Talk: Physical law

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The section "Description" is a nonneutral point of view. The rest of the article is not as bad, but still mostly carries a subtle bias in favor of the existence of universal, eternal, absolute laws. For example, even the sentence which suggests we might not know the ultimate physical laws still assumes the existence of physical laws in the sense put forth under "Description". Critical 02:01, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

About Users Critical and CStar

For the record, the user Critical ( talk, contributions), who slapped the "disputed NPoV" sticker on this page, has made his or her first edits tonight (or today) and within less than two hours has attacked eight articles for PoV, including (ironically given the CStar example given on the Logical fallacy talk page), Physical law. These were the only "edits" (plus weak justifications on talk pages in the same vein as this one). I don't think the PoV claim has merit. We may ask if this series of attacks is to be taken seriously.

For the following reasons I am thinking that these pages has been the victim of a tiresome semi-sophisticated troll and the PoV sticker should be removed sooner rather than later, if not immediately. We may note that CStar ( talk, contributions) after making edits, paused during the period user Critical made edits, and then CStar took up responding to these edits after the series of user Critical edits ends, as if there is only one user involved, and the user logged out, changed cookies and logged back in. Further, user CStar left a note on Charles Matthew's talk page, Chalst's talk page, and Angela's talk page pointing to a supposed PoV accusation placed on the Logical argument page, when in fact no such sticker has been placed. Perhaps the irony regarding the Physical law page is not so ironic. Hu 05:18, 2004 Dec 1 (UTC)

I have responded to this on the logical fallacy talk page, as well as on the pages of the above mentioned users. It does appear that these pages were as Hu suggests the victim of a tiresome semi-sophisticated troll. But I wasn't the perpetrator. This suggestion appears to have been an honest mistake, I consider the matter closed, and it appears that Hu does as well. CSTAR 01:41, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Knowledge and epistemology

I wasn't aware of this page until the little incident alluded to by the above discussion brought it to my attention. Now that I'm here though I do have some remarks about the article (Yikes but I won't dare touch it)

• Doesn't the first paragraph mix two things which should be separate? (1) What is a physical law is and (2) how we obtain physical laws.

Now it is arguable that one can't meaningfully separate the two. I don't think I believe that, but I'm certain willing to listen to an argument in favor of this.

• Do physical laws have to be generalizations? If so, how general do they have to be? Generality does seem to be a desirable property of physical laws, but again I don't think this really gets to the heart of the matter. Some kid discovering the principle that toys fall when let go, has discovered a physical law.
• The properties of physical laws listed in the Description section, should have more clearly identified source attribution, that is some comment such as

• Universality (R. P. Feynman, The Feynman lectures on XYZ, 1971).

Some of these I find hard to believe can be attributed to the sources mentioned. For instance, the property of Omnipotence to Feynman? Maybe, but I find it hard to swallow that he would have said something like that.

CSTAR 17:28, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

References are now clearly distinguished.--Johnstone 14:32, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)