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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There's also the uncollected-garbage problem, which this case is a good example of.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I think this is overly reductive. Indeed, many consequences that follow from the nonexistence or impossibility of a certain thing, event, or effect are brittle to the physical model being refined to include additional effects. But plenty of important consequences follow from existence or possibility and can be directly supported through experimental evidence.
For instance, Newtonian physics predict absolute simultaneity: if one observer measures that two events occurred at the same time, then all other observers will measure likewise, regardless of their relative position or velocity. But special relativity violates this, instead predicting relativity of simultaneity. As long as special relativity's predictions hold to any extent (which, experimentally, they do), then simultaneity is definitely relative and not absolute. There's no way to recover absolute simultaneity short of postulating a grand cosmic conspiracy. And learning that the arrow of time isn't absolute definitely isn't a waste of time!
Also, I think it's unwarranted to say that just because some consequences of nonexistence have historically been invalidated in the past, all the consequences of nonexistence in our current theories are inevitably going to fall over with further evidence. Why should we expect a priori that we haven't yet discovered a single true invariant of our universe? After all, some observed invariants, such as the conservation of energy, have withstood the numerous revisions to our physical models, and it seems odd to blithely assert that they'll be invalidated any year now. In the limit, to say that exceptions will be discovered to every principle ever is to say that the universe doesn't run on any kind of laws.
And if we do concede that at least some of our current models' invariants truly do hold in reality, then it's no longer a waste of time to study their implications, since some subset of our findings will remain just as accurate now matter how far our models are revised.
We are extremely confident in the wrongness of relativity and QM in this matter, so using them in that particular way for philosophy is really a waste of time.
One could sensibly write philosophy of the form "If string theory is true, then..." or "If Loop Quantum Gravity is true, then...", because while those are not proved, they are also not proved actively wrong in the relevant ways.
It’s exactly the sort of situation that precedes a paradigm shift and it’s very hard to predict exactly what will trigger one.
That's not a great example, since conservation of energy is actually violated in current cosmological models. The expansion of spacetime actually implies violation of energy conservation at the global level. It's only locally that energy is conserved.
Similarly, while there is definitely something special about the speed of light, it may or may not be a limit in the sense we typically use. That is, GR and QFT are consistent with the existence particles to have speeds greater than C, it only prevents any particle from accelerating from below C to C or above. It also puts certain limits on observations of those particles. However, it's hard to say what overall implications there would be for all of our models if such particles were actually found to exist, or if there is some modification possible for those theories that would entirely prevent the existence of those particles.
Because of the way the ranking system works here, spats like the philosophy/physics thing will always rise to the top, I think.