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Where Do the Laws of Nature Come From?
mlimber writes "The NYTimes science section has up an interesting article discussing the nature of scientific laws. It comes partly in reply to physicist Paul Davies, whose recent op-ed in same paper lit up the blogosphere and solicited flurry of reader responses to the editorial page. It asks, 'Are [laws of nature] merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world? Do they govern nature or just describe it? And does it matter that we don't know and that most scientists don't seem to know or care where they come from?' The current article proceeds to survey different views on the matter. The author seems to be poking fun at himself by quoting Richard Feynman's epigram, 'Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.'"
My favorite law is what I call Pratchett's Law: "One-in-a-million chances crop up nine times out of ten."
Damn shame about his recent Alzheimers diagnosis.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Obviously, the Laws of Nature came up in a big game of Nomic.
Next question please.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
An interesting and related question is how the laws can be tweaked, yet still conform to the anthropic principle. One could imagine a smaller universe, where the sentients would not be so spread out. Play with the equations, and run simulations. The neuroscientists will have to get involved once we understand sentience more.
Maybe I missed the point of this, but I don't see how scientific laws can be anything BUT a description of nature. We're not creating laws. I can't write a law saying gravity doesn't exist. Scientific laws/theories are merely descriptions of nature.
The Bible, or possibly the Koran.
Unfortunately alot of people use the "perfectness" of the Universal constants as "proof" of an "intelligent designer". Dennett has a great discussion of the flaws in this arguments in chapter 2 of "Darwin's Dangerous Idea".
Am I the only one who thought this sentence smacked of Intelligent Design proposition?
See, I find no conflict between science and spirituality; I find a LOT of conflict between fans of science and fans of specific flavors of spirituality (religions). The Yankees and Red Sox don't really spend a lot of time foaming at the mouth about their opponents, but the rest of the folks in the stadiums sure do. If spirituality offers guidance as to WHY we're here, then science attempts to explain HOW. Either question can be ignored and you'll still live, honestly. Both questions may be answered and the answers may or may not satisfy you. The only difference that I see, which puts me in the science camp, is that scientists at least try to prove themselves wrong.
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If there's no intent behind it, is there really a difference between the two with respect to laws? I don't think so. A description of what something does and what it actually does, as long as the description is correct, are the same.
I've yet to meet a scientist who doesn't care where they come from, but most scientists are smart enough to tackle only problems they think can handle, and leave the rest on the back burner. No science is advanced enough for any but the most deluded scientist to think they can answer that question.
Four different forces, superstrings, antineutrinos, strange quarks, neutralinos, gluons, and 26 dimensions.
The laws of physics are clearly the result of a bureaucracy.
Even if you're not very religious, if you sat down and tried to imagine what God could possibly be, or what function He/She/It could possibly have, I think this one would be rather high on the list.
Quoting the summary:
most scientists don't seem to know or care where they come from
Doesn't it make sense to worry about figuring out what the laws are before we worry about where they came from?
Truman: How long would it take to build an atomic bomb?
Scientist: Nobody knows how to do that. But I can tell you why the laws of nature made it possible.
I just can't think of a name
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Nature has Laws.
All Laws are made for the purpose of governing.
Nature has laws that are made for the purpose of governing.
Notice that the first and second time the term "Law" is used it has a different meaning.
I particularly liked the card game of bridge analogy and the author's conclusion where he stated:We don't know, and might never know, if science has overbid its hand. When in doubt, confronted with the complexities of the world, scientists have no choice but to play their cards as if they can win, as if the universe is indeed comprehensible. That is what they have been doing for more than 2,000 years, and they are still winning.
Interestingly enough, as a person of religious faith, I agree: scientists are winning the knowledge acquisition game faster than they ever have before -- and my faith is not threatened by the progress of knowledge at all for a simple reason: would it make sense for a designer (AKA a God) to organize/make a universe that doesn't follow comprehensible rules? or that this group of sentient beings known as humans can't set about on a centuries long search to understand what those rules are?
Because what I reject is the limitation imposed by atheistic scientists that the answer to that first argued question must be presupposed towards randomness, not design.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
if great minds have grappled with a given subject matter and the answer has remained inconclusive to them, then it is certain that a definitive absolute final answer to the mystery will be found in the comments section of slashdot
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Pretty soon (in a few generations), being gay will also be another "law of nature." But I still wonder how it works because being male, I have no desire for my fellow man. There are those who have the desire and I respect them.
This seems like the grownup, nerdy version of "What if every time I leave the room it blinks out of existence?" Scientific laws are useful uber-assumptions that allow further research. Treat gravity as a given and start fuddling around with bending light, for instance. Without this concept we might as well speculate if its turtles all the way down or one turtle and it flies. Look! Lint!
Suppose we had a complete understanding of the laws of the universe.
By definition that would include what laws apply under what conditions and what laws apply at a given time and place.
Until we have that, we don't understand the universe.
Of course, we may realize that the laws of the universe as they are now came into being only 3 hours ago and everything before then is just a false image.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The lawyers of nature, of course.
Duh.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Teleological arguments point to the existence of a Creator
They don't provide any evidence that aforementioned creator sent his son to get nailed to a plank of wood, or that Allah spoke through an epileptic child molester, or that buying Holy Healing Miracle Water off a televangelist will make you anything other than a gullible fuckwit.
And in answer to the article question, Flying Spaghetti Monster.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
... though it was clearly created by a Genius. ...and have you ever known of any genius that didn't have at least some unusual personality traits?
Just for the record, I did not RTFA.
And does it matter that we don't know and that most scientists don't seem to know or care where they come from?
I always felt that science was a way of uncovering where these laws came from. It sounds like I'm talking in a circle but I feel that in order to understand the whole you need to understand the parts. At least in the questions of where something comes from. You dissect the whole down in parts and those parts in parts and eventually you find the questions to the tough problems.
It would be nice to think that we would have an answer of the origins and we could fan our knowledge out from there. If that were the case science would be all but dead since we would have probably arrived at all possible answers at this point in time. Instead we're left peeling back layers and making theories about layer yet uncovered.
At least that's the way I see it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
remove the above poster for reprogramming before any of the other subjects notice
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I think, as a historical question, for the integrity of science, "philosophy of science" is particularly important now.
Now that the academic scientific orthodoxy has rallied to ensure for now that one disturbing inference, ID, is uniquely excluded, we'll need some way to deal with the aftermath--which is the bare fact that science is rife, throughout, with models which contain untestable inferential conclusions from tested empirical knowns. Given that this has always been the case (name the date -all- predictions of Einstein's model were experimentally verified--this year, was it--why'd we let him make that proposal in the interim?), is presently, and always will be--and we need only wait a half-hour for any given scientist to make such an inference without providing his testing model in any domain, the "cat is out of the bag" so to speak and well have to view "science" per se from a definitional perspective that reflects reality, without subsetting science down to a tiny shadow of its current scope. This isn't really an abstract question any more--it's the practical reality of fending off the appearance of bare hypocrisy in academia, by students who are paying attention to their educators' consistency on the matter.
A complex process, to be sure, but the risk is artificially limiting the scope of our investigation of reality at the outset, with literally untold damage to science and humanity.
Personally, I think Kuhn is a good place to start in terms of perspective, and the demarcation problem a good place to start as far as the overall issues at hand.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Seriously!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/11/14/scisurf114.xml
Don't forget the 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, 11 assistant deputy neutrons, the moron force, and the peons.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's not that we don't care where laws of physics come from, it's just that we have no testable explanation for it, so rather than bailing out with some nonsense like "goddidit" we merely accept that: For now, we don't really know.
