Where Do the Laws of Nature Come From?

mlimber writes "The NYTimes science section has up an interesting article discussing the nature of scientific laws. It comes partly in reply to physicist Paul Davies, whose recent op-ed in same paper lit up the blogosphere and solicited flurry of reader responses to the editorial page. It asks, 'Are [laws of nature] merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world? Do they govern nature or just describe it? And does it matter that we don't know and that most scientists don't seem to know or care where they come from?' The current article proceeds to survey different views on the matter. The author seems to be poking fun at himself by quoting Richard Feynman's epigram, 'Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.'"

Comments

Nomic is the answer.

[roguegramma]

Obviously, the Laws of Nature came up in a big game of Nomic.

Next question please.

Re:Nomic is the answer.

[Darinbob]

If Nature is a game, is it skill based or class based? Einstein has already postulated that it is a dice-less game. Modern quantum physics however suggests at least some die rolling is involved, but the number and type of dice is unknown. Is the dice bag full of uniform D6, or is it a nerdy mixture of shapes, such as D-up, D-down, D-strange, D-charm, etc?

Alternate universes

[Besna]

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.

Re:Alternate universes

[Brian Gordon]

NO, never run any simulations! If it can be shown possible to simulate a universe, it's infinitely likely that we're in some sub-simulation of someone's universe simulation.

Re:Alternate universes

[PresidentEnder]

What's wrong with that? As long as no one can tell the difference, we might as well go on living as we have. How much would it influence your actions to know that you were a simulation within a simulation? Everything still happens the same way.

Re:Alternate universes

[Torvaun]

Look on the even brighter side: maybe the galactic operator is using Windows, and Ctrl-C will just copy our universe.

Re:Alternate universes

[maxwell demon]

You might start searching for buffer overflows which would enable you to change our reality.

Re:Alternate universes

[zippthorne]

If the universe is a simulation, then you should spend at least some of your day looking for cheat codes.

Re:Alternate universes

[Beardo the Bearded]

One day, in a bright blue sky, I saw a cursor.

No kidding - I looked up, and in the middle of the air, I saw the standard Windows cursor just sitting there. It was as though Whatever had just gotten up to go take a leak and left the cursor sitting there in the middle of the sky. Reality was falling apart. I was going crazy.

I thought, "Wait, what the fuck is that?", and then the seagull banked, showing that it was in fact a bird in the air, and reality was mostly intact.

It was a very bizarre moment.

Re:Alternate universes

[IndustrialComplex]

I would wander 'how fast' was changing fast enough to raise a flag. Would observing a flaw in a previously accepted law be large enough to act as a flag that the universe changed, or that our original understanding was insufficient?

Though I suppose any change that was observable on such a scale would also be able to be proven if the data were still available and accurate.

Re:Alternate universes

[spun]

There are three basic approaches to this existential dilemma. First, decide based on arbitrary experiences that one particular explanation is right. Second, decide that no particular explanation matters since you can't know which one is right for sure, and get on with your life. Third, go batshit insane.

Buddha was asked a number of questions by a wise philosopher of the time, such as "Is there a soul," "Is there a God" and "Is there life after death?" Buddha refused to answer because the answers aren't important. If they are important to you, there is a more basic question you should be asking first, which is, "Why is it important for me to believe that I know the answers?"

You will find the answer to this is always some variant of, "Because I'm afraid of dying and knowing the right things will help keep me from ceasing to exist." So the question becomes, why am I afraid of dying? And the answer is almost always something along the lines of, "Because I see myself as fundamentally separate from the Universe, and when I die, I'm gone."

This is based on the fact that mind has privileged access to some of it's own internal state. No one else seems to know our internal worlds, and so we fear that when we die, those worlds will be lost. Worse yet, as we believe we are the only ones who can put them in their proper context, when we die, they might be misinterpreted.

Well, buck up. You aren't separate from the universe. You are not a subject, observing the objects. You aren't a little man sitting in your head looking out through your eyes and hearing through your ears. The sense of self is just another sense, just another track in the recording. No one is listening because there aren't any such things as individuals to observe.

