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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.
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."
Where'd this come from, then? Out of your nostril?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
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
OK now this is dumb. The AC's post (he was obviously going for "funny") is only flamebait if athiesm itself is a religion calling for holy war against all Jews, Christians, Muslims, Bhuddists, Hindus, and other nonbelievers; er, I mean, well you know what I mean.
If mention of religion offends your athiestic sensibilities your faith in the nonexistance of God must be weak indeed. If you can't stand someone making fun of your religion then your faith in God must be equally weak.
If Mr. Coward were to have said "God" instead of "the Bible" I would have to agree with him and if you want to know why, I wrote two articles several years ago at K5 explaining where my spiritual beliefs come from. Gecko Poker is about some strange wierdness I witnessed while in Thailand when I was in the USAF ("The bhuddist priests do things that make Kwai Chaing Cane look like a clumsy dork."), and Death about the time I died an an auto accident.
You can choose to believe that elephants exist or you can choose to believe that the photos are Gimped, but once you see an elephant nobody is going to convince you that there are no such things.
The article itself is flamebait if you ask me. I can understand completely why the parent poster chose to remain anonymous in this nest of athiests who whistle past the graveyard.
As I said in Bloody Sunday, thank God for the athiests!
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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.
"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.
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.
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.
And it's not an inference at all; it's a post hoc effort to rationalize (via pretend science) what its proponents already believed.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Same for String Theory, until recently. Why was that "allowed"?
I'm not even sure how the event of hypothesis-formation occurs with regard to any domain in your model--because certainly, the hypothesis precedes the testing model, and if said hypothesis "isn't science", it would then be excluded a priori.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
No, in fact, "Darwin's Black Box" in itself contains extensive science. This is a verifiable empirical fact by looking at the biochemical causal chains specifically described, like, you know, on the pages.
It's simply a assertion of yours based on your preference to exclude the science that is there based on your disagreement with the inference. You just arbitrarily "de-scope" the science, and thus exclude it from your characterization of ID. Sorry, not impressed.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
#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."
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)
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."
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.
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?
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
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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
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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.
Please go back to school and learn about the inverse-square and how it applies to physical laws in three dimensions. Here is something to think about "If you have a 2'x2' square of paper and it is 2' away and you move it to 4'(twice the distance), why does the paper look 1/4th the size and what is the apparent change in the surface area of the square?
The universe does not choose anything. The universe is an inanimate object. We choose the numbers.
Because, humans do the measuring. Take the formula for gravitational force between two objects, which is
Gravity is a function of mass. There are two masses, a and b, which attract each other and who are separated by distance r. Mass a attracts b and that attraction decreases with distance, which is r. Mass b attracts mass a and that attraction decreases with the distance which is r. You end up with two attractive forces (Fab and Fba). The equation for each looks likeTo get the total force you multiple the two equationsand then multiple them times the gravitational constant, which is by no means round.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Welcome to patterns. They exist mostly because that is how humans perceive them...
Math is OUR perceptions. Dont be so quick think that most of the universe is clean or mathmatically simple. Check out Pi, Entanglement, and please remember Newton is a good rule of thumb but his theories have been mostly replaced and Refined(except for his observations on optics) especially at the Macro and micro scales.
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".
It was mathmatically pretty good, and made sense.
ID means you need some magical event that can not be tested, proven in any shap what so ever. It also goes against all evidence.
Also not science:
Belief that monkey's in my butt make the universe last week. Which is the exact same thing as saying "Some power created all existence 6000 years ago."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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!
Nu-uh! They can be studied here!
No, wait... here!
Crap, that's still not it... maybe here?
I'm so confused...
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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."
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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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!
The two are mutually exclusive. "Quantitative laws" are a human construct. Why would the universe follow the dictates of a human construct?
Evolution is a fact. Darwinism is a joke.