As far as I know, there's nothing prohibiting a gradual gauge change over time and space.
You bet there is. All the conservation laws (e.g. conservation of energy, or of momentum) rely on the fact that physical laws do not change with time or position in space. If there was a "gradual change" in physical laws, e.g. if the constant in Coulomb's Law or Newton's Law changed slowly from position to position, or over time, then energy and momentum would not be conserved.
And, of course, the fact that energy and momentum are conserved has been verified experimentally in excruciating detail.
The "laws" of science simply *describe*. They do not govern.
Here's a couple pearls I've picked up:
"Science is the attempt to come up with systematic, coherent and useful descriptions of how the natural world works."
- Chris Mack, litho guru
Science always deals with models of reality, not the ultimate nature of reality.
- http://www.lightandmatter.com/
I'm a scientist, and I come from Wisconsin. Who are these scientists who don't seem to know or care where they come from? They must be awfully odd people.
The oped peice refers to religious faith as "belief without evidence." I believe this definition to be false. Certainly the characters who wrote in and were described by the Bible would not consider religious faith to be "belief without evidence." Rather they wrote what they considered to be personal evidence, with the hopes that readers of their words would likewise seek for their own personal evidence. Of course this area is, in the eyes of many, frought with difficulties. So certainly Dr. Davies can claim that these people have no evidence, but that doesn't make it true or untrue.
I made them.
"Sickness will surely take the mind where minds can't usually go."
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
While I'm generally fond of Feynman, and having read (and enjoyed) his semi-serious autobiography, I agree with most of his opinions, I think he has it wrong with this one. Sure, science can and does advance without scientists ever worrying about the underlying philosophy, but I think many scientists would benefit from the introspection philosophy of science provides. Birds are dumb creatures, which would not benefit from reflecting on themselves or thinking about their thinking. Scientists are usually smarter than that. In fact, if it were up to me, I would make several courses in Philosophy of Science mandatory in all scientific undergraduate studies.
As of yet IIRC, we have been unable to use science to say WHY something happens, but only HOW it happens. I think in the cases where we have determined WHY something happens (example: Newton's gravity happens because of relativity) we can only use a "HOW" to explain it (we don't know WHY relativity is true).
IANAScientist, so please correct me if I got any of that wrong.
One interesting way to look at it is that Science explains the HOW and Religion explains the WHY.
Look at the simplest quaternion wave equation, and if you are good, you can pick out the Maxwell equations and an rank 1 approach to gravity.
Look at workable definition of a quaternion derivative (a 2 limit process, where first the 3-vector goes to zero, then the scalar, or the reverse), and there is a reason why change is different in classical physics versus quantum mechanics.
Understand from a group theory standpoint that (A/|A| exp(A-A*))* (B/|B| exp(B-B*)) = 1 has the three symmetries found in the Standard Model, and you understand why we have a standard model.
Have fun with quaternions, but don't quit the day job. If physics really is quaternion math done right, then there is no Higgs, our good friend GR is wrong in the way Newton's gravity theory is wrong (useful, but not ultimately spot on), string theory is flat wrong, there is no dark matter. That should cover most people with a job in physics today.
doug
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
The argument I've found most persuasive, and IIRC correctly from a Berkeley physics seminar umpty years ago by Hawking, shared by at least some first-rank cosmologists, is that the physical laws we have will ultimately prove to be the only possible logically consistent set.
That is, "alternate" universes are ipso facto impossible, because there is no other set of physical laws that are consistent with each other. And imagining them is somewhat like asking whether God can make a stone so heavy he can't lift it, or imagining being your own grandfather via a time-travel machine: a mere exercise in word-play, allowed only by the fact that English is a sufficiently illogical and ambiguous way of communicating that all kinds of nonsense can be put into words and "make sense" grammatically without making the least bit of sense logically.
"My personal experience was walking on hot coals that were hot enough to melt an aluminum can. I walked for 40 feet through the oak coals and not a burn on my feet.
Further use of intent is if you wanted to measure light as a particle then it would be a particle. If you wanted light to be a wave then it would be so.
These types of things work from an interdimensional energy that science has not yet grasped. Eventually they will from observation of things like firewalks or handling hot iron without being burned and understanding that intent is the power behind things occurring.
"
No. You didn't bet burned because you where walking and your feet where dry. Your feet didn't stay in contact with the coals long enough for the heat to be conducted to them.
Coals are actually pretty poor conductors of heat.
Had they put a steel plate over the coals and let it reach the same temperature you would have gotten badly burned.
It wasn't your intent, magic, or some power. It was good old thermal dynamics.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
-Isn't it strange that we exist?
-No, God created the world, that is why you exist, hence answering the question once and for all.
-But...
-ONCE AND FOR ALL!!!!
In order to keep this thread from being one-sided, it's only fair to ask:
"Where do the laws of nurture come from?"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I think a lot of these discussions fail to clearly distinguish the map from the territory: scientific theories are approximate and merely descriptive (otherwise there would be no reason for science to continue to refine them), but when we talk about the "Laws of Nature", we are properly referring to the physical principles which those theories are intended to model, and against which our theories can be tested experimentally. It's pretty clear that these laws really exist, or else the results of experiments intended to explore them wouldn't converge.
The disputes that the articles have stirred up are mostly between three camps: those who think that the laws of nature can be accounted for by an infinite regression of physical laws, those who think the question of their source is unapproachable or meaningless, and those who think the existence of the laws can be accounted for in metaphysical terms.
DNA just wants to be free...
I started chasing hyperlinks in this discussion and came across this info about simulated reality.
This passage caught my attention: "To simulate an entire galaxy would require more computing power than can presently be envisioned, assuming that no shortcuts are taken when simulating areas that nobody is observing."
That made me think.. doesn't the very nature of quantum mechanics go along with this? I.E. Light being both a wave and particle until observed, electrons in infinite locations until observed, ect..
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Hume points out that the extra assumptions needed to do Science are such that they are assumed by everyone every day in the course of daily life.
WHAT IS THE LAW!? Do not walk on all fours. WHAT IS THE LAW!? Do not eat raw meat.
http://www.whuddafug.com
If the Universe was not created by God (or whoever,) where does every come from. The answer must be NOTHING.
If the Universe was created by God (or whoever,) where does God come from. The answer must be NOTHING.
Where does NOTHING come from? Who cares?
So the answer is: I don't care!
is where the Laws of Nature come from.
The laws come from symmetries.
Already he's wrong. Just look at quantum dynamics. At the time of it's discovery it seemed (and still does) completely irrational. Describing the actions of particles in terms of probabilities? You can't know how fast a particle is moving and it's location at the same time? When you observe a phenomena it changes it's behavior? There may be multiple divergent emerging universes?
Science challenges the nature of rationality all of the time. It destroys orthodoxy through observation. The very pillars of science, observation and interpretation (i.e. modeling) are always subject to change. That change, by necessity, comes slow and must have mountains of evidence justifying it, but it is possible. Quantum theory is still, almost 100 years on, challenging our notions of what is rational.
Davies again asks:
Of course. Reason in it's present form cannot model the entire universe. To do that it would have to be on the order of complexity of the universe, and it ain't there yet. Give it a few million years of progress. Davies derides the notion that science is governed by immutable physical laws. That's all well and good. But he's implicitly arguing from the standpoint that reason is immutable. That's just not the case.
can be studied here
#3: Do not spill blood!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
I don't really consider them "laws". They're the reliable tendencies of the universe. It's like the conversations I have with people who try to convert me to their religion.
Them: You say you don't believe in god because you haven't seen him... but you believe in electrons, don't you, and you've never seen them?
Me: No. I don't believe in them.
Them: You don't believe in electrons?
Me: Like I said... I've never seen one. All I know is that, if I pretend that electrons exist, then I'm able to make all kinds of predictions that I can see. It might turn out that there aren't electrons at all. The universe might be set up completely another way... and our current set of "laws" manage to give us the same set of predictions. So, I only believe in electrons long enough to build a television set, so to speak.
As a scientist, I should be ready to abandon any of these laws when they start failing to predict what I'm seeing... no matter how well it worked up to that point (see "Ultraviolet Catastrophe").
It's like we've been invited to play a board game. We haven't been told the rules... but, by trial and error, we've managed to deduce enough about the gameplay that we're able to get along in the game fairly well. However, I doubt that the rules that we've deduced actually match the ones printed in the book that came with the game.
The entire argument as framed by the article seems to take for granted the assumption that for there to be universal, absolute, necessary truths, there must exist some sort of "thing" in which they are "written", some ontological entity to grant them their truth. This assumption seems entirely fallacious to me (and to entire schools of philosophy opposed to such Platonic realism).
Take, for example, the Law of Non-Contradiction. This is a law of logic, you might even say THE law of logic: it says simply that for any proposition P (a proposition being what is expressed by a sentence in a given sense and context), either P or not-P. That's an exclusive OR there, so it's one or the other but not both. This is not just a law of language, of our way of expressing things, as Platonists often portray their opponents as claiming. Those who believe this law (which is almost, but not quite, everybody, Platonists and others alike) aren't just believing that, due to the arbitrary rules of all of our languages, it doesn't make any sense to say things like "both P and not-P" or "neither P nor not-P". They're saying that, completely independent of anybody speaking or even thinking anything, whatever state of affairs is described by "P" either obtains exactly as described, or it does not obtain exactly as described.
This is a necessary truth; one of the most, if not THE most, fundamental of them. (All other laws of truth-functional logic can be reduced to this one law, really). Necessary truths could aptly be described as laws, in the same sense as laws of nature: necessary truths are true everywhere always and there could not possibly be a universe where they were not true.
Now tell me, where is this fundamental law written (aside from our logic textbooks)? What is it that makes it true? Do we really need to posit some abstract metaphysical entity in Plato's heaven which is the ideal form of the Law of Non-Contradiction, in virtue of which our utterances of that law are true? Or can't we just say that it is necessarily true? Why must such laws be inscribed somewhere in order for them to be laws? This (along with the strawman "nominalism" that Platonists object to) is the metaphysical counterpart to the ethical position that things are only good or bad because someone (God, society, etc) says so, which completely destroys the idea of absolute, universal, and non-arbitrary standards of justice (justice dealing with duties or obligations, obligations relating to goods the same way that necessities relate to truths). Why must things be either decreed by heaven (whether there is a God there or just "Ideas") or by popular convention to be true? Cannot truth stand on its own?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
No, silly, natural laws are made by the Congress of Nature.
I wonder if the existence of matter/energy is a law of nature. If gravity pulls, if 1+1 = 2, if for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, then there must be a REASON for the existence of matter. wonder what that is.
The laws of nature come from invisible sky wizards of course.
Damned heathens. (literally)
This sort of article passes as interesting? It's a second-rate hash of the philosophy of science that doesn't even "faith in science" trap that everyone falls into.
It's unfortunate that so many people (like the readers of Slashdot, even) are so misinformed about what scientific laws are and what they mean.
First Scientific Lecture-Course
The scientists who think of Nature in the customary manner of our time, generally have no very clear idea of what constitutes the field of their researches. "Nature" has grown to be a rather vague and undefined conception. Therefore we will not take our start from the prevailing idea of what Nature is, but from the way in which the scientist of modern time will generally work.
The scientist today seeks to approach Nature from three vantage-points. In the first place he is at pains to observe Nature in such a way that from her several creatures and phenomena he may form concepts of species, kind and genus. He sub-divides and classifies the beings and phenomena of Nature. You need only recall how in external, sensory experience so many single wolves, single hyenas, single phenomena of warmth, single phenomena of electricity are given to the human being, who thereupon attempts to gather up the single phenomena into kinds and species. So then he speaks of the species "wolf" or "hyena", likewise he classifies the phenomena into species, thus grouping and comprising what is given, to begin with, in many single experiences. Now we may say, this first important activity is already taken more or less unconsciously for granted. Scientists in our time do not reflect that they should really examine how these "universals", these general ideas, are related to the single data.
The second thing, done by the man of today in scientific research, is that he tries by experiment, or by conceptual elaboration of the results of experiment, to arrive at what he calls the "causes" of phenomena. Speaking of causes, our scientists will have in mind forces or substances or even more universal entities. They speak for instance of the force of electricity, the force of magnetism, the force of heat or warmth, and so on. They speak of an unknown "ether" or the like, as underlying the phenomena of light and electricity. From the results of experiment they try to arrive at the properties of this ether. Now you are well aware how very controversial is all that can be said about the "ether" of Physics. There is one thing however to which we may draw attention even at this stage. In trying, as they put it, to go back to the causes of phenomena, the scientists are always wanting to find their way from what is known into some unknown realm. They scarcely ever ask if it is really justified thus to proceed from the known to the unknown. They scarcely trouble, for example, to consider if it is justified to say that when we perceive a phenomenon of light or colour, what we subjectively describe as the quality of colour is the effect on us, upon our soul, our nervous apparatus, of an objective process that is taking place in the universal ether -- say a wave-movement in the ether. They do not pause to think, whether it is justified thus to distinguish (what is what they really do) between the "subjective" event and the "objective", the latter being the supposed wave-movement in the ether, or else the interaction thereof with processes in ponderable matter.
Shaken though it now is to some extent, this kind of scientific outlook was predominant in the 19th century, and we still find it on all hands in the whole way the phenomena are spoken of; it still undoubtedly prevails in scientific literature to this day.
Now there is also a third way in which the scientist tries to get at the configuration of Nature. He takes the phenomena to begin with -- say, such a simple phenomenon as that a stone, let go, will fall to earth, or if suspended by a string, will pull vertically down towards the earth. Phenomena like this the scientist sums up and so arrives at what he calls a "Law of Nature". This statement for example would be regarded as a simple "Law of Nature": "Every celestial body attracts to itself the bodies that are upon it". We call the force of attraction Gravity or Gravitation and then express how it works in certain "Law
In The Making of a Brief History of Time (film), Steven Hawking waxes eloquent about how amazing it is that the whole behavior of the universe can be summed up in a few equations and a few rules. "But," he adds (I'm quoting from memory), "nowhere does this explain why the universe goes to the bother of existing."
Newton stated that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force ... inversely proportional to the square of the separation of the two objects.
Why the square? Why not the cube? Or to the power 2.5? Or 2.1? Or 1.937591537?
Why would the universe choose a round whole number for its law of gravity? That's just way too weird.
For that matter, why would a human construct (the mathematics of inverse square proportion) even apply to anything in the universe? Human brains are merely the accumulation of random mutations.
There is no reason whatsoever that any product of random mutation should provide any coherent insight into the universe.