Is that confusing or upsetting? Then you are stuck in dualistic thinking, and will always be, in some sense, scared of death. If you can let go of dualism and realize that there is no subjective observer separate from the objects observed, but that observation still exists, then you will be free and it won't matter one bit whether we are living in a simulation, or even whether there is a God, a soul, or an afterlife.

Re:Alternate universes

[martyros]

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

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

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

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

Re:Alternate universes

[marcello_dl]

> Personally, I stick to Wittgenstein: "What is thinkable is possible too."

I think that there's something thinkable and impossible.
If I am right, there is.
If I am wrong, that same assertion is impossible but i thought it. So I am right. Have a nice day.

Re:Alternate universes

[spun]

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

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

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

i think its clear

[El Pollo Loco]

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.

Re:i think its clear

[gardyloo]

A question is, though, do those laws apply at all times and places, or are we just "discovering" them here, and now? As far as I know, there's nothing prohibiting a gradual gauge change over time and space. Perhaps those innocuous gauge shifts really DO have an effect somewhere/when. What we generally call "laws" should be universally applicable (or their restricted domains should be stated), but what if they're only applicable here/now? Are they just shadows of higher-dimensional laws which may undergo sudden changes as some higher-dimensional phase change goes on?

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

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

Re:i think its clear

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a non-issue. Laws of nature are, by definition, theories which have been tested and found to be applicable over and over again. Scientists are always looking for ways to falsify their theories. That is the very essence of science. They are fully aware that not finding contradictions to their theories doesn't mean that no contradictions exist. They are looking for changing "constants" and they even know about effects which run counter to known "laws of nature", but that doesn't make the laws useless, because the circumstances where the laws don't apply are known.

Re:i think its clear

[Ralph Spoilsport]

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

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

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

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

RS

Re:i think its clear

[orclevegam]

From a scientific standpoint it doesn't matter. All the "laws" we have now are essentially just best guesses made on available data. If in the future we discover circumstances under which those laws no longer apply the laws will be amended to reflect those conditions under which they don't apply. The original laws of Newtonian mechanics were quite sufficient to describe the behaviors that Newton was observing, but were later found to be insufficient and were updated. This is the scientific process, it's a gradual refinement of understanding in an attempt to approach a set of laws that can used to accurately describe and calculate the universe (and possibly beyond).

Re:i think its clear

[gardyloo]

You've a good point. I don't think we're talking at cross-purposes. I, at least, find these slashdot discussions to be ways in which to refine my own thinking a bit. If nothing else, it may make me a better communicator

    I'm not proposing at ALL calling these hypothetical departures from "local" behavior "laws". If I gave that impression, I was mistaken and didn't mean to. I AM a proponent of testing those which have a chance of being true and which we have a chance of testing. I think that probably every scientist (or other philosopher, down to many young children) has pondered this question at one depth or another. It is nice that the NYT covered Davies' thoughts about this stuff, but it's nothing new in the philosophy of science (as I'm sure you well know, and as others in this discussion have pointed out).
    I'm also somewhat saddened by the standard in which "falsifiability" is held. I think that if something is falsifiable, it should probably be tested, and things that are not presently falsifiable are really rather weak as hypotheses. Things which will never be falsifiable (because of the physical impossibility of doing certain experiments, or the ability to "move the boundaries" which define the problem -- as in "Intelligent Design") are very probably worthless and most certainly impractical. However, they are still quite interesting, if for no other reason that they provide some illustration of the point at which one should probably STOP thinking about them, or putting any faith in them.

    I've always been leery of this "jump" which our guesses about the world can make if we test them enough. As I understand it, a "theory" is quite analogous to a "theorem" in mathematics; it may be built up from very basic building blocks, which we suppose to be true, using small reasoning steps which we also suppose to be true. Theories are often eminently testable; if they are not, they may be a step or two beyond their building-block theories which ARE eminently testable (and tested), but we still suppose our reasoning holds in extrapolating to them.
    A "law" may be based on very little reasoning, but just seems to work every time we happen to glance its way, whether we have a series of stepping-stones to it or not. I would say that Newton's law of gravitation (that with the force falling off as the inverse-square of the distance, and so forth) was very definitely a law until Minkowski and Einstein came along (and after them, as a special case), but no one could remotely map out a nice way of getting there from "simpler" principles. If one puts one trust in the process of getting to a conclusion, laws are often very slippery, tentative beasts, whereas theories are well-rooted and understood. Laws just happen to have never failed (which may be a much stronger argument for their validity, but wouldn't satisfy a pure mathematician at all).

