Where Do the Laws of Nature Come From? 729
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.'"
Nomic is the answer. (Score:5, Funny)
Next question please.
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Alternate universes (Score:3, Interesting)
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More importantly: if the fundamental laws of the universe are changing (as some posit), how would we know? Can we separate natural laws from the universe that they are derived from/created in?
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Apparently this is a useless question since it is the philosophy of science. I have to wonder why smart people think they are smart about everything. Isn't science supposed to have rigor and thorough analysis, and if so, wouldn't that mean rigor and analysis about itself? Theories of metaphysics (not the new age sh
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Well, if they change fast enough, it could become apparent that the equations and constants we've been using for 200 years now are no longer accurate (with respect to the results they used to produce). That would be a pretty big flag I'd think.
=Smidge=
Re:Alternate universes (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent [kfs.org]
It saves a lot of effort when arguing with the religious types - "transcendent entities are necessarily outside the realm of logic, so I'll not discuss your particular version of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, thankyou."
Re:Alternate universes (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Alternate universes (Score:5, Insightful)
quickly now (Score:5, Funny)
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Maybe it wouldn't make any difference to an animal, but I have psychological investment in the existential.
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Re:Alternate universes (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Likewise, if you were in pain, you would desire to not be in pain. That's because pain is negative happiness, and its removal will at least make things neutral.
If you desired to listen to an incredible piece of music, or see an incredible piece of art, then the happiness you would get from such a pursuit would mostly lik
Re:Alternate universes (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Meditation can also give you some degree of control over not just the emotions, but the sensations themselves. The mind can learn to dissociate from the sensory inputs.
I think most Buddhists gain pleasure f
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Shalom :P
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There is no real choice, because there is no stable point that is outside the system of feedback loops and can influence them without being influenced. There is only cause and effect.
Re:Alternate universes (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Alternate universes (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Alternate universes (Score:5, Insightful)
probably impossible by definition (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Not consistent with each other, but with us ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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."
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Try it. Try defining "correct" and "incorrect" without presupposing some rules of logic!
Also, 1 = 1 is not an axiom but an observable fact. The most obvious proof is that 1 - 1 = 0, that is, if I have an apple and I eat it, I now have zero apples. Would you deny this?
i think its clear (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:i think its clear (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:i think its clear (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:i think its clear (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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conservation laws prohibit this (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I can't believe you'd try and drag poor dear Emmy into something so.....applied.
Gentlemen, this is *not* a bathhouse.
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For example: "stuff falls down" becomes a description of gravity which might one day become something about strings wor whatever, when that is probperly figured out. "Human flight is impossible" because "heavier than air flight is impossible" which then became laws of aeronautics and one
Re:i think its clear (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem [wikipedia.org]
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No not really. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
MOD THIS GUY UP! (Score:5, Funny)
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"Intent" for an organism with a decent number of ganglia is an electrochemical series of interactions that drive the motorneural aspects of said organism's body.
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The alternative is to state what every scientist will, that we do not have to have the full picture for any given theory to be useful. Thus far, our study of biological neural systems, as incomplete as it may
ZOMG religion! (Score:2, Interesting)
intelligent design isn't (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Completely wrong-headed statement. Any laws which have been established in any particular discipline are taught to students immediately. They're used and discussed endlessly as the basis for all kinds of problem-solving decisions. In physics, for example, the law of conservation of momentum has been verified a million more times than Darwin has incited insecurity. Anyone who wishes to do so can easily search for an example in which that law is v
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Ok then. Since you are a spiritual person, and you have understood that spirituality offers guidance as to WHY we are here, please enlighten us: WHY ARE WE HERE?
Re:intelligent design isn't (Score:4, Informative)
Re:intelligent design isn't (Score:5, Funny)
You certainly weren't, since that's a tad over 1600 times the speed of light.
Scientists can be biased just like fundamentalists (Score:3, Interesting)
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 cat
Yeesh (Score:5, Funny)
The laws of physics are clearly the result of a bureaucracy.
Re:Yeesh (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Yeesh (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe if they took that danged cat out of the box, they'd have enough room...
Re:Yeesh (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
God (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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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 would like to say that you will probably be modded troll or offtopic for that comment even though I don't think it is warranted in this case. While I'm not sure about your particular viewpoint of what "God" constitutes, because you used a capitol letter in the word "God" I will assume you mean the Christian humanoid man in the sky (I clarify this because the term has had its use in nearly every religion and even by non-religious people to.) Religion has indeed been the explanation for many unknowns in th
Seems like a natural progression to me... (Score:2)
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.
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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.
Worrying about where they came form would be a good indicator your a bad scientist since your anthropomorphizing your work. Laws in Science are just terse observations.
Well I've got my finger on it (Score:3, Funny)
Fallacy of equivocation (Score:5, Informative)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:5, Funny)
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They are mere observations (Score:2)
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.
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Where do the laws of nature come from? (Score:5, Funny)
Duh.
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Missing the point (Score:2)
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 t
Re:Missing the point (Score:5, Interesting)
When in fact, science is discovering the opposite.
Reductionism [wikipedia.org] 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
We don't really know, yet. (Score:4, Insightful)
anyone who knows anything about science knows (Score:5, Insightful)
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/ [lightandmatter.com]
Scientists Have No Roots? (Score:4, Funny)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Incorrect definition of religious faith (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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As the other responder said: doubt. I don't accept your "evidence", because your evidence is not compelling on its own, and certainly not compelling when lumped together with all the other stories - religious and otherwise - that have existed over the millennia.
Futurama (Score:5, Funny)
-No, God created the world, that is why you exist, hence answering the question once and for all.
-But...
-ONCE AND FOR ALL!!!!
Not exactly on topic but... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Platonism, Laws, and Necessary Truths (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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Yes, statements like "neither good or evil" are nonsensical.
Oh wait, they're not.
That's because "good" does not mean simply "non-evil", nor does "evil" mean "non-good". The relationship between good and evil is the same as the relationship between necessity and impossibility, as between obligation and prohibition, between all and none, etc; this opposed-but-not-just-negative formal relationship is found all over the place.
The negation of "nothing" is "something", not "everything". The negation of "prohibited" is "permitted", not "obligatory". The negation of "impossible" is "possible",
Read Personal Knowledge (Score:3, Interesting)
Where do Laws of Nature come from? (Score:4, Funny)
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I get that you were joking, but I suspect it's more like where do small rocks come from?
The two options are accretion (collection and bonding of smaller particles or concepts to gether to form a greater whole) or disintergration (breaking apart of a larger whole - only fragments remain).
Why is this necessary? (Score:3)
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.
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).
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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
Re:Pratchett's Law (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Pratchett's Law (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Philosophy of science is crucial (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
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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 unstabl