(January 21, 2010 at 1:15 am)chatpilot Wrote: All of your add ons in parenthesis except for the last one are all in the most mundane way impossibilities in our world as is evidenced by our everyday observation of throwing a ball up in the air. A ball with weight and mass (for instance a baseball) will not remain suspended or rising indefinitely, and no matter how hard you throw a ball it will not break free from Earths gravitational force. It is in this context that I would consider my example an absolute truth that anyone in the same ballpark as I could confirm by conducting the same experiment.Everyday observation isn't absolute. Science advances by everyday observation doing something it's never done before (at least not in front of us before). Physics equations will show you that if you throw a ball fast enough, it will escape the Earth. We do it every month with rockets and space shuttles. The only difference between the two is that a ball is smaller and requires less energy to move it the same distance, but it also needs an excess of energy because unlike the rocket, it doesn't generate it's own thrust, and so needs to compensate for the pull of gravity and air resistance.
To piss all over your "absolute truth" nonsense again, you have no way of determining whether a ball will come back down when you throw it up based on previous observations. Our previous observations give us laws that describe how we think the universe works, but they are not absolute (they are subject to change as new data comes in). You could argue that your ball has a high chance of coming down based on previous occurrences, but I would argue this is bullshit as well, since you are working on an assumption that the universe is ordered and that it is material. Truthfully, there are an infinite amount of things that could happen to the ball when it reaches the peak. It could just be wild coincidence that so far, every time we've thrown a ball up, it has come down. The next time we do so, it could do anything.
This is the problem when applying mathematical probability to real world scenarios. In maths, you define the probabilities based on your rules. In reality, the probabilities cannot be defined, since we have no way of knowing all of them are.
