It is very important to realise that what are described as scientific laws are just the best working theories at the present time. They have to be upgraded and extended as further scientific observations are made and further facts discovered.
At this point in time we have reached the point where we need to realise that some of the laws of science do not cover every case, and while they have been very useful in the past, they do need to be extended to cover some cases which have been left out until now.
For example, suppose a bank robber broke into a bank and stole all of the cash there. How much could he take? Every coin and every note, right? The limit is the sum total of all cash in the building.
This is what the Law of Conservation of Energy is all about. What it says is very simple: You can´t take out any more than there is there in the beginning. Seems pretty straightforward, doesn´t it?
As another example, consider a glass tumbler filled with water. Using common sense, how much water can be poured out of the glass? The exact volume contained in the tumbler. This is what present day science says.
To be strictly accurate, you will never be able to pour all of the water out as a small amount will remain, wetting the inside of the glass. Another way of putting this is to say that the efficiency of the pouring operation is never 100 percent. This is typical of life in general, where very few, if any, actions are 100 percent efficient.
So, are we agreed with current scientific thinking then - the maximum amount of water which we can pour out of the tumbler is the total volume inside the tumbler minus a few drips for the wetting inside the glass? Science thinks so, and insists that this is the end of the story, and nothing else is possible. This arrangement is called a “closed system” as the only things being considered are the glass, the water and the gravity.
Unfortunately for current scientific thinking, this is NOT the only possible situation and closed systems are almost unknown in the real world. Mostly, assumptions are made that the effects of anything else around will cancel out and end up to a net zero effect. This is a very convenient theory, but it has no basis in reality.
Let us fill our glass with water again and begin to pour it again, but this time we position it underneath a source of flowing water:
So, now, how much water can be poured out of the tumbler? Correct answer: Millions of times the volume of the tumbler!
Hang on a moment. Haven´t we just said that the absolute limit of water poured from the tumbler has to be the volume inside the tumbler? Yes, that is exactly what we said, and that is what current science teaching says.
The bottom line here is that what current science says does in fact hold true for most of the time, but there are cases where the basic assumption of it being a closed system is just not true.