Jason Watters wrote:
Would the physical laws that we have determined on earth apply everywhere
else in the universe?

Take a relaxed view on this for a while.

Newton believed that the planets behaved like objects do on the surface
of the planet insofar as if you throw a ball up in the air it will
eventually slow down ,stop and then pick up speed as it returns to the
surface of the planet.

Kepler refined the original Copernican insight to show that planets
slowed down and speeded up over the course of an annual obit giving
Newton his idea that terrestial ballistics applied to planetary motion
was the answer.

With our 21st century data,Newton's idea was not a bad attempt and he
did take awful shortcuts to get his ballistics agenda to work but
ultimately it can now only stands as an enormous testament to
pretension.

If you think about it carefully enough,you can get Keplerian motion by
concentrating on the Earth's compound orbital motions.The Earth orbits
the Sun and it also orbits,along with the rest of the solar system, in
one direction around the Milky Way axis.

A boat circles a buoy on a still lake and the motion of the boat will
be circular.If you introduce a current on the lake,the boat will circle
the buoy much like Keplerian orbital geometry insofar as it goes faster
as it moves with the current and slower when moving against the
current.

Applied to Keplerian motion ,the Earth's compound motions do the same
job as terrestial ballistics do and do much more.It grafts in the
Earth's galactic orbital motion as conditioning heliocentric orbital
motion and subsequently solves the puzzle of how Keplerian geometry
changes in generating ice ages without tampering with the stable
processes in the Sun.






Just as sound changes speed when it enters a different medium, could light
somehow be manipulated as it travels through space and cause stellar objects
to appear either much closer or much more distant than actual?

Thanks,
Jason

Newton was best when he was away from real astronomy and unfortunately
became too greedy in hijacking astronomical principles which he
manipulated with reckless abandon.He basically destroyed
Copernican/Keplerian heliocentricity yet the cataloguers love him.

Unfortunately his disciples went way beyond even Newton's misconduct
which is why,despite the fact that Newton's Opticks has only limited
application with reflection,refraction and colors,they grafted in the
ballistics agenda.

http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/libra.../newton1-1.jpg

Look,do your best with becoming comfortable with the Earth's compound
heliocentric and galactic orbital motions and how they combine to
generate Keplerian orbital geometry and motion.It is far easier to work
with than the isolated solar system of Newton and his view on the rest
of the cosmos -

"Cor. 2. And since these stars are liable to no sensible parallax from
the annual motion of the earth, they can have no force, because of
their immense distance, to produce any sensible effect in our system.
Not to mention that the fixed stars, every where promiscuously
dispersed in the heavens, by their contrary actions destroy their
mutual actions, by Prop. LXX, Book I."

Don't worry,the ghost of Newton is not going to haunt you although you
can count on the zombies running to his defence.