    I'm also of the opinion that based upon my ramblings above, something can easily be a "law" and a "theory" at the same time, if it has been shown to hold true every time we've (validly) tested it, and is built out of simpler steps. In this way, the "Theory of Evolution", in my opinion, is very probably a law, since it's both been tested so much, and is built upon some very well-tested blocks.

Re:i think its clear

[DamnStupidElf]

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

Existence is a tricky thing, because it is also purely a human concept. By claiming that mathematics does not exist outside of human experience you are also implicitly claiming that the universe itself does not exist outside of human experience. Everything we know about the universe has been derived from human experience, which is ultimately no more real or unreal than our experience of mathematics, since both experiences exist only within the human mind. There is no objective viewpoint from which to consider existence or reality. Our minds must approach both the universe and mathematics in exactly the same way; perform experiments, observe the results, make up theories about what is happening, and try to disprove them. From the human perspective mathematics is as much a part of the universe as matter and energy, so it is not absurd to claim that mathematics exists outside of human experience.

intelligent design isn't

[Speare]

And does it matter that we don't know and that most scientists don't seem to know or care where they come from?

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.

Re:intelligent design isn't

[$RANDOMLUSER]

"But officer, I wasn't doing anywhere near 299,792,458 miles per second!"

What, do you work for NASA that you don't know the difference between imperial and metric? That's meters per second, not miles per second.

Re:intelligent design isn't

[swillden]

"But officer, I wasn't doing anywhere near 299,792,458 miles per second!"

You certainly weren't, since that's a tad over 1600 times the speed of light.

Yeesh

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

Four different forces, superstrings, antineutrinos, strange quarks, neutralinos, gluons, and 26 dimensions.

The laws of physics are clearly the result of a bureaucracy.

Re:Yeesh

[Animats]

Four different forces, superstrings, antineutrinos, strange quarks, neutralinos, gluons, and 26 dimensions.

The laws of physics are clearly the result of a bureaucracy.

There's a basic frustration in physics today that things are just too complicated at the bottom. There's a classic comment by I. I. Rabi, "Who ordered that?", made when the muon was discovered. The muon is a "heavy electron", the first elementary particle discovered that doesn't appear in ordinary atoms. Muons didn't seem to be necessary to physics, but there they were. That was the end of simple subatomic physics, and nobody has been able to put the mess back in the box since.

Re:Yeesh

[Odin's Raven]

That was the end of simple subatomic physics, and nobody has been able to put the mess back in the box since.

Maybe if they took that danged cat out of the box, they'd have enough room...

Re:Yeesh

[jfengel]

It's certainly interesting that we had an approximation (Maxwell, Newton) which as so simple it seemed that it must be fundamental, or nearly so. If there was anything more fundamental, one would expect it to be even simpler: why should a more-complex set of rules just happen to have a nice, neat approximation right at the scales where humans happen to be able to observe them easily?

I suspect that one day we'll find out that there's a very good explanation, but I'll be darned if I have any idea what it is.

Fallacy of equivocation

[TheNarrator]

Equivocation is the use in a syllogism (a logical chain of reasoning) of a term several times, but giving the term a different meaning each time. For example:

        A feather is light.
        What is light cannot be dark.
        Therefore, a feather cannot be dark.

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.

Damn good article about faith...

[CodeShark]

Because it really puts the so called "faith vs. science" argument into perspective. That argument quite simply boils down to how a scientific mind goes about answering one question: do the so-called "laws of nature" work because that's how the universe "IS", or is the universe the way it is because that's how the "laws of nature" were designed? [Or my thought: Even a "God" has to use the laws of nature to organize things into interesting things like universes, planets, beings, etc...]

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.

Re:Damn good article about faith...

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

"do the so-called "laws of nature" work because that's how the universe "IS", or is the universe the way it is because that's how the "laws of nature" were designed?"

Our laws are wrong. We might never know what laws would most accurately describe the universe.

"would it make sense for a designer (AKA a God) to organize/make a universe that doesn't follow comprehensible rules?"

