• Question: If you could change a law of physics, what would it be?

    Asked by jillpf to Adam, Alexander, Aron, Jess, Neil on 10 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Neil Bowles

      Neil Bowles answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      It would have to be the 2nd law of thermodynamics, about entropy increasing or staying the same. Entropy is kind of like a measure of disorder in a physics system and will always increase or at best not change. Its one of the reasons why it is easier to break things rather than make things (china cups falling off of table smash, but dropping all the bits of a smashed china cup off a table are extremely unlikely to form themselves into a cup shape).

      If you could suddenly change this, all sorts of weird stuff would happen, assuming you could be conscious of it. Direction that we perceive time to flow? Chemical reactions running ‘backwards’ ? Free energy and perpetual motion? These sorts of odd things would all become possible.

    • Photo: Jessica Marshall

      Jessica Marshall answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      I would like to alter the Space-Time continuum, but just for me so that I could have more time to sleep!

    • Photo: Aron Kisdi

      Aron Kisdi answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      I would alter the way gravity works. Everything with mass has gravitational pull, but it is relatively weak, only matters for very large objects such as Earth and Sun. Also the further away you get from the object the less gravitational pull you get from the object (keeping things Newtonian it can be described by inverse-square law). That is why you can use a rocket to break away from Earth’s influence and head out in the solar system (Sun’s influence). It is also the reason why the universe looks the way it is with relatively large distances between stars and even larger distances between galaxies filled with a lot of “empty” space.
      If we could design gravitational pull in a different way we could have a universe where things are much closer to one another, imagine that, rockets could be much smaller, we could have passenger-spacecrafts going to the Moon and Mars, we could observe and visit planets around stars and move around in our galaxy easily.

    • Photo: Alexander Finch

      Alexander Finch answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      Even if I could change them, I probably wouldn’t! I like them as they are 🙂 If we change them suddenly, the universe and everything around us would change in a huge way, and maybe not in the ways we’d expect. It probably wouldn’t be pretty. For example, we could make gravity a bit weaker which means we could jump higher… but then the sun would likely become much brighter or dimmer, which would be bad for us!

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