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.'"

Comments

Re:i think its clear

[gardyloo]

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 (or their restricted domains should be stated), but what if they're only applicable here/now? Are they just shadows of higher-dimensional laws which may undergo sudden changes as some higher-dimensional phase change goes on?

      Perhaps the arbitrary laws you can write down really do apply.

        This all strikes me as a form of hidden variables theory. Or perhaps just cosmic navel-gazing.

Re:i think its clear

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I agree, but I disagree. So many people (Platonists) think these laws exist outside of human experience, and it's so obvious that they don't. WHAT they try to describe does, but there's a big difference. We can say a^2 + b^2 = c^2, but the very notion of a triangle is completely circumscribed by human experience, and the notion of abstract notation is also a human thing. To say such a relation exists a priori is where I believe rationalism runs off the rails into a kind of metaphysics of "belief" as opposed to empirical science, and where empirical science mistakes itself for reality.

We ARE creating the laws, but what we create them ABOUT is something we do not have control over. The universe and human evolution rolled those dice aeons ago. Yes, you COULD write a law that says gravity doesn't exist, IF the law you write permits the kind of observations we make regarding objects in space/time. In fact, this is an interesting example. The Einsteinian view is that gravity (in and of itself) doesn't exist. It is our perception of how objects behave in curved space time. In the other ring, you have physicists who are bound and determined to shoe-horn gravity into some grand design of particle physics, and are on a continuous (and IMHO, quixotic) quest for the Graviton.

So, you grab a brick, hold it out. Let go. It falls. The effect of it falling on release we can call "gravity", but whether gravity exists as a REAL force in the universe, or just some weird effect of space/time warpage is another issue. So, yes, you CAN write a law that says "gravity doesn't exist" as long as your law accounts for the behaviour exhibited in the test of your dropping the brick.

What is insightful about your brief post is the point that what we call "Scientific Laws" are merely descriptions of nature. The laws are Scientific, and are therefore, tentative. They will remain "true" only as long as they can be proven to be true. Once some genius comes along and disproves it, or, more likely, incorporates it into some larger understanding, it will cease to be "true". Science is not based on absolute permanent truth. Scientific truth is ALWAYS provisional. It is so, as it is a product of language - a tool of our species.

RS

Re:Missing the point

[gstoddart]

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.

When in fact, science is discovering the opposite.

Reductionism has been the prevailing school of thought in science for a very long time. We've assumed if we could break things down into their constituent pieces, then we'd understand the bigger picture stuff pretty readily.

Now scientists are starting really get a sense that the more they pull it apart into wee pieces, the less we know about how it all got put together in the first place. The complexity of what we have is, at present, far greater than our understanding of how the bits work.

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.

In actuality, you end up like a child who has taken apart a complicated toy, and can't figure out how to put it together.

Our knowledge has grown exponentially. But, the more we look at what we know, the more we realize the sheer scale of the stuff we don't know anything about. It's fascinating, but it's also humbling at the same time -- there's a lot more in some of these systems than we even have an inkling of understanding of.

I think we're reaching the point where simple reductionism, while still driving basic science, opens up far more questions than the number of answers we get. We just didn't know enough to know we had to ask these questions before.

Certainly, I don't think science is any where near answering the question of where the laws of nature came from. Philosophy and religion can try to do that, but their answers are just guesses as well -- some of this stuff isn't really "knowable" just yet.

Cheers

Re:Alternate universes

[martyros]

What an interesting post! Very well put. Not often that I read a slashdot post that causes so much introspection.

Two points. First, Buddha's observation relates only to questions about life after death. However, the question "Is there a God" doesn't necessarily have to do with "eternity". If you read the Old Testament of the Bible, there is no explicit mention of Heaven. (Or, at least, almost no mention of heaven -- haven't done a search.) There is a vague shadowy idea of the afterlife in terms of "Sheol", but that's nothing like what people think of heaven and eternity these days. Almost all of the focus of God and our relationship with him is about the here and now -- the blessings of walking with God and being a righteous man.

Second, Buddha's observation about the source of the question may reveal something about us; but the question still remains as a question of fact, and it does matter. If Buddha I were on the Titanic, and I had heard people say that it was sinking, and I asked Buddha if he thought it was sinking and if we should try to escape on some lifeboats, his series of observational questions are still as valid as they are when asking about God. Yes, I want to know if the Titanic is sinking in part because I'm afraid of dying; and yes, that's in part because I'm afraid of what will happen to me when I die. But I must insist that the answer to the original question is still important, since how I believe and act will determine whether I die a cold icy death soon, or of old age after a long full life later.

Similarly, the answer to the question of God's existence and nature -- whether I can live in a relationship with him now, and whether he will judge me after I die for how I've lived my life here -- will be of material significance to my happiness.

Re:Alternate universes

[spun]

Surely desire has little to do with it. If you were trapped in a dark box with no means of escape for the rest of eternity, I can guarantee you would be unhappy, and desire to get out. There were Buddhist monks in Tibet, who, in time of famine, would starve and mummify themselves by eating only tree bark, sitting in the lotus position until they died, where many of them sit to this day. They did it to show that we are not slaves to our desires, that we do not need to become vioent animals in time of famine.

Other monks, held captive and tortured by the Chinese for years, said that the greatest danger they faced was that of losing compassion for their captors. Then there's the Vietnamese Buddhist who set himself on fire in protest of the war, They caught that on film. He did not move a muscle, even while being burned alive. Nothing was left of his body, except his heart, which hasn't decayed to this day. Don't underestimate the power of a person who is free from desire.

The questions you raise were the very ones that kept me from feeling comfortable with Buddhism for a long time. But Buddha taught that desire for asceticism was a form of attachment, too. Spiritual bragging, in a way. That's why Buddhism is called the middle path. Enjoy the pleasures of the moment fully while they are there, but do not pine for them when they are gone. Look at pain as experience. Just don't place value judgments on situations or feelings. That's my take on it, anyway.