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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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...
What's wrong with that? As long as no one can tell the difference, we might as well go on living as we have. How much would it influence your actions to know that you were a simulation within a simulation? Everything still happens the same way.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
Four different forces, superstrings, antineutrinos, strange quarks, neutralinos, gluons, and 26 dimensions.
The laws of physics are clearly the result of a bureaucracy.
There's a basic frustration in physics today that things are just too complicated at the bottom. There's a classic comment by I. I. Rabi, "Who ordered that?", made when the muon was discovered. The muon is a "heavy electron", the first elementary particle discovered that doesn't appear in ordinary atoms. Muons didn't seem to be necessary to physics, but there they were. That was the end of simple subatomic physics, and nobody has been able to put the mess back in the box since.
More importantly: if the fundamental laws of the universe are changing (as some posit), how would we know? Can we separate natural laws from the universe that they are derived from/created in?
Apparently this is a useless question since it is the philosophy of science. I have to wonder why smart people think they are smart about everything. Isn't science supposed to have rigor and thorough analysis, and if so, wouldn't that mean rigor and analysis about itself? Theories of metaphysics (not the new age shit that word is associated with, but about fundamental stuff about physics or science), epistemology (what we know and how we know it), and language all inform our science and scientific thought. Failing to understand that is a failure to understand the very activity a scientist is engaged in.
Because life has no meaning, and because at any second someone could hit Ctrl-C and kill us all instantly, erasing our entire life's work, because the whole of human existance could be some process running in the background of a lab workstation, because someone would be watching us... because someone would be responsible for human suffering.
Maybe it wouldn't make any difference to an animal, but I have psychological investment in the existential.
More importantly: if the fundamental laws of the universe are changing (as some posit), how would we know? Can we separate natural laws from the universe that they are derived from/created in?
Well, if they change fast enough, it could become apparent that the equations and constants we've been using for 200 years now are no longer accurate (with respect to the results they used to produce). That would be a pretty big flag I'd think.
=Smidge=
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/
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 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."
Interesting thought, if that were the case, how long do you think would pass between the simulator thinking they're going to press Ctrl-C and the program actually terminating? I'm guessing billions of years in our time. Of course it could have decided to do this billions of years ago, but in any case, chances are it wouldn't happen before we all died anyway.
If the universe is a simulation, then you should spend at least some of your day looking for cheat codes.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It could also be true that all configurations of physical laws would ultimately lead to life forming in one way or another. They can say that changing the charge of the electron by 2% would make life impossible, but we cannot truly know the macroscopic effects that such a change would have. Yes, the universe would be different, but to say that life couldn't form there is hugely arrogant IMHO.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
I would wander 'how fast' was changing fast enough to raise a flag. Would observing a flaw in a previously accepted law be large enough to act as a flag that the universe changed, or that our original understanding was insufficient?
Though I suppose any change that was observable on such a scale would also be able to be proven if the data were still available and accurate.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I think you have gone over the heads of most "scientists". Seriously, I have seen more "scientists" pumped out of universities than a pr0n star pumps out semen.
Why so harsh? Hmm, is it just me or should our "scientists" being asking questions and not just towing the line of the corporate money they are all pimping for?
Yeah, I was working in the "scientific" field for a while until I got bored with the butt kissing that I witnessed of big corporate money.
Where are the scientists that actually _ask_ questions, regardless of topic? Ask a question about a topic that even _might_ have a Christian connection and watch the "scientists" drop it like a whore with crabs.
Then watch them all scurry to get the scraps from some corporate funded "study".
What crap. I use to want to be a "scientist". I went to school to be a "scientist". Then I became a "scientist". Then I quit, because of the crap.
I am much happier now. I still hold dear my teachings and thoughts. I just no longer will accept money from a "corporate sponsor" to give some crappy @ssed opinion.
How can "scientists" come to 2 conclusions about global warming? Show two groups of "scientists" the _same_ data, ask them to evaluate it and I can tell you the outcome. It all depends on who funded them.
There are three basic approaches to this existential dilemma. First, decide based on arbitrary experiences that one particular explanation is right. Second, decide that no particular explanation matters since you can't know which one is right for sure, and get on with your life. Third, go batshit insane.