Unless, perhaps, the intelligence which formed the universe is the same intelligence which informs our consciousness. And that our brains are not merely the products of random mutations.
Evolution is a fact. Darwinism is a joke.
Stop saying blogosphere.
Michael Polanyi's book "Personal Knowledge - Towards a Post-Critical Philosphy" addresses some of these issues. While he agrees there is are objective truths, he also postulates that "tacit knowledge" leads much of scientific discovery. When I got it in 1988 it was about the most difficult book I had ever read. Actually it still is, maybe I should try reading it again, or re-embark on my quest for "knowledge" ;)
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
This dilemma is solved by adding up the laws of nature. If we have them all correctly, they should add up to 42.
By my calculations, we're a few laws short. I think that we might be missing another law of gravity at least. And there is that pesky unifying force law that we keep getting wrong.
I think the philosophers have addressed the basis for this "struggle" in a way that neither Davies nor Overbye take into consideration.
... ways of thinking, hard wiring in our consciousness that make us.
... the question shifts from something "out there which is for unknown reasons" to an examination of our own consciousness, "why do we organize the empirical world in this particular way". This does not, of course address the question of why anything at all, including our consciousness.
To the point, when asking questions about why there are nifty and tremendously useful & predictive ways of talking about the empirical world it is not useful think about discovering laws that are out there. Because of that it's not useful to ask what created those laws.
Rather, those laws are expressions of the way our minds work. We mentally organize the world around us in wondrous and interrelated (and intersubjective but that's a longer story) ways and give meaning to those concepts. We didn't "find" the laws, we made them by observing the empirical world and talking about it to each other.
Kant gave us this insight in the Critique of Pure reason when he usefully told us that there are a-priori categories
That does raise the question of why do we think the way we do, what are these categories and could they be different, which is a little bit the same in the sense that we are given something and wonder about the mechanism for it but very different in another
From my point of view this is the truly awe-inspiring knee weakening thing. That we are and we have the gift of consciousness to celebrate, and can be grateful for it.
Well son, when a mommy law of nature and a daddy law of nature like each other very, very much...
The article refers to Plato and "great thinkers" but it should have referred as much to philosophy as it did to physics. Like a reference to empiricism to go along with "Are they(the laws) merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world?" e.g. David Hume pointed out that we there is no perceptual difference between causation and correlation (the sense data is the same), and the reaction to this sort of skeptical argument has been to retreat and cling to sense data, as the source and subject of everything that is knowledge about the world (empiricism, logical positivism, modern analytic tradition). The alternative from Plato is to concentrate on necessary propositions, the kind whose denial is a contradiction (like those found in mathematics). Plato imagined that (the nature of) Courage, Truth, Love, Beauty, Wisdom etc could be known with necessity, after one had completed a rigorous program of education in mathematics. The most important argument from Plato is that we should always keep trying to find the true nature of these things, because its easy to give up and say "there is no truth" but WHAT IF THAT'S WRONG, then we would be giving up something far greater (and then Plato writes dialog about someone being enlightened to a mathematical truth, even after they had tried to give up). The synthesis between rationalism and empiricism came from Kant, who proposed that there are necessary propositions about the world but they are only necessary because of our "hardwired" categories of the understanding i.e. permanent reality goggles. We are forced to interpret the world in terms of space, time, causality, unity-plurality, etc. Kant also went so far as to say that Newton's Law's were necessarily part of our reality goggles (oops). The point is that reality-goggles allows us to save the idea of necessary propositions about the world, but the modern work on whether they are hardwired by anatomy or language could hardly resolve in a way that would make this satisfying for fundamental physics because quantum mechanics is so counterintuitive. One approach is to return to Einstein-style derivations and shows that our gauge theories are necessary, all though it seems hard to believe that string theory could at this point deliver a proof whose premises are stronger then its intended conclusion. (to show you that the grass is green, first consider the hyper-cube of dimension 10 whose diagonal...) Another approach is to show that quantum mechanics is fundamentally about our knowledge i.e. take literally the statement "the quantum state contains all the information there is to know about the system". The bottom line is that the article is a rehash of centuries old philosophical debates, but not presented in a way that will make people more literate in philosophy i.e. you could read the article without getting the impression that a huge body of very interesting work already exists on the subject. And as far as far as Feynman's comments on philosophy, I find that sad since he attracted me to physics in the first place, but it also sheds some light on the other comment of his that I dislike, that "nobody understands quantum mechanics"; of course he doesn't understand, because he was to cynical to even take the first step!
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
If all scientists do is work out useful estimation techniques, aren't they just engineers?
A question is, though, do those laws apply at all times and places, or are we just "discovering" them here, and now? As far as I know, there's nothing prohibiting a gradual gauge change over time and space. Perhaps those innocuous gauge shifts really DO have an effect somewhere/when. What we generally call "laws" should be universally applicable
What does the speed limit in Dallas matter if you're driving in Cleveland?
Maybe the laws we perceive are just shadows of something more amazing, but for now we know pretty much what we're stuck with and what we are allowed to do and not do. But don't worry - science is all about adjustments. We thought Newton was right. And he was, as far as he could tell. Then along came Einstein and showed that for some cases Newton was wrong. So we adjusted. I imagine we'll continue to do that for probably as long as we exist, sculpting better laws as of refinements of existing laws.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
A few of the wrong, unsupported, or meaningless statements bothering me:
"You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed." Really? no such scientist exists? All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way because it is pragmatic to do so in order to ever accomplish anything productive. This assumption is also tested every step of the way and if it ever fails, then we'll worry.
When I [Davies] was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. Then Davies had poor teachers. Tell this to Einstein who overthrew the laws of Newton. It's just that these laws have so much evidentiary support you need lots of evidence to prove the next theory of relativity.
If the laws of physics were just any old ragbag of rules, life as we (vary narrowly) know it would almost certainly not exist Forgot the bold part, eh?
There has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow bylaws on them. And is need for a physical mechanism is shown how?
physicists declare a similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws (or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe. Wait...didn't he just say the realization that what we [physicists] long regarded as absolute and universal laws might not be truly fundamental at all, but more like local bylaws. They could vary from place to place on a mega-cosmic scale.
religion and science are founded on faith -- namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws Nothing like jumping to conclusions. Does science actually rely on unexplained physical laws or just the explained ones? does it matter if the laws are unexplained, aren't we bound by them nonetheless? And if they are physical laws, aren't they by definition within the universe?
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Are very stable in theory.Thats why we call them laws.They work almost every time.
The exceptions are more likely to be equipment glitch then a
exception in the law of nature.
However when examining the thing from logical perspective we can get to some sets of assumptions not bound by any logic.These gaps are not
threatening us in daily life,but they are as real as gravity is(dark matter,black holes,the list goes on) but aren't sufficiently described.
The question:What are origins of these laws?
The common trend is to regard this as it we a unique model of symmetry which fits into observations in order to process the data we gather(e.g. triangles and a^2+b^2=c^2).
In fact these laws,as the whole science is very culture specific and more represents the reflections/level of culture in homo sapiens now,in this blue planet.
The "universality of experience" generalizing(e.g. the visible universe) the knowledge into laws is not more then imperfect subset of "hyper-theory" which is in fact the source of laws,but isn't yet reached due our limited cognition and human nature.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
I keep seeing pseudo-scientific authors make the same argument that "there are X universal constants/laws and if any one of them were changed life could not exist, and the odds of that are [some astronomical number] to 1, thus that proves God/Intelligent Design/Xenu/etc."
