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Comment by femto | Hacker News Reader

In the same vein, a neutron can decay into a proton, an electron and a neutrino (Beta decay), so in some sense the neutral neutron is the combination of an electron and proton. (A connection is there?)

In a simplistic way, I see a neutron star as just being a lump of regular (atomic) matter where the high pressure has forced all the electrons into the protons.

Question for someone who might know: Was pressure so high in the early universe that matter originally formed as neutrons, then as pressure reduced electrons and protons were able to separate? Sort of like the formation of a neutron star in reverse?

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It was a plasma of quarks and gluons first (these particles make up protons and neutrons and other unstable particles) which did cool down and become these particles. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe]

There is no reason to prefer any of the possible particles, but as all of them are unstable - minus the proton - they eventually decay to that state. (neutrons are not unstable in nuclei and such).

NB: this is quite simplistic and I skipped many details

Makes me wonder if the universe as a whole is electrically neutral. Someone should check!

I also have a question. Why should any theoretical predictions be regarded as Science if there is no feasible way to test them?

I think you might need to define your terms more specifically/clearly to be able to get an answer to this.

There's always the layman vs scientists definition of true. Like I think most people would say we know gravity exists, but in actuality we don't really know what gravity is, but we can measure how objects behave and make useful predictions about our world and universe because of that, with it lining up with other stuff we think we know.

Sorta similarly there's the scientific definition of something like dark matter/dark energy where there useful for modeling stuff but unlike what the general public thinks nobody has actually been able to point to a physical object that is dark matter to my knowledge, it's dark because it's unseen, not because it's like chunks of black stuff we can't see.

I am going to get downvoted into oblivion again for asking this follow up question but that’s what I live for. What is the line between Physics, a scientific endeavor, and Metaphysics, a philosophical one?

Please set my transparency as high as you can. I totally deserve it. Let me fade into oblivion.

Physics is testable within the known laws of physics. Metaphysics is not.

Broadly speaking, philosophers of science don't think there's a generic answer to what differentiates scientific inquiry from not-scientific (or pseudoscientific) inquiry. Popper put forward the criterion of falsifiability (if it's falsifiable, it's science, otherwise, it's not science), but after Kuhn and Feyerabend's arguments, philosophers generally drifted away from thinking there's some hard-and-fast rule to differentiate science and pseudoscience.

If you're interested in these issues, you might enjoy Chalmers' What is this Thing Called Science?, an introduction to the philosophy of science that addresses issues like these. Or a primary source like Feyerabend's Against Method, quite a fun read, though maybe not one that many philosophers of science today would give their full-throated endorsement of.

Metaphysics can answer Why questions while Physics is more concerned with How and What questions.

As long as it's called a theory instead of fact, then why isn't it science. We might not have enough tech or information on being able to create the test.

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