On Sep 10, 12:54 pm, "Aaron" wrote:
"Knud Soerensen" wrote in message

. dk...

Maybe it should be
"the study of cause and effect in physical systems"
it also possible to study cause and effects in example economical systems.

I can't abide using the word "physic" in the the definition of physics
Whaa!! I'm a baby.


Actually, I don't agree that it's a study of cause and effect. Science
in general is the study of regularities in the behavior of things. For
instance, we observe that momentum is consistently conserved in closed
system, a remarkable regularity, even though we have no idea what
momentum IS, or what CAUSES it to be conserved. We just note that it
just seems to be true that it always does.

If you get into demanding cause and effect, then you start demanding a
theory with no free parameters or choices whatsover, such that there
could be no possible way nature to be other than the way that it is.
While such a goal is a noble goal, there is nothing in science that
bears that characteristic, and there is certainly no indication that
we are any closer to realizing that than we ever were. The cause
question just shifts. We know that the speed of light is constant
because of the structure of spacetime, but that begs the question why
spacetime has the structure it has. There is no end to questions like
that.

Moreover, quantum mechanics has predicted, and experiment has
confirmed, that strict causal determinism is not strictly observed in
nature.

PD