First fallacy: the idea that the only kind of life that could exist in ANY universe is life AS WE KNOW IT is extremely arrogant and non-scientific. I get irked just by the people who believe only another Earth could support life in this universe...
Second fallacy: if the conditions did not set the stage for life, there would be no lifeforms to sit around and wonder about the scientific constants/laws that set the stage for life. It's a conditional probability: 100% of constants/laws that allow lifeforms to sit around and think about the universe will support life. You might as well roll a bunch of dice, remove every die that didn't come up a 1, and "See? They're all ones! God exists!"
"Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate from the University of Texas, Austin, described himself in an e-mail message as "pretty Platonist," saying he thinks the laws of nature are as real as "the rocks in the field."
The laws of mathematics don't exist "out there" somewhere, floating around like asteroids. This kind of Platonic abstraction is nonsense. The correct way to look at the laws of mathematics and laws of physics is more like Arististotlean abstractions. Rather than specifying the absence of something, to make a "platonic horse" -- as neoclassical economists do with perfect competition models -- we simply don't specify something (e.g., don't account for friction with simple equations of how long it will take for something to fall; but we don't say that friction doesn't exist).
Furthermore, it is true that some things we have to presuppose. Statements like "all things we consider true must be empirically verified", are self-contradictory; either statement isn't accepted as necessarily true -- in which case, why hold to it dogmatically -- or you hold that it is necessarily true, in which case it contradicts itself.
Moreover, the scientific method must presuppose causality; otherwise, no observations could suggest the falsification of a hypothesis. Without causality, all events are just unrelated entities. We cannot empirically test for causality; it is just something that every acting man understands and presupposes must exist (otherwise, why act if it isn't causally connected to some goal?).
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Whereas ID doesn't tell us anything about the designer and how it came about, nor what it did and why.
So ID doesn't make any predictions, it just throws the hands up in the air and says "no way we can know why". Not science.
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The argument that you link to, Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis, is faulty. A key step is along the lines of:
1) We could write simulations of our own history
2) Our simulations don't have to include everything; we can leave out details that don't affect the outcome
3) The people inside our simulations can do 1 and 2, ad infinitum
Step 2 is a big jump. How do you know what details you can leave out unless you do the simulation with the details included and compare?
But even if step 2 were okay and we could skimp on details, step 3 says the people inside can skimp too. In effect we'd run a calculation that computes itself plus something extra and do it recursively, ultimately getting infinite computation for infinitesimal effort. Just like no compression algorithm can guarantee lossless reduction in size, no computation could guarantee greater than 100% efficiency.
But a compression algorithm will do well with raw data, and a computation could do well with raw physics if step 2 is right. So if we ever discover that we can skimp on simulating our own reality then that proves that we are not living in an (already simplified) simulation.
Road to Reality posited a neo platonist view of things.
You've got a cameraphone that takes high-res pictures? Where do I get one of those? All I can find are 1MP or so cameras.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
and all the wierd quantum behaviours we come across are just untidy artifacts of the simulation algorithm optimisations.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.
Why? Why does an attempted description have to state the source? This is analogous to someone saying I'm a 6'2" white guy, and replying, you don't know anything until you can tell me where he was born. Who cares? You aren't trying to describe my home town but my apearance.As for a closed system, I'm not convinced that such a proof is possible or necessary. After all, how do you prove that two lines are in a plane? You take the dot product of them with the normal vector of the plane in question. Similarly it might be true that in order to prove our laws/find the source of them, you'd have to be able to construct something out side of them to compare them to. Otherwise at best you get a local view of things. And say you can prove the cause of them, what does it matter? Unless knowing the source of the laws allows you to get exact laws (eg, you know for certainty that the God of the bible exists and you can go to the bible for all answers), you still have to measure, do experiments etc, to find out what the laws are. In application, nothing might change too, because even if you know we are part of a multi-verse, the only laws that would be useful to us are the ones that are true in our local universe. Others might be interesting academically, but aren't necessary practically (by definition there is no way to pass between universes in a multiverse).
As for the whole faith because you assume that the universe can be explained rationally bit. It is similar to the reasoning that you are better off believing in God because if you are wrong you loose nothing but if you are right you gain everything (Pascal's wager). If scientists are wrong, then the universe is unordered and their search will be futile. But if they are right, then they have the chance to know how things work, and perhaps find useful stuff along the way. Ever here the saying "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing expecting a different outcome"? This is that in reverse. It is only rational to continue to do the same thing you've done in the past if you liked the outcome the first time (in this case gained rational explanations of the things you observed).
If it wasn't for the Discovery Institute trying to pass off Intelligent Design as a science, I would say that is what I believe. I believe God created the laws and made order out of chaos. Humans merely discovered and described these laws. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive. But this is a belief, not knowledge, and is in no way provable. If it was provable it wouldn't be religion. God is beyond the capacity of human knowledge by definition. That is why we (at least in the US) separate science from religion (in part) it sorts hard facts from the beliefs so one does not detract from the other. It leaves each individual with the opportunity to make up his or her own mind about the existence of a higher power. I encourage everyone to do so and move on. The scientific community is no place for such a discussion unless someone can make a provable hypothesis.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Laws of nature are manmade, And as with most laws, nature just isn't quite following them. However with the laws of nature, scientists try to moddify the laws, rather then just throwing nature in jail. Most likely because they haven't developed a holdingcell big enough. Personaly It's my belief that they one day will, and nature will finaly be forced to follow the law, just like everyone else.
The laws of nature Physics, EVOLVED.
The same way we did and the universe did.
They didn't just 'come into being randomly' as the I.D. guys like to describe our evolution.
They came into being because this is the only way stability could be achieved.
As is often mentioned, any change in the fundamental laws would result in a universe unfavorable for cosmological structures or life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe
I would hazard a guess that we are either
1) in a favorable sector of a vast universe (ie. laws of physics change beyond our
limited visible universe)
2) The Universe has evolved ie. expanding and collapsing many times before it reached this stable version.
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
I don't think the word 'Laws' is used except in a historical context of the theory.
ABout 100 25 years ago, or so, they figured that had wrapped up this universe thing and could explain everything..except for an i or two that needed to be dotted. Then they were done, this is how it works, these are the laws.
Then it turned out that dotting that eye meant explaining quantum effects.
After that calling anything a 'law' fell out of favor.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That is, "alternate" universes are ipso facto impossible, because there is no other set of physical laws that are consistent with each other.
I don't think the problem is with internal consistency of a set of laws, but compatibility with us. I believe Hawking argues that other sets of laws are possible, just incompatible with life. That our existence requires the current set. Regarding fundamental numbers (electron charge, etc): "The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life."
I like that!!!
Best post on the subject have read on this subject in a LONG time.
It seems the kind of faith Davies is pointing out is the faith scientists have that they can investigate the unknown and have faith that there will be a simple underlying principle which has remarkable predictive power.
And, it is often quite amazing that these patterns are so simple and orderly. An inverse square is not an inverse 1.9834... law.
Why is it that this faith in discovering underlying simple, consistant order is rewarded by our universe when seemingly random observations are examined closely?