And, equally, I can say ID "makes sense". No, I don't need some "magical event", I need an instance of Design. And, again, "it goes against all evidence" is purely your personal -interpretation- of the evidence. My notion of the system at hand is additive, not either-or; I can, without any self-contradiction, assert there is a particular causal mechanism -and- that mechanism was designed at some point in the causal chain. Naturalists tend not to have that option, and so tend to have a deep problem understanding "proximate cause", or at least refuse to understand it in regards to ID, though they're fine with the notion that what caused, say, the Nagasaki explosion was a nuclear chain reaction--and that what caused the Nagasaki explosion was President Roosevelt. And that leads to the open lunacy of the chain-of-false-dichotomies "god of the gaps" argument... but I digress. ;)
Thanks for throwing in the two straw-men at the end, but I think we'd agree discussing that would serve no productive purpose, nor was intended to.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
"Irreducibly complex" is never defined precisely. Without a precise definition of that term, your sentence is meaningless noise, not a testable prediction. It is therefore emphatically not science.
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
If this weren't slashdot, I'd probably be bothered by your post.
1&1 - Cheap domain and web hosting.
Horribly semantic, but okay. Remove the term entirely.
The specific mutations required PERIOD.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
ID may make predictions, but it's not falsifiable. There isn't any observation you can make that will falsify intelligent design. There's always the out that god simply did it that way because he wanted to.
Plus, intelligent design doesn't tell us anything useful. Okay, so what if god did design everything? He has apparently ALSO included at least a limited form of evolution. The premise that god designed everything... well, some stuff, doesn't tell us anything about what will happen in the future. It doesn't even tell us anything interesting about the past because the entire fossil record becomes arbitrary acts of creation.
String theory, on the other hand, DOES have the potential to be falsifiable. In fact, there are several avenues being pursued right now to do just that. Of course, last I checked nobody teaches string theory in elementary and high school science classes anyway. If anything it gets mentioned as a bleeding edge possibility.
Why would the universe choose a round whole number for its law of gravity? That's just way too weird.
What whole round number would that be then? Don't forget it's humans that choose the numbers - sometimes we choose certain numbers as the basis of systems (e.g. SI) to make them come out to whole numbers for many practical problems - this reduces errors when doing the arithmetic. But often other phenomena don't fit into a neat system of whole numbers and we are left with awkward constants. Nearly every real physical constant you care to name is not a round number, unless the "system" was designed around it. 1 second equals 1000 milliseconds, how weird is that!!!!
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.
I wish I could mod this +4 LIES. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Well, I hope you'll at least acknowledge "useful" is a rather-subjective evaluation.
But let me propose one scenario:
We are now at the point in history of being able to do substantial varieties of genetic engineering. What we don't have, is historical data as to the possible negative effects of producing various varieties of "artificial life". Let say, in one alternate future, -because enough people didn't reject the notion out of hand-, we "ran the numbers" on some fossilized form of life, and found that judging by the calculated probability, this form of life had no likely direct Earthly ancestor. This form of life also was apparently remarkably efficient at killing off other forms of life existing at the time, in unexpected ways--say, it secreted its own deadly virii or somesuch. No need to specify "God" or "intelligent extraterrestrials" or any further cause--we're simply left with the evidence that an apparent case of design interacted with its environment in previously-unforeseen and hazardous ways. The only distinction that caused us even to focus upon, pursue, and reach this information is the paradigm of design. Given that we're now entering a historical period of doing our own genetic design, with an ever-expanding scope, could not the outcome of an apparent historical sample of that be of very pressing "usefulness", in terms of cautionary specifics to refer to for our own genetic engineering efforts?
As for ID's falsifiability, well, that's debatable too--but a little aside the point in terms of String Theory. The criteria for excluding ID would state that String Theory should not have been "allowed" to be pursued scientifically in the first place, or that it magically "became science" the moment when the first person thought of (or proposed, or documented... what is your criteria, anyway?) something to falsify it.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Gravity does not work in three dimensions. There is no 'area' variable associated with the law of gravity. It deals with two points and the line between them. If you think that 'area' has something to do with gravity, you have a fertile imagination. Gravity has to do with two masses and the distance between them. The strength of gravity is inverse square to the distance. But there is nothing about the physics of gravity which requires it to be so. It just is so. Where in the law of gravity does a '2x2' piece of paper come in to play? What variables represent the area of the 'paper'? Guess what? There are none.
We choose the numbers.
Ah, so Newton chose the numbers and the universe instantly obeyed. Amazing!
