If you start with the premise that past performance is the best predictor of future performance, then obviously most if not all scientific models today will be proven inadequate or just wrong in the next 5,000 years, starting tomorrow.

Very recently cosmology had taught us theory states that there are only three possible states of the current universe, 1. expanding forever 2. expanding every more slowly until essentially static 3. expanding until it starts to collapse. That is, expand forever, stay the same, collapse. What else could there be? Then it was discovered that the universe is not only expanding, but accelerating. Am I right, in that acceleration is work and thus the energy has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere has to be within a closed system, that is our universe.

And yes, we do affect what happens in the universe, by observing it. Don’t take my word for it, Google it, its part of current physics.

The current models in physics are limited to solving specific problems, and in that way are very valid. That said, they solve the problems that they postulate.
I would suggest tolerance. Even further, we need “crackpot” ideas like tomatoes need fertilizer.

Rudeness to new ideas is a sign of either old age or young simplistic over-enthusiasm. There is the problem of sorting out new concepts with merit from those that are dead ends, but if you can not do that politely then say nothing.

I enjoyed Wilhelm Godschalk, and can understand his frustration with physics as it is taught in high school and beyond. One of the problems is how poorly the fundamental concepts are explained. I received much better clarity by reading Isaac Asimov.

To name something is not to explain it. I still don’t understand why no one can define time, or explain permanent magnets, or what the universe is expanding/accelerating into?

As for evolution vs intelligent design, it seems to me both sides ignore the evidence for the other. I predict neither side is right!

I apologize for the long delay in replying. I’ve moved halfway around the world, and haven’t spent much time checking the comments here.

Like Eddie, you need to hit the books, too. Modern physics is a unitary whole; the various laws, principles, and theories have all been reconciled with each other in the previous centuries. Suggesting that the Law of Universal Gravitation violates the First Law of Thermodynamics suggests you do not understand physics all that well.

The related concepts of work, energy and the laws of thermo were all developed after Newton’s mechanics by more than a dozen scientists over the course of a century. Einstein’s E = mc² dropped in one of the last pieces of the puzzle in 1905. For any of these ideas to be accepted by the wider scientific community, their developers had to show that their theories would give the same results as Newton’s mechanics for physical processes. During the 1800s, that kind of reconciliation happened. By 1905 the concepts of work, energy and thermodynamics were widely accepted. After all, they worked supremely well.

Now, for details. Work is defined in terms of a force acting over a distance. For objects moving toward or away from the earth’s surface, that distance is the height above some arbitrary reference point — the floor, for example. The object and the earth form a system, and strictly speaking they both move around a common center of gravity — the earth pulls down, the book pulls up. {Third Law of Motion} Since the earth is so much heavier than the object, it moves only fractionally. {Second Law of Motion} For convenience and as a very good approximation, we assume the earth is stationary.

At a certain height, the object has zero kinetic energy. If you drop the object, gravity does work on it, increasing its kinetic energy until the object hits the floor. Then that kinetic energy is transformed into the energy needed to push the air around (to make a noise) and the kinetic energy of the individual molecules of the object and floor (to heat things up). Thus, we can account for all of the object’s KE — no energy is created or destroyed.

There is another kind of energy, potential energy, which is actually defined in terms of force and distance just as work is. This concept was introduced to explain how the KE of the object went from zero to something else, apparently creating something from nothing. At a certain height, the object has a certain gravitational PE, which decreases to zero as it falls. PE at the top = KE at the bottom (assuming no air resistance)

The earth, meanwhile, also participates in this energy exchange, and the change in its KE and PE is equal to that of the object. Strictly speaking, we would need to correct for the motion of the earth toward the object; practically speaking, we ignore it. It is less than the diameter of an atom, so who really cares?

Physics is just a model for the real world, when you get down to it. It is an imperfect model, but it works very well. The law of gravitation does not violate of the laws of thermodynamics because physicists have expressed both in ways that enable them to give valid results while fitting into the same overall model of the universe.

Finally, the first law of thermo more properly states that in a closed system no energy can be created nor destroyed. Science denialists somehow gloss over that important little clause.

You seriously need to study some real science texts — not the slanted versions of science contained in creationist tracts. Your understanding of evolution is just plain wrong.

Your body and my body do not “evolve.” Evolution is not at all apparent within the lifetime of a single human being, or perhaps even within the lifetimes of 100 generations of human beings. It is a slow process, like continental drift.

Secondly, a person did not “change” from a monkey or some other kind (“kind” being a loosely defined creationist term for species). Monkeys and human are both members of the primate family of mammals, and we did have a common ancestor “kind” millions of years ago. That ancestor was neither a human nor a monkey. Its descendents evolved during those millions of years into the primate species we see today, including Homo sapiens sapiens — us.

Humans are mammals. Mammals are animals, Therefore, humans are animals. We are very intelligent animals, to be sure, but genetically not very different from the chimpanzees.

Fairy-tale thinking? Evolution as a scientific theory has withstood the test of 150 years’ inspection and challenge. All genetic, geologic and paleo-ontologic evidence supports it. There is simply no room to argue it is wrong, unless your thought is obscured by religious dogma. How is it more plausible to assume there is a supreme being with infinite wisdom and power? That is a fairy tale — a handy creation myth for people who refuse to accept reality.

Before you start casting stones at a scientific theory like evolution, Eddie, you need to understand what it says and what it means. You need to do your homework, and the best sources of information are biology texts — the ones that creationists have NOT written. Books by Stephen Jay Gould and Eugenie Scott are good starting points.

I don’t know much about physics, but I do know the laws of thermodynamics were developed in the 1800’s. Over one hundred years after Newton. So you’ve got what I’d call a fatal flaw in that argument. It might be worthwhile to find out how the scientists who worked on the laws of thermodynamics reconciled their work with gravity (pun intended).

The thing is, this approximation eventually started to “fail”, as newer, more precise observations became available. That was when Einstein climbed onto Newton’s shoulders, and worked out a more complex theory, which precisely matched both the old and the new observations.