This question is loaded. The laws of nature (actually physics) didn't 'come from' anywhere. The laws of Physics, EVOLVED (nature is based on physical laws). The same way we did and the universe did. The same people would ask 'where did we come from'. We didn't just 'come into being randomly' as the I.D. guys like to badly critique evolution theory. We and our universe came into being because this is the only way stability (ie. survival) could be achieved. As is often mentioned, any change in the fundamental laws would result in a universe unfavorable for cosmological structures or life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe I would hazard a guess that we are either, 1) in a favorable sector of a vast universe (ie. laws of physics change beyond our limited visible universe) 2) The Universe has evolved ie. expanding and collapsing many times before it reached this stable version.
Einstein has already postulated that it is a dice-less game.
Well, maybe it is diceless in theory, but imagine that for most entities there is a kind of event horizon beyond which it cannot calculate and predict and thus favor and influence events because the decision tree branches faster than, so to speak, the borg can adapt, then these events will appear to contain a random component even if technically there is a mechanism behind them(And if this sentence should appear meaningless and random to you, well that sort of proves my point).There also might be that kind of randomness which leads to a many-worlds-interpretation, that is at a point where there a choices, for each choice a universe will be created. However maybe things are - or appear to be whenever we ask "why" - more entangled than that, for example a quantum computer will collapse to a set of decisions, not just a single bit.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
It takes as an hypothesis that the multiverse "theory" is a scientific theory, so it show then that science is based on faith..
But the multiverse "theory" isn't at all a scientific theory like relativity is, it is just an hypothesis.
The interest of the multiverse "theory" is just that this is a possible explanation to the question "why our universe is so finely tuned as to create life?"
The usual answer is "because it was created by God" (which isn't an answer at all as this create the questions what is this God? and why does God exist?), the multiverse hypothesis is a better answer as it doesn't rely on such poorly defined concept that God is.
But as currently we have no way to check whether other universe exist or not, the multiverse hypothesis isn't anymore a scientific theory than the Flying Spaghetti Monster/God(s) "theory" are.
Well, it is good that you do not know the number of reboots (read big bangs) we had to do to get it right.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
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...which this Comment box is too small to contain...
I don't think you can measure a wave and not weaken it, at least you cannot in its entirety. E.g. Quantum cryptography.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
... scientists try to prove other scientists wrong. The hard-headedness that some colleagues demonstrate when faced with opposing theories that have substantial backing data is a little disheartening at times... Religious or not, as a human it's difficult to escape the mechanism of cognitive dissonance in a perfect manner.
One good example of some scientists being just as closed minded as religious fundamentalists was that some rejected the big bang theory of the universe because it was proposed by a catholic priest, Georges Lemaître http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre. Note: I'm not referring to Einstein, he was skeptical at first and suspected a religious influence, but he did not dismiss Lemaître.
Silly!
Now, I don't support ID, but I also don't see how falsifiability is a requirement for something to be scientific.
Sure, it's convenient, in that it allows you to eliminate theories that eventually are proven false.
But the Universe is under no obligation whatsoever to cooperate with the aesthetics of human scientists. It could well be that there are laws that aren't falsifiable.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Actually I think the point is simply that by universe we mean by definition that which we can observe. We also probably would overlook weak interactions with other related universes or explain them by dark matter. So if a universe sustains an incompatible set of laws, we could only observe it in a simulation. So far, we do not believe that it is unethical to switch off a simulation, we treat it as unreal. Smarter and more lifelike AI will push that envelope.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
...does the universe run on Linux?
Score: -1 Overly-obligatory
Table-ized A.I.
Take thermodynamics, we experience that two objects in contact come to the same temperature. Einstein felt thermodyamics was on the most secure foundation. On the other hand quantum mechanics is a mathematical construct to explain the behaviour of things on an atomic scale. We believe it because it works so well even though it is not intuitive at all. For example the double slit experiment which has been performed with molecules (C60) is certainly not intuitive. The absolute speed of light is another example that comes to mind.
It is still amazing to me the leaps that the great scientists made in the early 20th century beyond experience to explain the world we exist in. Planck, Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, and many others made these leaps. It must have been so astounding to have been a scientist then and see this unfold.
if the fundamental laws of the universe are changing (as some posit), how would we know?
Exactly what do you mean by "change"? I've heard suggestions that the fundamental constants may have changed as the Universe expanded but that does not really mean that the "laws of physics" have really changed. There would still be an EM wave, nuclei, atoms etc. but just slightly larger/smaller faster/slower etc. than now. In fact I think this suggestion that "we don;t care or think" about where the laws come from is not quite true.
My take is that the laws of physics are, at least partially, due to the properties of space-time. Supposing we were deep underwater creatures with zero experience of air. Our physicists would likely come up with slightly different laws of nature. Light would travel slower, the EM force would be weaker etc. However we see the same effects in vacuum now. The strength of the EM force increases with increasing energy because the vacuum cannot shield the charge as well, the cause of the electrons mass is postulated to be the Higgs field which fills all of space so if we lived outside space the electron may well not have any mass at all etc.
So it is very clear that the properties of our space-time affect the laws of physics which we measure. What is not clear is whether things like, say, an electric field are a fundamental law outside space-time or a result of the properties of space-time. However to answer that we would either need to do an experiment outside our space-time continuum to compare results or have a really smart theorist come up with some framework which solves this and has predictable phenomena which we can measure inside our space-time.
What the original poster seems to have forgotten with the "scientists don't seem to care" comment is that the key to good science is NOT just about asking good questions - any idiot can do that! It is about asking good questions to which you have a chance at finding the answer. The reason physicists do not ask this question is that we have no idea how to find the answer....yet!
We are living in a four corner universe built on LIES!
You are stupid for reading this you are a LIE!
Only TRUTH can be found in 4-corner simulation!
Education makes you stupid 1-corner thinking!
A simulated simulation of the four universes is TRUTH!
Up and down are LIES by the GODLESS MORONS!
There is only inside and upside down in 4-corner universe!
MAKE YOUR TIME FAST, 1 CORNER UNIVERSE CUBE = DEATH!
1+1+1+1=TRUTH, 1 IS A LIE!
FOUR UNIVERSES FOUR LETTERS IN "LIES" COINCIDENCE?
I'm a pretty purple pony, you are stupid and ugly.
GOD IS LIES part of the 1-corner reality that makes you STUPID
Go to hell I hate all the filthy scumsucking humans they are STUPID!!!
TRUTH is 4 universe fractal IT JUST MAKES SENSE!
4 UNIVERSE RATIONAL TRUTH IRRATIONAL LIES we live in LIES!
"Whomsoever reads this is STUPID!"
THERE is no GOD only FOUR UNIVERSE you will BURN IN HELL!
MY HEAD ASPLODE!
the article quotes one mathematician from MIT who says that maths is a universe - which is quite correct. yet all maths universes are quite different from the 'known universe as we percieve it' in one important respect: the main goal of any maths structure is to be sufficiently rich yet consistent and non-contradictory. capturing some (or may be none) of the features of the ''real world as we perceive it'' is merely a side-effect, quite useful indeed so maths has some practical implications, but by no means this utilitarian aspect is the goal #1 of maths. so far there is no single model available that can consistently describe our universe - and that fact has nothing to do with maths. I'm a bit surprised someone from MIT can say anything of that kind. we are not part of any mathematical universe. what we are part of is something we'll never know for sure, we'll be attempting to describe the known universe with whatever models and concepts are available at this point (just we did the same thing hundreds and hundreds years ago), and that may or may not increase our knowledge of the universe.
My immediate reaction was kind of "He was taught not to question this in school? I came from a hick Indiana highschool, and we weren't taught that way?"
