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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.'"
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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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.
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
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."
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
Yeah too bad.
On a more serius note. The laws of nature were written by God. After writing them he set about building a Universe to the specifications allowed by those laws.
Either that or he built a universe, made it work and these laws are just documenting how his code functions.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
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.
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.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
When in fact, science is discovering the opposite.
Reductionism has been the prevailing school of thought in science for a very long time. We've assumed if we could break things down into their constituent pieces, then we'd understand the bigger picture stuff pretty readily.
Now scientists are starting really get a sense that the more they pull it apart into wee pieces, the less we know about how it all got put together in the first place. The complexity of what we have is, at present, far greater than our understanding of how the bits work.
In actuality, you end up like a child who has taken apart a complicated toy, and can't figure out how to put it together.
Our knowledge has grown exponentially. But, the more we look at what we know, the more we realize the sheer scale of the stuff we don't know anything about. It's fascinating, but it's also humbling at the same time -- there's a lot more in some of these systems than we even have an inkling of understanding of.
I think we're reaching the point where simple reductionism, while still driving basic science, opens up far more questions than the number of answers we get. We just didn't know enough to know we had to ask these questions before.
Certainly, I don't think science is any where near answering the question of where the laws of nature came from. Philosophy and religion can try to do that, but their answers are just guesses as well -- some of this stuff isn't really "knowable" just yet.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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."
Well, the /. consensus would probably say that anything which is omnipatent qualifies for the devil, rather than god...
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
Well son, when a mommy law of nature and a daddy law of nature like each other very, very much...
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".
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.
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."
... 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.
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 disagree.
What about Moore's law?
Hubble's law was formulated in 1929.
Again, the theory of evolution, and theories of stellar formation are not mathematical descriptions of observations. They are way too complicated for that. For evolution, the observable would be the fossil record, or the specialization of species in the Galapagos which are both too complicated to be expressed using mathematics. The theory is that of evolution caused by natural selection, and the testable prediction is the slightly unstable information medium passed parents to children (long after being predicted, we found DNA)
We still name things laws. But the math is key. The type of math is also important.
For instance, Schroedinger's equation is not a law because it in itself does not describe an observable quantity. You can however use it with some funny statistical mechanics to find observable quantities, but that isn't good enough.
Laws ==> mathematical expressions of observations.
Theories ==> expressions of inference.
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."