Humans are an intrinsically vain species. One of your less endearing traits is how, just as soon as you figure out some slapdash approximation of how reality functions, you immediately name it after yourselves. Hell, as one of you already pointed out, you don't even name them after their first discoverers half the time! Well, you know what? You're made almost entirely of meat and man is the Universe itching to remind you.

When you sign up, you will receive one scientific or sociological theory named after a person. In your story, that theory worked: then suddenly, inexplicably, stops applying. How? And then what? That's up to you, 'Domers, but note that I will be gravely displeased by copouts and greatly pleased by completely mad yet somehow still coherent copins.

e: AN EXAMPLE, DO NOT USE

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quote:
Obliterati's Theory of Lightspeed says that light moves at fifty-five miles an hour in vacuum. THEN SUDDENLY it moves at ten/fifty-seven million/doesn't move at all/moves only when within half a mile of any member of the Manic Street Preachers. Oh, woe! Your story is about that.

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e: food for thought from the theory of quantum decay, that asserts that physical laws and constants are localised and sustained by quantum effects:

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Coleman & deLucca 1980 posted:
The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy.

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