Why should the rules be comprehensible? Sure, we've comprehended some of it, but there's really no guarantee that our brains will figure it all out. Our brains certainly can't grasp more than 3 spatial dimensions.

Also, why do you believe the actions of a deity have to make sense? A lot of things in the real world don't make sense to us. Common sense has been a regular failure at analyzing more than the most basic scenarios.

"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?"

Yes, I could see it being true that our brains - originally developed for hunting strategy and making weapons - would not be able to handle revealing the fundamental laws of nature. Then again, as I said, common sense regularly fails.

"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."

I don't think the word "randomness" means what you think it means. If you are talking about evolution, it certainly does not progress at random. It is indeed nearly impossible for a bunch of particles to fly together and form a 747. But then, that is not what evolution is.

i don't know, but i am certain of one thing:

[circletimessquare]

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

Where do the laws of nature come from?

[Hawthorne01]

The lawyers of nature, of course.

Duh.

quickly now

[circletimessquare]

remove the above poster for reprogramming before any of the other subjects notice

Re:Pratchett's Law

[Forge]

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.

We don't really know, yet.

[BlueParrot]

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.

conservation laws prohibit this

[Quadraginta]

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.

anyone who knows anything about science knows

[jackstack]

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/

Scientists Have No Roots?

[Anonymous Coward]

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'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.

Incorrect definition of religious faith

[caseih]

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.

Re:Incorrect definition of religious faith

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

"Certainly the characters who wrote in and were described by the Bible would not consider religious faith to be "belief without evidence.""

Your belief in the reality of these characters' existence, let alone of their accounts or beliefs, is what can be characterized as "belief without evidence". All religious stories contain characters with first-hand accounts. The problem is that people can also make up stories containing characters with first-hand accounts.

Re:Incorrect definition of religious faith

[saltydogdesign]

I'm not judging the guy's argument, but I think you've mischaracterized it. I think his point is that faith is based on personal, subjective experience, as *demonstrated* by Biblical characters. He's not saying that faith is based on *their* experience.

probably impossible by definition

[Quadraginta]

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.

Re:probably impossible by definition

[EllisDees]

It could also be true that all configurations of physical laws would ultimately lead to life forming in one way or another. They can say that changing the charge of the electron by 2% would make life impossible, but we cannot truly know the macroscopic effects that such a change would have. Yes, the universe would be different, but to say that life couldn't form there is hugely arrogant IMHO.

No not really.

[LWATCDR]

"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.

Re:Philosophy of science is crucial

[ricree]

Now that the academic scientific orthodoxy has rallied to ensure for now that one disturbing inference, ID, is uniquely excluded There is nothing special or unique about ID's exclusion from being taught as science. Quite simply put, it doesn't actually make any testable predictions, it has no way to be falsified, and therefore it simply isn't science.

Futurama

[BlueParrot]

-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!!!!

MOD THIS GUY UP!

[Cajun Hell]

Example was Peter walking on the water with Jesus. When his mental mind told him it was impossible to walk on water then he began to sink.

Stop modding this guy down! The phenomenon has been observed in nature when flightless birds attempt to evade predators.

Re:Missing the point

[gstoddart]

I always felt that science was a way of uncovering where these laws came from. It sounds like I'm talking in a circle but I feel that in order to understand the whole you need to understand the parts. At least in the questions of where something comes from. You dissect the whole down in parts and those parts in parts and eventually you find the questions to the tough problems.

When in fact, science is discovering the opposite.

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

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

It would be nice to think that we would have an answer of the origins and we could fan our knowledge out from there. If that were the case science would be all but dead since we would have probably arrived at all possible answers at this point in time. Instead we're left peeling back layers and making theories about layer yet uncovered.

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

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

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

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

Cheers

Platonism, Laws, and Necessary Truths

[Pfhorrest]

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?

Re:Pratchett's Law

[msuarezalvarez]

Well, the /. consensus would probably say that anything which is omnipatent qualifies for the devil, rather than god...

Where do Laws of Nature come from?

[Gibbs-Duhem]

Well son, when a mommy law of nature and a daddy law of nature like each other very, very much...

Not consistent with each other, but with us ...

[AHumbleOpinion]

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."