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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
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
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.
The article's speculation almost found something significant, I would say. Metaphysics is necessarily permissive, as Spinoza understood. Different mathematics, then, must permissively overlap where logic allows, because there is no cosmic censor consistently possible to keep them separate. And, classical mathematics - not subject to Church's thesis, are distinct in their range of expression. So, the most expressive of those are found most, namely Einstein-Davis and Kaluza-Klein.
Check out my journal here.
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Michael J. Burns
Michael J. Burns