Gravity is a function of mass. There are two masses, a and b, which attract each other and who are separated by distance r. Mass a attracts b and that attraction decreases with distance, which is r. Mass b attracts mass a and that attraction decreases with the distance which is r. You end up with two attractive forces (Fab and Fba).
What happened to the pieces of paper the 'area' you were talking about? I thought the inverse square has something to do with area? I see there is no area variable in the formulas you are presenting. Maybe you're the one that needs to go back to school.
Evolution is a fact. Darwinism is a joke.
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
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Ah, there's the difference. A theory of intelligent design can certainly be scientific. Many have been advanced. Most start with us being someone's domestic animals. The problem is with Intelligent Design, where the designer is specifically God, the Christian god. The other tenant of Intelligent Design is that evolution, at least "macro" evolution of species, does not occur.
Which brings us to your fossil with no likely relation to any other life form. If we found such a thing, and since evolutionary biologists are constantly "running the numbers" it's quite likely we would recognize it as something very unusual, then it would be a strong argument that intelligent design occurred at least once.
If Intelligent Design is correct, EVERY fossil should show signs that it stands in isolation from every other life form. Why the procession of extinct primates and hominids leading up to humans, for example? Does that falsify ID? Nope. Because God did it that way on purpose, to test us, or because those hominids were evil and destroyed by the flood, or whatever. There's always something. As soon as you introduce an omnipotent being then no rules need to be followed. Nothing is predictable, and nothing need be consistent.
So intelligent design, quite possibly scientific, though we haven't seen any indication of it. Since there's no indication of intelligent design and it would require evolution to fit the observations anyway, Occam's razor urges us to use straight evolution as most likely true. Unless we find your unique life form, which evolution can't explain.
Intelligent Design, on the other hand, with it's hallmark pseudoscientific use of a potentially scientific theory to advance an unscientific agenda, is not scientific. Who knows, it could even be true, but it's not science.
So string theory. First off, nobody claims ST is a finished theory. It's still under very active development. Call it an embryonic theory, or a mathematical model that might grow into a theory, if you prefer to be really critical. ST differs from ID (as opposed to id) in a couple of key ways. First, it has to follow the rules. It has to be consistent. There's no god in the works to provide an excuse for any observation that doesn't seem to fit. So string theory is potentially testable... we just have to figure out how to do it (and we are). Second, string theory fits existing observations very well: as well as existing theories. ID does not. ID doesn't explain, for instance, those extinct hominids, without resorting to magic to resolve the inconsistency. It also doesn't explain the instances of evolution that we've seen, without adding a completely ad hoc explanation that there are TWO kinds of evolution, micro evolution that occurs, and macro evolution, which is abhorrent to God and never happens. As a third strike, one of the biggest arguments ID proponents make in favour of the theory is irreducible complexity. Yet we keep discovering that "irreducible complexities" like the mammalian eye, reduce very nicely.
My HTC 8525 has a 2MP camera. I'm in America, and it's readily available from AT&T/Cingular.
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Well, you're simply stating ID is as it isn't, a) that it either necessitates or specifies the Christian God, or b) it definitionally denies either "macroevolution" or "microevolution" occurs.
Since you're simply making up what's under discussion, I suppose I'll need to leave your conversation with yourself to you. Unfortunate, since it was an interesting discussion.
Your strategy of simply asserting a straw-man version of ID aside, eventually, regardless of how much anyone tries to freight "Intelligent Design" with other positions of theism (in contrast to the process that would be intellectually honest, looking for the best argument in a domain--instead choosing to deliberately search for the worst), science simply will need a term to refer to "maybe some or all of this was designed", and actually deal with the issue.
Which brings us full circle to the question of the scope of science opened in my first post.
I hope I didn't give the impression that I'm predisposed to there not being a "reduction" of proposed instances of "irreducible complexity", though. My personal worldview can accomodate every single proposal being sufficiently explained, thus simply moving my notion of the point of design's "when" back to the Big Bang. I think, perhaps, your concern is that it is your worldview that fails outright, with the very first example that doesn't "reduce".
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Ad-hominems to the point of absurdity. I expect you didn't really expect a response to that, and I'll accomodate you.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
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!
