WEEKLY WHINE

Natural assumptions

Although, for the most part, the Universe seems to be rather orderly and well-behaved, there are things that we can't help but question. These are things that challenge our most fundamental assumptions. Actually, there are people who don't share these assumptions, so they get a free bonus. As for the people who do share these assumptions, they are the ones who often get the worst end of any bargain. In general, many residents of Earth all have some of the same assumptions, so it's time to look at them and explore their validity.

CONSERVATION OF ENERGY
We'd obviously like to assume that you can't get something for nothing. Over the past several hundreds of years, there have been basically zero physical interactions that couldn't be explained in a way that conserved energy. There were a few that prompted physicists to come up with "nothing particles" to ensure that energy was conserved, but as it turned out, these particles do indeed exist and are called neutrinos and antineutrinos. That's what makes conservation of energy the first law of thermodynamics.

SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS
Entropy is one of our least favorite quantities, and unfortunately, it always increases. Entropy impedes any kind of interaction by forcing large amounts of energy to become heat, which is all but useless as an energy form. Again, as far as we can tell, this is another inviolable law. Anything that doesn't seem to obey this law is probably generating massive amounts of secret entropy.

TRIANGLE ANGLES SUM TO 180°
In Euclidean geometry, this is exactly right. Most things we see, however, aren't quite Euclidean, like Earth's surface. It's possible to build a triangle on Earth's surface like this: Start at the North Pole and proceed along the Prime Meridian until you get to the Equator. Continue east or west [it doesn't really matter] until you get to the 90° longitude line. Then go due north again until you hit the North Pole again. This is a triangle with three right angles, and no matter how hard you try, you can't do this in Euclidean geometry. If we had the resources to do this on the extremely large scale of the Universe, we would be able to determine whether the Universe has enough mass to collapse upon itself.

TIME TRAVEL ISN'T POSSIBLE
This would enable a few absurdities, to say the least. There are no indications one way or the other, since according to long and tedious calculations involving general relativity, some geometries of the Universe, such as if it's rotating, would permit travel through time. It may be that time travel is possible but that we'll never find out how to do so. After all, if humans ever do figure out time travel, we'd expect to see a lot more people from the future or from the past.

PEOPLE DON'T SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST
Most of us have never actually seen this take place, so it's safe to assume that it never does, right? Some people claim that it does occur, though. If, for some reason, updates to GoobNet suddenly cease, you might take this explanation. On the other hand, if that happens during finals week, you might take the alternate explanation that I finally gave up and agreed to go with the nice people in white coats.

RELATIVITY CAN BE NEGLECTED
In everyday life, that seems to be true, since nobody is at a high enough velocity or in a strong enough gravitational field to make us notice any of relativity's predictions. After all, when you drive down the highway, you don't expect to see the back of the billboard until you've already passed it. But suppose that, suddenly, the speed of light decreased by a factor of, say, several million. Then, we'd all notice that as we drive down the 110 at 75 miles per hour, the intersections of death inexplicably decrease in length, and everyone else seems to move slowly.