already... F = q(E+v×B) ⇄ ∑ici 22:17, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

style/presentation of article
Hrm... The new reformulations look nice, but there really shouldn't be bullet points for all the non-fundamental laws. Those segments should be written in continuous prose, as a description of how these laws are related/derived/obtained and describe and predict physical phenomena for their applicable conditions, with the formulae displayed like in most other articles as part of the text, not listed. There should not be just worded statements of the equation itself: "X is proporional to Y" (etc) as this is blatently obvious from the equation. When I get time I'll try this myself. The tables look good for making the more fundamental laws stand out, and how they can be organized. Maschen (talk) 20:05, 9 May 2012 (UTC)


 * True, and good points. I had this in another mind, and will also try and rewrite when I get time... F = q(E+v×B) ⇄ ∑ici 20:10, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Mistakes in Kepler's laws?
In the section "Classical laws", I think the following two things may be mistakes:

•In the equation in polar coordinates for the ellipse of Kepler's first law, why is there an r-hat on the right hand side?

•Prior to the equation for Kepler's third law, it says "The square of the orbital time period T is proportional to the mean radius a. To agree with the equation, shouldn't it say "... is proportional to the cube of the mean radius r"? ("Cube" is missing, and notation is not consistent.)

More generally, I would note that in a number of places in the article, notation is used without being defined.

208.50.124.65 (talk) 19:18, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

Hooke's laws
Where is hooke's law? I like the idea of this page but it seems highly lacking in lots of well known scientific laws. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.31.0.40 (talk) 03:40, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Merge Scientific Law into this article?

 * Strongest possible agree The article has been tagged by another user, given that they're both on the same topic, and that the scientific law article is so incredibly stubby, it seems to be overwhelmingly positive thing to do the merge.GliderMaven (talk) 15:55, 15 May 2018 (UTC)


 * Strongly agree for the same reasons as GliderMaven. The article titled Scientific law is very weak. I am disappointed that this merger proposal has not drawn more participation.—Finell 01:14, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment: What am I missing? How would adding a paragraph with the content from the merger help this article? --Ancheta Wis   (talk  &#124; contribs) 02:48, 2 August 2018 (UTC)


 * (edit conflict) I agree with this as well. This issue hasn't been raised since this discussion in 2012 which ended with no consensus. As there has been no opposition over the last several months, I've gone ahead and performed the merge (choosing Scientific law as the target for consistency with related articles). If a separate article is necessary, it may be reasonable to split some of the content back out to List of scientific laws (currently a redirect) or to Philosophy of scientific laws, but the split into "Scientific law" and "Laws of science" doesn't really represent a valid distinction. The status of Physical law should also be clarified; a merge with that article has also been proposed a couple of times and I'd be willing to support that as well. Sunrise (talk) 02:54, 2 August 2018 (UTC) Adding a ping to  for completeness. Sunrise (talk) 02:58, 2 August 2018 (UTC)