If you're in the business of ID apologetics, you should at least find out what its pretend scientists actually say.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I don't know what Intelligent Design theory you're talking about, but the one that I've heard about is the one that some people in places like Texas and Kansas would like taught in school. THAT Intelligent Design is widely acknowledged (including by most religious people) as a thin veneer on the Christian creation myth. You can get the Jewish and Islamic creation myths out of that too. It is most certainly used to argue against evolution being even a possibility. Since this conversation started with you implying that if string theory is taught in school (which it's not) then so should Intelligent Design.
As I said, if you want to talk about intelligent design, small case, the theory that life on this planet was designed by some intelligence (NOT necessarily a god), then I already agreed with you that, depending on how you formulate it, it could very well be a scientific theory, although an unlikely one for various reasons. The version that was/is being pushed in certain school divisions, and the one that gets prominently discussed, is not, for reasons I pointed out.
I actually think you have an agenda here that has nothing to do with objectively evaluating whether Intelligent Design, or even intelligent design, is a scientific theory. The word "strawman" is usually a good tip off.
So I agree. End of discussion.
Welcome to the internet. Will you be staying long?
XML causes global warming.
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.
"Truth" (my definition) is merely the degree to which a model resembles its referent according to desired metrics. As such, truth exists, in many cases may be measured, and generally may be regarded as a function applied to a model, the referent, and the language of the proposition, to yield a value in [0,1].
A "true wheel" is one that implicitly resembles an idealized circle on the plane. A "true-to-scale" model is one in which geometric proportions are represented adequately, but the material, color, density, etc. may differ. Note that the referent may be ideal or metaphysical, as in the true wheel, or "real", as in a true-to-scale model of the U.S.S. Enterprise (the carrier, not the spacecraft ;^).
The sorts of propositions (i.e. linguistic models) you are talking about that have referents in the past or future are just as metaphysical as the idealized circle. The only thing that may exist in "real life" is the instantaneous present--everything else is idealized. So propositions about the past or the future are just as metaphysical in nature as propositions about mathematics.
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.
As for facts about the future, if determinism is correct, or even if the future is undetermined but with only a limited range of outcomes from this moment, then it may very well be true now that your cat will never be 5 years old, even though this cannot be practically tested until that time comes about, because *if* we knew everything about the present *and* all the laws of nature perfectly *and* could compute more quickly than the universe itself does (as time passes by), we could tell right now whether or not your cat will ever live to be 5 years old. The problem of testability is this instance is merely a practical one; the information may very well be there in the universe right now, we just have no way of getting at all of it and processing it to our ends before that moment comes along and we can just look and see if it happens. It's something like statements about minor geographical features of distant astronomical bodies, or minor events in the distant past like what Julius Caesar ate for lunch three days after his sixth birthday. The information is there, or might be barring certain indeterministic hypotheses being correct, but even if it is there, it's a damn bitch to get at it. Doesn't make it both true or false, or neither true nor false.
Although, neither-true-nor-false (but not both-true-and-false) does follow for some cases if those indeterministic hypotheses are correct, as it does for nonsense, like you mentioned. I just wrote something elsewhere in this thread dealing with such cases. While I only used the example of nonsense there, undetermined features of the universe can be accounted for in the same way.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
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....
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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."
Knob.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Personally I enjoyed the joke. But I save spell checking for things that are a bit more important than a slkashdot comment.
And oddly, although I don;t worrry about karma and often get modded troll or flamebait my karma remains excellent. I have no idea why.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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
Reverse-engineers, then. They don't create something themselves, they're analysing someone else's creation.
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.
What has been bothering me about this Intelligent Design debate is that the typical knee-jerk argument of "not science" that you hear also applies against the lowercase "intelligent design" that you said could be scientific. It seems like a whole (potential) theory of science is being discarded because of the motives of some Christians. In particular, the search for "intelligent" life in the universe. Is that science?
Not quite. The problem with injecting God into a "theory," whether it's God, god, Vishnu, Allah, Buddha, Zeus or Thor is that you're proposing that a supernatural force is at work. Supernatural basically means that there's no requirement for such an influence to act in any kind of consistent way. One of the limitations of science is that it has as a basic axiom that observations are consistent and repeatable: they don't change based on God's whim. So lower case intelligent design is only a scientific theory if the designer is bound by rules... he is not supernatural.
