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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
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
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 ?
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/
Look on the even brighter side: maybe the galactic operator is using Windows, and Ctrl-C will just copy our universe.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
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.
-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!!!!
"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.
"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.
Well, the /. consensus would probably say that anything which is omnipatent qualifies for the devil, rather than god...
You might start searching for buffer overflows which would enable you to change our reality.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
If the universe is a simulation, then you should spend at least some of your day looking for cheat codes.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton