If the Laws of Thermodynamics were wrong

[ExoticMatter773]

What would happen to the science world if we found of the Laws of Thermodynamics were false? Such as energy can be destroyed or created.

[Strange]

Its your science fiction story, you can make up anything you like. Dragons could have evolved, for example. Or life is impossible so the Earth is just a barren rock in space.

[ExoticMatter773]

While your sarcasm is indeed humorous the question is still not being answered. There are ideas and theories which the scientific community believed hundreds of years ago and even decades ago which have changed. All I’m saying is what would be the impact of those specific laws (The Laws of Thermodynamics) now not having those constraints implied constraints? What could be changed or overlooked in the scientific community? What would some of the major projects focus on?

[Strange]

1 minute ago, ExoticMatter773 said:

While your sarcasm is indeed humorous the question is still not being answered. There are ideas and theories which the scientific community believed hundreds of years ago and even decades ago which have changed. All I’m saying is what would be the impact of those specific laws (The Laws of Thermodynamics) now not having those constraints implied constraints? What could be changed or overlooked in the scientific community? What would some of the major projects focus on?

Thanks for not taking the humour too seriously!

But really, the consequences depend on how you change those laws. So, for example, if you say that energy is not conserved, then dragons could generate massive destructive flames without needing a source of fuel. And they could fly because they wouldn't be constrained by the energy needed to lift a massive object.

On the other hand, if energy weren't conserved, then orbits probably wouldn't be stable. Even atoms probably wouldn't be stable. So the universe as we know it wouldn't exist.

But maybe you could suggest that energy is not conserved in some very special and limited way. If so, the consequences depend on what those limitations are. You can make up the rules and then invent the consequences. 

There have been real examples of this. For example, when the evidence for neutrinos was first seen, as an unexplained energy difference, one of the suggestions was that energy conservation might only be true on average. And so individual small-scale interactions could violate it. However, after a while neutrinos were detected and the conservation law lived to fight another day.

Also, it used to be thought that mass was conserved and energy was conserved but, famously, Einstein showed that it is actually mass-energy that is conserved. (That's hyphen not a minus sign!)

Because of Noether's theorem, if energy were not conserved then you would have odd effects like physics experiments not behaving the same at different times.

[swansont]

Energy not being conserved implies the laws of physics change over time. Not knowing what the new laws are or how they vary limits the ability to predict anything, as Strange has said.

You could have the situation where energy could be destroyed, and everything eventually winks out of existence. 

[Bender]

Conservation of energy can be violated, as long as the violation lasts less than [math]\Delta t = \hbar / \Delta E [/math] (which is really short).

Edited May 23, 2018 by Bender

[universaltheory]

The universe wold have lost Its systematic essence and so it would have been something unfathomable