(10 am – promoted by ek hornbeck)
The New York Times has a good article up today about one of the deepest questions that can be asked: What are “laws of nature”?
Physics describes the universe on the scales of the very large and the very small. But are the equations which accurately track the antics of galaxies and quarks merely tracking those movements or do those equations themselves refer to deep truths about “laws” that govern the universe?
If the former, why are the regularities of nature . . . well, regular? If the latter, whence come the laws? What are they, really? And how much variability could there have been in those laws? To put it differently, how different could the universe have been?
There are two seperate questions here. The second, and less deep, question is, “How many different laws of nature could have resulted in a coherent world?” The first, and deeper, question is, “Are there laws of nature, really? Do they exist in the same way that electrons and elephants exist?”
Quoting now from the Times article, about the deep question:
Are they [the “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?
But in fact a lot of scientists do care, as the author, Dennis Overbye, goes on to note.
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 seem to persist, he wrote, “whatever the circumstance of how I look at them, and they are things about which it is possible to be wrong, as when I stub my toe on a rock I had not noticed.”
“Platonism”, in this context, refers to the idea that the “laws of physics” transcend the universe that they govern. They are timeless, eternal, and real. Plato, so long ago, argued that the world around us is a pale reflection of an ideal world of “forms” that exists in some kind of “Platonic heaven”. Each “beautiful” thing in this world, said Plato, partakes in a limited way of the ideal form of capital-B “Beauty” which inhabits the world of the forms. Each imperfect triangle in this world, the form of Triangularity in the Other World.
Most importantly, here, Plato thought that mathematics and geometry were about the world of the Forms, and not this world. The ideal invisible world was austere, precise, perfect, unchanging — mathematical. The dirty world of accidents and time around us is only its shadow.
The modern day parallel that we call “Platonism”, then, is the view that when physics describes “laws of nature” it is describing laws that are themselves “above” any particular instance of those laws.
To give an example, did Issac Newton’s law of gravitational attraction (pretend it’s correct for a moment) merely describe the fact that every body falls at a rate equalling G(m^2/r^2), or is there more to it than that? Does the equation refer to something which governs all of those individual fallings and which exists over and above them?
The ultimate Platonist these days is Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In talks and papers recently he has speculated that mathematics does not describe the universe – it is the universe.
But not everyone is a Platonist. Some physicists think that the “laws of nature” are merely descriptions of regularities in this world, and not about anything transcendent.
Not every physicist pledges allegiance to Plato. Pressed, these scientists will describe the laws more pragmatically as a kind of shorthand for nature’s regularity. Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, put it this way: “A law of physics is a pattern that nature obeys without exception.”
Further, one can be a philosophical pragmatist about these “laws of nature”. This view strips the “laws of nature” even further of their grandure as it notes that, after all, the things we discover are the things we look for, and the science we settle on is the science we’re able to do something with. So what we call “laws of nature”, on this view, are really a compromise between regularities “out there in the world” and our own ability to see and manipulate them.
Steven Weinstein, a philosopher of science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, termed the phrase “law of nature” as “a kind of honorific” bestowed on principles that seem suitably general, useful and deep. How general and deep the laws really are, he said, is partly up to nature and partly up to us, since we are the ones who have to use them.
Needless to say, there are myriad and intricate variations on all of these ideas. But the NYT does a good job here of giving a glimpse at a set of questions at the intersection of science, philosophy, and perhaps theology. Questions deeper than day-to-day science (even if the answer to the deep questions is that there is only day-to-day science); these are questions about the nature of reality . . . of the nature of where we are, and what there is, and why.
