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The English language uses the word law to describe (among other things) both legislative created rules that must be obeyed under penalty of criminal punishment (e.g., We have laws against murder; you could go to jail!) and scientific statements about invariable phenomena (e.g., The law of gravity says 'What goes up must come down'). The conflation of these two meanings is a common platform for humor, typically for satirical jabs at those who are either too naive or too stubbornly bound by ideology to allow inconvenient realities of the physical world to interfere with what they choose to believe. (Examples of this form of humor can be found here and here and here.) The item quoted above supposedly relates a real-life occurrence of this phenomenon, experienced by Dr. David E. Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research (CAR), in 2009: Example: [Collected via e-mail, June 2009] According to this account, representatives sent by the Obama administration presumed to lecture the auto industry about the type of alternative fuel/fuel efficient cars they needed to build and were not put off by the rejoinder that what they were proposing was a physical impossibility, one of them cluelessly insisting that they could legislatively amend or repeal any law of physics that interfered with their desired policy initiatives. We asked Dr. Cole directly about this anecdote, and his response was that it had been garbled: He said that although he did once encounter, in a meeting with members of Congress, the suggestion that a law of physics should be legislatively amended, that meeting took place several years ago and did not involve representatives of the Obama administration (with whom Dr. Cole has never met):
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