[rosser]

This is one of the things I most love about the process of science: things predicted by a theory are posited to exist, and subsequently discovered, matching the prediction to such amazing degrees. T-Ż Objects, gravitational lenses, the Higgs boson, &c, are all examples of how well we understand our universe.

[trhway]

that shows one more time that the Universe follows the, relatively, simple laws we'd discovered so far. Why? I mean a whole notion of "physical law" as uniform principle applicable through the Universe... Why "c" is "c" everywhere? Instead of say interaction speed being limited by 0.7c here and 1.5c there with change happening abruptly discontinuous and unpredictable (of course may be this is what really happening, and it is just our perception of physical world that is "smoothed" and regularized out...)

[jacquesm]

It's something analogous to Occam's razor combined with the principle of least surprise applied at a very large scale.

Given our observation of the 'laws' locally the assumption that they hold universally is the simplest explanation. It would require something a lot more complex than what we generally observe for such laws not to hold universally.

The places where the laws break down (big bang, inside black holes (do they) and other extremities) are as far as we're concerned not places we are likely to visit and are nice examples of how forceful you'd have to be to get out of the set of laws that we observe locally. It's probably safe to say that any place where the universally observed laws do not hold are places where energy levels are in play that we'd do best to avoid.

[sambeau]

I came here to say exactly that. I'm glad you put it do well.