Buddha was asked a number of questions by a wise philosopher of the time, such as "Is there a soul," "Is there a God" and "Is there life after death?" Buddha refused to answer because the answers aren't important. If they are important to you, there is a more basic question you should be asking first, which is, "Why is it important for me to believe that I know the answers?"
You will find the answer to this is always some variant of, "Because I'm afraid of dying and knowing the right things will help keep me from ceasing to exist." So the question becomes, why am I afraid of dying? And the answer is almost always something along the lines of, "Because I see myself as fundamentally separate from the Universe, and when I die, I'm gone."
This is based on the fact that mind has privileged access to some of it's own internal state. No one else seems to know our internal worlds, and so we fear that when we die, those worlds will be lost. Worse yet, as we believe we are the only ones who can put them in their proper context, when we die, they might be misinterpreted.
Well, buck up. You aren't separate from the universe. You are not a subject, observing the objects. You aren't a little man sitting in your head looking out through your eyes and hearing through your ears. The sense of self is just another sense, just another track in the recording. No one is listening because there aren't any such things as individuals to observe.
Is that confusing or upsetting? Then you are stuck in dualistic thinking, and will always be, in some sense, scared of death. If you can let go of dualism and realize that there is no subjective observer separate from the objects observed, but that observation still exists, then you will be free and it won't matter one bit whether we are living in a simulation, or even whether there is a God, a soul, or an afterlife.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's certainly interesting that we had an approximation (Maxwell, Newton) which as so simple it seemed that it must be fundamental, or nearly so. If there was anything more fundamental, one would expect it to be even simpler: why should a more-complex set of rules just happen to have a nice, neat approximation right at the scales where humans happen to be able to observe them easily?
I suspect that one day we'll find out that there's a very good explanation, but I'll be darned if I have any idea what it is.
"We" don't "exist." That is still dualistic thinking. I like what you say about the sense of self, though I tend to think of it as undifferentiated awareness. Not of something, by something. Awareness.
There is no real choice, because there is no stable point that is outside the system of feedback loops and can influence them without being influenced. There is only cause and effect.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I get that you were joking, but I suspect it's more like where do small rocks come from?
The two options are accretion (collection and bonding of smaller particles or concepts to gether to form a greater whole) or disintergration (breaking apart of a larger whole - only fragments remain).
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent
It saves a lot of effort when arguing with the religious types - "transcendent entities are necessarily outside the realm of logic, so I'll not discuss your particular version of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, thankyou."
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Shalom :P
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
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."
Extreme bodily sensations are still unpleasant. I am talking about the emotional component of pain. That is suffering, and that is what I think animals don't have. We feel powerless over our pain, and that powerlessness over something so simple confronts our egos in a way that there is no defense against.
Meditation can also give you some degree of control over not just the emotions, but the sensations themselves. The mind can learn to dissociate from the sensory inputs.
I think most Buddhists gain pleasure from as many things as they can, including breathing and just being. Most Buddhists I have known have been actively engaged in making the world a better place. Some have specifically told me that meditation helps them focus and do more with their limited time to help the world. I think one of the long term goals of Buddhism is to build a Utopian world, because that would reduce suffering, and help people towards enlightenment. Easier to worry about enlightenment on a full belly, after all.
I try to manage positive and negative emotions. It's easy to become attached to positive feelings, and this does more than create negative feelings in their absence. It creates a compulsion to work for those positive feelings. I relish the good feelings but try not to let them rule me, and motivate myself based on what I believe rather than what I feel.
But I don't try to control my emotions, per se. Buddhism has a phrase for that, "Like trying to stir the dirt out of muddy water." if the water is muddy, leave it alone and the dirt will settle out. Trying to control feelings means you are placing value judgments on the moment.
Basically, your value judgments made in the past are your past life karma. That karma determines your present life, the present moment, Meaning, for example, I have chosen to feel negatively in past situations. A similar situation arises. I am predisposed to feel negatively about it, and if I don't check that impulse, it only reinforces things. The next time a similar situation comes around, I will have slightly less freedom of choice in how to view it. In the "karma metaphor," my choices in my past lives (individual moments) determine my present life karma, and my choices in my present life determine my future karma.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton