OVERTHROWING NATURAL LAWS

Can a natural law be overthrown?

Yes. Natural laws are rooted in experience: a law has to be confirmed by very many varied experiments before it is accepted, yet a single experiment contradicting it will kill it.

For example, Newton's Law of Gravitation (do not confuse with his much more important and more general Laws of Motion) says, in part, that the attractive force of gravity varies as the inverse square of the distance: increase the distance from the sun by a factor of 3, and its attractive force is down to 1/9^th.

For almost two centuries the law explained and predicted the orbits of the planets and their moons, brilliantly and with truly astronomic precision. But if the inverse square law were strictly true, a planet would retrace the same ellipse in each orbit; yet in 1880 it was discovered that the orbital ellipse of Mercury, the planet whose orbit has both the highest velocity and the highest and eccentricity (most elongated ellipse), very slightly rotates about the sun in each orbit.

Newton's Law of gravitation was inaccurate.

But that was not a cataclysmic collapse: Newton's Law still holds up well until one gets into almost unbelievable accuracies. The rotational shift of the Mercury ellipse, for example, amounts to about 0.011 of one degree per century. When a fundamental law is "overthrown," it really remains in force except for a tiny, newly discovered area.

Next, can a natural law be discovered by an uneducated layman?

Of course it can, and it has. Michael Faraday (1791-1867) discovered several of them; and without discovery of the one on electromagnetic induction, there would be no large-scale electric power today. He had virtually no education, perfected his reading skills as a bookbinder apprentice and was hired as manual help in a laboratory, where he was eventually allowed to experiment with the apparatus after hours. (By contrast, Sen. Dole has a college degree, and maybe several.)

But the corollary does not follow: the fact that Newton's Law of Gravitation has proved inaccurate does not mean that every law can be overthrown; and just because an inventor is a layman, it does not mean his invention must work.