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Unread 11-03-2009, 03:22 PM   #53
Professor Smarmiarty
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Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: K-space
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Professor Smarmiarty isn't just above the law -- they are the law. Professor Smarmiarty isn't just above the law -- they are the law. Professor Smarmiarty isn't just above the law -- they are the law. Professor Smarmiarty isn't just above the law -- they are the law. Professor Smarmiarty isn't just above the law -- they are the law. Professor Smarmiarty isn't just above the law -- they are the law. Professor Smarmiarty isn't just above the law -- they are the law. Professor Smarmiarty isn't just above the law -- they are the law. Professor Smarmiarty isn't just above the law -- they are the law. Professor Smarmiarty isn't just above the law -- they are the law. Professor Smarmiarty isn't just above the law -- they are the law.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Kurosen View Post
Sometimes Twitter is used to "publish" long form works that one would not expect to find in a venue that only allows the use of 140 characters at once.

The quote is likening On The Road to a collection of minutia, which is typically identified as the only thing available on Twitter.
Yeah, it's basically joining in the long line of critical attacks on Keroac. It's tacky and possibly one of the worst attacks on him ever but I laughed.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sithdarth View Post
Just a matter of semantics: Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is a law. Einsteins General Theory of Relativity (ie. gravity) is a theory that's damn near a law. The difference here being Newton was concerned with exactly the math and nothing else Einstein not so much which is encapsulated in the difference between gravit-ation and gravit-y. Newton's Laws of Motion (ie Classical Mechanics) are also laws as are the Laws of Thermodynamics because they're all purely mathematical. Statistical Mechanics, Electromagnetics, Quantum Mechanics, Solid State Physics, the Standard Model, etc are all theories that have been proven to a stupidly high degree. You can tell the difference by how they are thought. Although if you lean Quantum Mechanics via the Matrix approach you end up with mathematical laws that give equivalent answers to the theory.
The thing is that no matter how much you prove a theory it CANNOT become a law. Laws are collections of evidence. That is all.
Theories are explanatory.
The law of universal gravitation is different from the theory of gravity but they unfortunately have the same name. The gravitation law is the the mathematics behind the attraction but does not explain why this occurs, which the theory does.
It is wrong to say a theory is nearly a law. It is also misleading because it muddles the waters between what is a theory and what is a law.
No matter how well proven your theory is, it is still as far from becoming a law as when you started.
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