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Hope your Tuesday is going well!
let’s suppose for one moment we are the only “living and thinking” beings in the universe (some scientists think we are unique… i hope not). but suppose that’s so. does the fact that we can think beyond perceived “laws of nature” or recognize those laws or attempt to manipulate them (we’d break the speed-of-light barrier in a heart beat) change those universal laws? does our ability to imagine different worlds or create in ourselves empathy and compassion or draw those things beyond their fit in our survival tool kit change laws of the universe?
how does our energy of thought throw off the “laws of nature” (should they really exist as we try to quantify them). how do we know they aren’t kept on scrolls somewhere in a great celestial hall just beyond our telescopes, voyagers, and abilities to imagine such a place…
or are laws sets of conditions that exist until some disturbance, like a black hole or can quarks be damaged like chromosomes and change everything?
i no nothing about physics. but it seems to me the power of thought is as vast and deep as the universe from which it was born. and a new idea can shift the universe. maybe there have been many big bangs.
who the hell really knows?
thanks for this LC… like these kinds of essays.
I read that article too. Interesting.
I’m more tuned into the music of chance (as Paul Auster calls it) than the so-called Platonism of the law of laws as articulated by that Tegmark. I’m much more compelled by Wheeler’s “higgledy piggledy”-ness and “quantum uncertainty.”
Was it interesting that not one woman was cited in the article? I think it was to me.
Happy Tuesday to you too! So far so good here … couch, coffee, computer, what could go wrong?
the “anthropic principle” idea anywhere in their article…
As I run out the door to a hectic day, this was a great essay to catch.
I’ve always found contemplating descriptions of the world’s regularities to be a kind of path to the transcendent. The world is so amazing as it is!
all the understanding I can muster to science. I married a physicist. Talk about opposites attract!
sounded the death knell to Platonism. Natural selection showed that the form of living creatures in nature is subject to stochastic and deterministic forces, while also demonstrating that no form is eternal, nor is form the reflection of some underlying archetype (as some of Darwin’s lukewarm evolutionary supporters thought).
When one of the great scientists of his day read Darwin’s Origin of Species, he complained that Darwin would reduce natural regularities to “the law of higgeldy-piggeldy”. Darwin himself thought he was discovering laws that underlie living matter, much as Newton had discovered the laws that describe matter in the universe (as then understood). Darwin’s critic would respond, what kind of law relies on chance and cannot predict the outcome of a series of events?
Quantum physics demonstrated that regularities are subject to questions of scale, and that “laws of nature” are subordinate to physical reality in the forms and circumstances within which such reality is apprehended — including the vagaries of the observational process itself.
I think that we are probably wrong in looking for “laws of nature”. The problem is with the association to the word “laws”. It implies both a lawgiver (taking us into creationist territory), or an underlying orderliness that itself is a reflection of the “order” of rank and class that constitutes human society.
Our problem is that we don’t know how to conceptualize the universe, hampered by our limited intellect and still immature scientific approach, i.e., our reliance on socially-constructed concepts to label non-human physical reality. Only with mathematics do we get to peek at the truth that underlies reality. Our attempt to translate mathematical truth into the language of description fails us every time. (And I say this as a non-mathematician.)
what brings me to this site at elast once during the day, unfortunately I have to go and perform another one of those ‘immutable laws of my nature’, Christmas shopping! Always leave it the to the last minute hoping someone will have cancelled it, but with three young grandchildren don’t have the heart to be the one to tell them Santa has been laid off and god is dead.
However, I shall return on my return because i am eager to find Paul Davies’s original comment (or article) in which I gather he says he was mis-understood and that he intended to convery that it is man/womans interpretation of the laws that he is wondering about, and that the scientific explanation is no different than the theological explanations of the 17th century, except that God has been removed from the equation. He explored this concept? theory? explanation? wonder? in his book ‘The mind of God’. A book i return to once in a while when i am trying to understand the rationale of the almost universal belief in a Creator/God in almost all humans.
I tend to agree with the ‘circular argument’ that the answer to WHY is just BECAUSE. Fortunately for the sake of a good argument, in science, holding opposing views seems to be no more difficult than it is in politics.
Off to kiss Santa under the mistletoe and hope i can pick his pocket before he picks mine.
…I find this stuff, through dint of long handling, to be as real as rocks — realer, certainly, than the fictions of accountants, or for that matter a good deal of political ideology. The square root of negative one earns its keep, and we know what it means. I doubt it’s possible to say the same of, say, the “Global War On Terror.”