Not that thought he didn't have anything to say, but what he calls 'faith' in science I would call a logical assumption or an axiom. And the difference is simple - neither an article of faith or an axiom can be proven. But an article of faith can't be disproven - an axiom or assumption can. And that's the difference between science and religion.
If we based science on faith, then we wouldn't have rockets, we'd still believe in the ether, we would know with certainty that the problems with Mercury's orbit were measurement issues, not that Newtonian physics is incomplete.
There are things I take on faith - I think there are unique qualities to the soul that are real, yet not disprovable, and thus beyond the purview of science and logic. But that is not the same as taking *science* on faith.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
I personally like Federick Kantor's (see Information Mechanics, 1977) attempted derivation of the laws of physics from the mathematical requirements of information theory. I think this may be the seed from which everything else sprouts, but so far the full mathematics involved has proven intractable.
From the "tagging beta" line: navalgazing
Is that, like, sitting on the beach watching ships go by?
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
as a person of science i might only add that i am only interested in having a set of consistent, comprehensive (and, for purely aesthetic reasons, also elegant) laws describing our universe completely.
...
Once we have the laws, and we agree on them, whether you see an intelligent designer behind such laws, (thereby requiring some sort of "upper" universe in which god designed and implemented the laws), or you just see an universe that "just is", it's completely up to you and not of my concern at all
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history - Tom Veneziano
Frank Stallone.
My HTC 8525 has a 2MP camera. I'm in America, and it's readily available from AT&T/Cingular.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
> Your belief in the reality of these characters' existence, let alone of their accounts or beliefs, is what can be characterized as "belief without evidence". All religious stories contain characters with first-hand accounts.
The problem with that statement is that you've completely ignored what the grandparent post said. He just said that his belief was not predicated on their first-hand accounts, but on his own, and that their experiences were the impetus for him to seek his own experiences.
If you're going to critique something, please read it more carefully.
Actually the prophets of old did a pretty good job of explaining where the laws of nature came from. They just did a poor job of using our modern jargon. And the folks that translated the language they did use into modern "old english" didn't do a very good job of translating it into our modern jargon either. (Or for that matter from the original language to old english. )
Consider earth, wind, fire and water as the most common examples of solid, gas, plasma and liquid (The standard phases of matter). They also recognized other forms of constrained energy, not having the characteristics of mass, light and smokeless fire as exemplars, capable of creating epiphenomena forms supporting sufficient complexity to form intelligent life.
If you work back to the original language and take into account the lack of instrumentation and the subsequent rewrites/interpretations by ignorant priests and such it is amazingly accurate. Beware that existence is much more complex than we know yet and where we think it is wrong may be proved right sometime in the future. For instance the seven days isn't odd when relativistic effects from the expansion of the universe is applied.
You can also look into the work of Noether on symmetry causing the conservation laws. Quite interesting.
Remember... Deep Thought is the only computer we ever know who gave the answer to the ultimate question (101010 in binary...or 42 in decimal). So the truth is out there.. deep inside Deep Thought....
Guys... lets go and debug it.. check the logs, put a botnet, do whatever can to find the laws of nature!!!
Yup, The Laws of Nature come from my Aunt Matilda. She's a force of nature. No, that's not accurate, she is the force of Nature.
When a god and goddess love each other very much...
Boycott shampoo! Demand the REAL poo!
The background for the question is whether Science is a path to some kind of Truth about Life, The Universe and Everything, or if is just a collection of empirical relationships between measurements.
I'm for the second interpretation. If you seek Truth, go to a priest. We (scientists) deal only in predictions.
I think Derrida did a pretty bang-up job of deconstructing logocentrism.
From Wikipedia:
Deconstruction's central concern is a radical critique of the Enlightenment project and of metaphysics, including in particular the founding texts by such philosophers as Plato, Rousseau, and Husserl, but also other sorts of texts, including literature. Deconstruction identifies in the Western philosophical tradition a "logocentrism" or "metaphysics of presence" (sometimes known as phallogocentrism) which holds that speech-thought (the logos) is a privileged, ideal, and self-present entity, through which all discourse and meaning are derived. This logocentrism is the primary target of deconstruction.
The "laws of nature," being phenomenae encoded in words (logos) are also not privileged, and cannot be assumed to preexist.
It cannot be a "logical chain of reasoning" if the flow of logic depends on subjective key terms that carry different meanings in varying occurances.
Light means both luminescence and extremely low weight in the English language but not in many others.
Therefore this "logical chain of reasoning" is actually dependent on language, which is not objective and so cannot be used in reasoning.
Logic is "above" (for lack of better term =\ ) subjective stuff like language.
At most.. equivocation can be considered a play on words.
I believe the following quote is due to Ludwig Wittgenstein,
"Newtonian mechanics tells us nothing ABOUT the world. It merely tells us that the world can be described in a way that it has, in fact, been described."
And, due to Bohr,(paraphrased)
"Physics does not tell us what nature IS. It tells us what we can say about nature."
The Law of Non-Contradiction is still only an abstract for the sake of convenience. It neatly omits the entire field of non-modal logic, which is more consistent with our "real life observations".
Let's take a "P" in case to demonstrate: P = "My cat is 4 years old". Aside from ambiguities of meaning, the cat in question is at one time younger than 4, equal to 4 years old, and then older than 4 years old. The law of non-contradiction is non-temporally bounded - it's contextual.
It get's better: P = "My cat will never be 5 years old". Such a P can not be tested until these 5 years are completed, unless someone goes and does the cat in deliberately.
. And further P's exist, go ahead and make up your own: P = "We can never know whether the laws of nature are fixed."
And finally, you've got to include the enormous category of P that is nonsensical, for which we are unable to assign a true/false value. Example: P = "Splinkyblocks go flimmyjob in the gorridocolopily".
The so-called Law of Non-Contradiction is a mathematical pre-condition to formal logic systems, nothing much more nor less. I'd take care, if I were you, not to "believe" such a law is "true" at all. All things may come to pass. There is no such "thing" as truth.
In Plato's philosophy, he thinks that there is another universe of perfect Forms and that imperfect objects (not geomertrically perfect, etc) in our universe are shadows cast from the Forms. But in the Old Testament, God creates and governs his universe by creating laws that govern all the objects in it. So instead of trying to discern what the Forms are, we can go out and collect new data from observations in order to discern what God's laws of the natural world are, and perhaps thereby learn something new about God. Modern Science was born from combining Greek philosophy with Theology.
recommended reading: Foster, M. B. "The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Science," Mind 43 (1934): 446-68.
Plato's approach is presented by a really intersting metaphor of a cave. People are all chained up in a cave with our backs to a big fire behind us, so we see only shadows dancing before our eyes that are cast from the flames. Newton's approach, wanting to discern the thoughts of God, is the culmination of the Scientific Revolution, what we call the Newtonian Synthesis, where laws of motion and laws of everything else are clearly discernable and all we need to do is collect data endlessly and we will be able to constantly perfect our understanding of those laws.
If you want to talk about whether there was a Second Scientific Revolution in the 20th century, read some Thomas Khun.
"And does it matter that we don't know and that most scientists don't seem to _know_or_care_ where they _come_from_?"
How can you religious people not see that scientists care a lot from where these things _come_from_. That's why they keep searching and searching, trying to figure out how they work, why they work, and how they are connected (the laws of physics). The only difference here is that they do not try to explain where the laws come from before they have a theory that can be proven by other scientists, it's not (and will never be) so simple as just throwing out "oh they was made by god".
