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This thread is becoming the 'science blog.'

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

Of course, a Law in science is nothing more nor less than a statement by humans about the way physical nature appears to work. And every Law of science must of necessity be considered in the context of discovered phenomena. So what seems to be a universal Law on Earth, or near Earth, may not be as universal as we think.

Exactly; much agreed. A 'Law' usually means that something is true in all observed instances; however, overturning a Law can and does happen (think Newton). This differs from divine revelation, which is believed to be true regardless of any negative evidence.

For example, gravity as a constant, G, apparenlty is not constant at all outside our solar system; at least, that's what I've been reading lately. If G is not constant, what causes it not to be so? And how does that affect Angular Momentum?

I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what makes it interesting. Science does not throw its hands up and says, "We can never know." It will start to chew away at that problem as it can, trying to gather data from different sources, hash out some hypotheses, and see where it goes from there. It will use the Law until an experiment shows it to be in error; better that than to start completely anew with no frame of reference.

And there is also this phenomenon called plasma (named so by its discoverer because it seemed to have characteristics similar to human blood), which are fields of charged particles in space.

You're not saying that plasma is in any way similar to blood?

• In medical terminology, plasma is the liquid part of blood or lymph, as distinguished from the suspended elements.

• In cosmology, plasma is an electrically neutral medium of positive and negative particles, as defined here.

Not that we're not made of "star stuff" (was that Sagan?), and not that we won't return to being stars again sometime in the future, but the only similarities between blood and plasma are that they consist of particles (but then again, isn't everything?).

In other words, there are fields of active electricity throughout the universe; in fact, 99.9% of the universe is made of plasma (electrically charged particles). Wherever this is the case, one will necessarily be confronted with magnetic fields (moving charged particles). Question: why are the popular descriptions of our solar system devoid of any of the effects of the magnetic fields and plasma fields that act like "veins and arteries" throughout the solar system, connecting the sun and all the planets? Why is the powerful action of these magnetic fields not factored in to our understanding of the solar system, not to mention the galaxy and the universe?

I don't know enough about the field (or pretty much any field) to know if these things are being factored in or not. The Chandra X-ray observatory seems to be looking into the issue regarding plasma and gravity, as indicated by these 'challenges to plasma atomic physics.'

Isn't the universe a glorious place? And yet we can feel something for characters created by a man who put them under a sun and moon possibly like our own.