Astronomers discover first Thorne-Żytkow object, a bizarre type of hybrid star • Hacker News Board

Re: Astronomers discover first Thorne-Żytkow object, a bizarre type of hybrid star

#11

Post by trhway » Thu, Jun 05, 2014, 1:42 AM UTC

rosser wrote: post #5

This is one of the things I most love about the process of science: things predicted by a theory are posited to exist, and subsequently discovered, matching the prediction to such amazing degrees. T-Ż Objects, gravitational lenses, the Higgs boson, &c , are all examples of how well we understand our universe.

that shows one more time that the Universe follows the, relatively, simple laws we'd discovered so far. Why? I mean a whole notion of "physical law" as uniform principle applicable through the Universe... Why "c" is "c" everywhere? Instead of say interaction speed being limited by 0.7c here and 1.5c there with change happening abruptly discontinuous and unpredictable (of course may be this is what really happening, and it is just our perception of physical world that is "smoothed" and regularized out...)

Re: Astronomers discover first Thorne-Żytkow object, a bizarre type of hybrid star

#12

Post by Natsu » Thu, Jun 05, 2014, 2:49 AM UTC

The part of me who played too much Star Control II hopes this means that if we've found a TZO out there, we might find TZO crystals on Pluto someday :)

Re: Astronomers discover first Thorne-Żytkow object, a bizarre type of hybrid star

#13

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jun 05, 2014, 7:02 AM UTC

trhway wrote: post #11

rosser wrote: post #5

This is one of the things I most love about the process of science: things predicted by a theory are posited to exist, and subsequently discovered, matching the prediction to such amazing degrees. T-Ż Objects, gravitational lenses, the Higgs boson, &c , are all examples of how well we understand our universe.

that shows one more time that the Universe follows the, relatively, simple laws we'd discovered so far. Why? I mean a whole notion of "physical law" as uniform principle applicable through the Universe... Why "c" is "c" everywhere? Instead of say interaction speed being limited by 0.7c here and 1.5c there with change happening abruptly discontinuous and unpredictable (of course may be this is what really happening, a…

It's something analogous to Occam's razor combined with the principle of least surprise applied at a very large scale.

Given our observation of the 'laws' locally the assumption that they hold universally is the simplest explanation. It would require something a lot more complex than what we generally observe for such laws not to hold universally.

The places where the laws break down (big bang, inside black holes (do they) and other extremities) are as far as we're concerned not places we are likely to visit and are nice examples of how forceful you'd have to be to get out of the set of laws that we observe locally. It's probably safe to say that any place where the universally observed laws do not hold are places where energy levels are in play that we'd do best to avoid.