If I got the topic wrong, Im sorry for that. But how a doubt about science can be a headline on slashdot in 2007 scares me.
Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has a very interesting answer to the question of where the laws of nature come from. He suggests that what we think of as "laws" is actually better described as "habits" of nature. This is the essence of a very controversial, but entirely scientific, hypothesis called morphic resonance.
According to this hypothesis, the laws of nature do in fact evolve. For things like how atoms behave and cosmological stuff we wouldn't be able to observe any such change, since the "habits" that control them have been engrained for literally billions of years.
But for instance in the biological realm, the change would be observable. This makes the hypothesis testable in a scientific way. So far, a number of experiments have been carried out, and while it is far to early to say that the results conclusively prove the hypothesis of morphic fields, results are very encouraging. It appears that the laws of nature do in fact evolve over time.
If you are at all interested in the questions of how self organizing systems evolve and where the laws of nature may come from, I strongly recommend that you visit the sheldrake.org website to get a first overview of the hypothesis. The next step would be to get hold of and read Sheldrake's book The Presence of the Past for a more detailed description of the hypothesis and the experimental data that suggests it.
Personally, I regard this as the most interesting book I have ever read in my life. Your mileage may of course vary.
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
The most important question in science is: What is the nature of consciousness? ie How does nature instantiate consciousness in the human mind? The motivation is provided by the creation of an ego which observes the universe without being a part of it. Prior to this, we were at one with the universe, so the formation of this separated ego is the source of an existential guilt which we atone for by reconnecting to the universe through our science. If we could have total scientific knowledge of the universe, we would re-attain our original state and lose the guilt that drives us. Without this guilt, we wouldn't get up in the morning, and we wouldn't be conscious.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what is really meant by "laws" of nature; that is apparent in the article and some of the comments here.
Try substituting the word "model" for "law" in the texts. There is nothing absolute about the models as they are described; they are just the best models we have been able to describe so far. There may be better models waiting to be discovered.
Consider Newton's model of gravity. Since it's a model, how would we go about deciding if the model is wrong? Well, you might propose that the model does not hold for, say, bananas. We can then go off and conduct an experiment where we drop bananas in vacuum chambers and measure if the time to impact the ground is the one predicted by the model. If it's not, the model isn't correct.
As we know, it turns out that Newton's model doesn't give the full picture - once we get into extremely dense objects (black holes) or objects moving at high speed (i.e. near the speed of light) - so better models are introduced.
The basis of science, then, is to describe models that fit with the phenomena we can observe. The models need to be testable (I can construct an experiment to test my model), reproducible (you can do it as well), and falsifiable (we can conceive of an experiment that would prove the model wrong).
The last point is crucial. Otherwise, we could end up with a model of the universe like: "Everything happens because the plant om my desk decided it should be that way". There is no way of disproving this model, but it is useless because we cannot predict anything from it; any outcomes are equally likely based on this model.
Step 2 is answer where the thing that is the answer to step 1 (e.g. "God" or "The Fundamental Equation of Everything") comes from.
I know some wag will suggest that we don't know step 3, but step 4 is "Profit", but in fact we do know step 3, or at least the form it must take: "Where does the thing that was the answer to step 2 come from?"
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Amanda Dennison of Alberta, Canada, firewalked 220 feet in '05. Someone named Scott Bell walked 328 feet last year. Your experience was more along the lines of the thousands of middle managers who experience the "magic" of firewalking as part of motivational seminars every year.
You have to do your research before you decide you have superseded the laws of physics. Or, at least before you start telling other people about it....
How can we ever 'fully' understand the Universe? When we have laws one can continue to ask the question 'why' is this law the way it is, right down to the most 'fundamental' law and when we reach this, we can still ask of this law: 'why' is the fundamental law the way it is.
The only state of the Universe that i think we could comprehend is complete nothingness, and that obviously isn't the case...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
As I see it, scientific laws are primarily descriptive, as they usually comprise an abstraction of past observations and hence are statistical in nature. No matter how often a law might be verified, there's still a possibility left that things might behave differently next time. The confusion likely arises from (the requisite to be called science) reproducibility, which lurks people into thinking that if an experimental outcome can reproduced that many times it will work that way forever, and is closely related to the human causality concept.
The discussion is pretty much idle anyway though, which becomes apparent when we look at the reasons why we do science. Clearly, the driving motive is to make our environment, and hence our lives, more predictable, thus firstly enhancing our chances or survival and secondly reduce times of suffer, i.e. the comfort factor. It about control (in time), the same motive that turned hunters into farmers. The search for the ultimate truth, world formula or whatever reflects but the desire for an ultimate "lean back" situation. The very same reason why people ask whether our laws really "govern" nature, of course, it'd be just comforting to know and settle our minds.
The weight of a kilogram can't change any more than the capacitance of an ampere can.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There is also a good bit of biographical stuff in the video, but the other parts are worth checking out in relation to this topic. Also, elsewhere on Google Video the same piece is cut into 10 minute chunks.
Nature has no laws because nature doesn't care. We observe what we assume are constants and call those laws. Most are proven false, and even some of the supposedly immutable natural constants like the ratio of electron to proton mass, can be shown to be variable in theory, which means we'll probably find them that way. Everything exists in space-time, which is never flat and static. Therefore things are never the same and there are no "constants".
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Although I don't disagree with most of what you're saying, I disagree with your tenet that we "can't understand mind with mind any more than a knife can cut itself." We're definitely not there yet, but I feel we're making significant progress. Before this century is out, we'll be able to recreate this phenomenon, complete with AIs that claim to feel "qualia" themselves, and who express a fear of dying. If you're looking for a good koan on the topic, consider quine. (Okay, so it's not exactly a koan, but I like the way those words play together.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
It's entirely possible that we might reproduce the phenomenon of conscious minds without understanding them. However, just like it's possible to create a quine or a self-replicating machine (which we're examples of), it's possible for our mind to understand itself without collapsing into paradox. (I completely respect the Buddhist way of thinking, but fundamentally I'm a reductionist, which is also at odds with dualism, but for different reasons.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Same for String Theory, until recently. Why was that "allowed"?
To some extent, parsimony. String theory was an attempt to condense multiple distinct models into a single one. Assume the strong Church-Turing universe thesis; the work of Vitanyi/Li and Wallace/Dowe indicate that the simpler prediction correctly describing the known data is more likely to be correctly predictive.
That said, I would say that until some solid evidence turned up that previous theories didn't cover, String Theory was more philosophy than science per se.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
In other news...
While googling found some other good ones.
Billy Brown rides on. Yolanda Green bypasses Gary White.
The laws of the Nature have come from life on this earth, which follow certain biological activities. Most of them follow servival of the fittest principle. With the resources availabe try to servive, if not adopt to the changing scenario of materials that are available and go on changing their own mechanisms to suit. Only Human because of the brain do not follow, this natural principle. That's where we get all the problems on this earth. Most of the cases Photosynthesis is the way they get the energy, or from the natural materials that can supply energy through chemicals under certain conditions. They all convert from one form to other form, even if required by consuming the other or by molecular changes. It is a cyclic process that goes on for ever. Materials to life and life back to materials. Most of the cases the man made systems are not so efficient in reversing the mechanisms. Energy is converted to materials of higher order for stability and materials back to energy in the same order, which is naturally occuring phenomenon. Any inbalance in the process because of the human intervention releases energy at faster rates and leaves wasteful materials some times dangerous to the life.