Any theory that includes a god-like influence that actually DOES something is unscientific. You can have theories that include a god that creates everything and then doesn't (can't) ever do anything else, but at that point you don't gain anything (and can't gain anything) except complexity so Occam's razor says to forego the god explanation.
Another important feature of a scientific theory is that it doesn't overstep itself. Some theories are commonly explained using metaphors, but they don't actually insist that that metaphor is necessarily literally true. A scientific theory of intelligent design is fine, but when you then decide that a god must be the designer, you're overstepping. There's no evidence for that -- it doesn't add any predictive or explanatory power to the theory that's not present with an unspecified "designer." The identification of God as the designer must be for reasons other than scientific ones.
None of this is to say that there is or isn't a god or gods, just that omnipotent beings are necessarily outside the scope of science since they invalidate a basic axiom. So any theory that features one is not a scientific theory.
There's lots of silliness on BOTH sides of the ID debate. Intelligent design, lower case, without a supernatural god could be a scientific theory depending on how you went about formulating it. It IS a very unlikely theory though. The fossil record, paleo-DNA studies (they've gotten a bit of protein from a T-Rex now and it shows a nice relation to chickens), work being done on creating biological precursors inorganically, and studies of present-day life, plus what we know about evolution, all suggest that an intelligent designer isn't necessary to explain life on earth. Again, using Occam's razor, hypothesizing an intelligent designer actually introduces a LOT of complexity with very little payoff. You explain life on Earth, but then you're left with the origin of the designer to explain.
Lowercase intelligent design actually has a lot in common with panspermia. It's an interesting idea, but again, the theory doesn't really give us much except complexity (at the moment anyway), because you still have to explain where life arose before it was seeded here. Now, if we start to find life that's related to ours in a bunch of different places in the galaxy, then panspermia and intelligent design (lowercase) start to explain things that plain old biogenesis and evolution can't.
I'm not trying to defend Intelligent Design or even the lowercase version as something that should be taught in the classroom, precisely because it is not established science. I'm not trying to discredit evolution or further the cause of religion. What I am trying to do is recognize that a rather broad broom is being used to sweep away the arguments of Intelligent Design, in what I perceive to be an intellectually dishonest way.
I think you are less guilty of this, in that you leave some room for lowercase "intelligent design", though I'm having trouble discerning the difference between the basic arguments of the uppercase version and the lowercase version, except that perhaps you are inserting religious words and ideas whereas the basic principle only speaks of intelligence.
No, any description I've ever heard of the Intelligent Design, capital, being pushed in certain school districts is that the designer is a deity, not subject to the laws of nature. Super advanced aliens, though they might appear to be magical to us (a la Arthur C. Clarke), are NOT. They are still subject to the laws of nature, even if they're not the laws of nature that WE know. Since it's the goal of science to discover those laws of nature, anything that includes an entity that can subvert them is unscientific. However, if your theory has to appeal to the super advanced aliens it's not very scientific either. If every attempt to falsify your theory is explained away by "aliens did it with advanced technology" then your theory isn't any more falsifiable than "God did it."
If you modified ID to omit a supernatural designer, if you still have the political goals behind ID at heart you still end up with problems, because one of your political goals is that there's no such thing as evolution. That's what makes ID (capital) an "alternative" to evolution. Lowercase id would explain biogenesis, but probably NOT subsequent evolution, so it wouldn't be an alternative to evolution. Evolution itself doesn't say anything about where life originally came from, just how it tends to develop into new forms.
So our new theory of ID calls for an unspecified, but non-supernatural creator but is still opposed to evolution, or at least "macro-evolution." Well, how do you explain all the extinct and transitional forms in the fossil record? Why can we draw fairly consistent family trees using all of anatomical features, carbon dating and DNA analysis? The answers given by ID proponents really do pretty much require supernatural powers. Fossils were put there by God to test us, or they're the result of the flood. The evidence just piles up constantly against a no-evolution theory of intelligent design and the rebuttals regularly need to call upon unexplained powers. Even if you argue that any of those powers could potentially be non-divine, you're still not following the spirit of the scientific method. ID, really ID of any sort, just isn't a reasonable alternative to evolution because it requires SO many unexplainables, while evolution does not. Basically, ID has been falsified many times, but its proponents consistently save it by appealing to the intervention of a god, or at least a very unlikely, contrived set of circumstances that requires the intervention of a near-deity.
