[JSS]

Hockey players can still hit them into a net

It takes practice and skill to become good at hockey. You are describing an intelligent process with your analogies, not nature.

Aiming, controlling, keeping something on course, are all artificial acts of man, and unrelated to whether straight line trajectories between points are or are not natural.

You were the one who brought the hockey analogy into the argument, and the spaceship with controlled thrust.

I agree with you completely that artificial acts of man have nothing to do with how objects move in nature, and are unrelated.

What we observe, is photons and planets and objects dropped on Earth all obey Newton's laws. Light travels straight from here to Pluto, arriving exactly where it should. We know how light behaves, we can account for everything that reflects, refracts or pulls on it via gravity.

We assume light and objects move in straight lines unless otherwise acted upon because that is what we observe.

If someone spots light spiraling or curving or bending in ways that break the laws of physics as we know it, that will be an exciting day.

[Jeb Kermin]

So it is Imagination Land then. That just creates an assumption that there is a place where there are no forces.

Lets go into Imagination Land and try to get bodies to travel from Point A and Point B in a straight line.

Think of a rocket ship in space that blasts its engines for five seconds:



What makes you think it is possible to create an engine that fires perfectly evenly from all points? If the engine starts in the slightest manner from one side or gives off the slightest bit of more energy on one side then the rocket builds too much momentum on one side and goes spiraling off to one side, either quickly or slowly. It doesn't reach the Point B destination.

The only way to go straight is for the rocket to be constantly controlled and navigated. AKA, an artificial result.

Even in something as simple as the game of Pool, it is rather difficult to hit a ball to go straightly to the Point B hole:



You have to hit it in just the right spot to get it to go the way you want it to go. Luckily in pool you are only shooting a few feet.

What if you are shooting a ball at a Point B hole which is miles away? Ignoring the fact that you don't have the arm strength to do that, and ignoring everything about surface friction, to hit a pool ball perfectly for a distance ranging in miles and get into a hole is still very improbable. The ball is more likely to go off in some random direction.

So again, straight line trajectories between two points do not naturally occur in nature. They are highly unnatural.

Ok, so you don't believe in straight line trajectories.  So this leads to the question, how can we measure anything? 

How do we know that the light reflected from the ruler we just measured the length of something as 20 centimeters or whatever, isn't nature just playing tricks on us?