Getting back to string theory, it does not require any magic (yet). If it turns out that it DOES, then continuing to pursue it without dealing with those requirements would be unscientific. Actually, some versions of string theory HAVE run into intractable (without magic) problems, and have been discarded. Newer versions don't have those problems, but lots of people are actively looking for ways to trip them up too. The basic premise, that particles like quarks and electrons are not actually point-like but rather are composed of vibrating strings, doesn't (yet) seem to cause any inconsistencies, and it has some very desirable properties, like allowing the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity. The main criticisms of string theory are not that it doesn't explain current observations well (which any variation of intelligent design tends not to), but that it doesn't make new, testable predictions. That is, predictions that we can test NOW. String theory does make all sorts of predictions that are likely beyond our ability to test with current technology, although it's starting to look like some of them might be easier than we first thought. It also explains some theoretical problems (specifically dealing with black holes) quite nicely.
"Disingenuously, intelligent design advocates try to disguise their religious motives by claiming that the designer's identity is left open. Not necessarily Yahweh, it could be an alien from space. Scientists would not object to that in principle, because the stellar alien, who might indeed be god-like from our humble viewpoint, presumably evolved by a gradual, cumulative process." If you modified ID to omit a supernatural designer, if you still have the political goals behind ID at heart you still end up with problems, because one of your political goals is that there's no such thing as evolution. I'll grant you that is a problem, but I'm interested in the basic principle of intelligent design, not the Intelligent Design movement. What concerns me is the arguments against Intelligent Design are often against the basic principle, though this basic principle is at the very heart of looking for intelligent life in the universe. In the rush to defend evolution and the science class, interesting areas of science are being painted with the same brush. I'm just trying to disentangle the two, and it sounds to me that you, in principle, should be in agreement with this. Well, how do you explain all the extinct and transitional forms in the fossil record? I'll reiterate here that I am not anti-evolution, nor pro Intelligent Design replacing evolution. I'm not religious in any way, and I accept evolution as the best theory we have.
It is the basic principle that Intelligent Design rests on that I find worthwhile. To me it's the question of what is this thing we refer to as "intelligence", and how do we recognize it's artifacts? This question is at the heart of the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
Just to clarify, the "how do you" questions aren't directed at you, but more generally at the theory.
They hypothesis that life on Earth might have come from somewhere else is usually called panspermia. Generally the idea is that life arrived as microbes on a comet, but it could have been seeded from an alien spaceship. It's a theory that gets some attention now and then but at the moment we don't have any observations that would lend it support over much simpler theories, so we put it on the back shelf in case we ever do. As I said before, if we find out that this part of the galaxy has lots of life that's all very similar, panspermia becomes the best theory we know of to explain where life on Earth came from (although it doesn't say anything about how life ultimately originated).
Intelligent design would just be an addendum on the theory that stipulates that the life here was designed and seeded by an intelligence. However, just like panspermia, there's no evidence to support the theory, so we shelve it. If we discover the first hundred prime numbers encoded in base 12 in the genetic code, or the remains of an alien seeding ship with genetic engineering facilities, then intelligent design suddenly becomes a leading theory.
You're right, a big danger from Intelligent Design, the political and religious movement, is that it encourages lazy thinking. There are good reasons why ID isn't scientific. Unfortunately, because it's pushed so hard for the wrong reasons anything similar often earns the same ridicule. You can rest assured though, that if we ever do find something in the genetic code or the fossil record that requires ancient genetic engineering to explain, it will be fascinating and well studied. We'll probably have to call it something other than intelligent design though.
I'm pretty sure I'm on record on Slashdot (years ago) saying that we SHOULD teach Intelligent Design in school (well, probably a philosophy class in university) and get students to figure out all the ways that it's not scientific. It illustrates what science is and is not, and explaining the difference, particularly when it's a hot topic, is a good exercise in scientific communication.
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.