3 Are the Laws of Nature Fixed?Read more at location 1480
On the basis of two or three hundred years of earthbound research, how can we be sure that the laws were always the same and always will be, everywhere?Read more at location 1483
For most of science’s history, eternal laws of nature made sense. Either the universe was eternal and had needed no God to create it, or it had been made by God and stayed the same thereafter, guaranteed by God’s eternity. But in an evolutionary cosmos, does the theory of fixed laws make sense?Read more at location 1485
First, the very idea of a law of nature is anthropocentric. Only humans have laws. For the founders of modern science, the metaphor of law was appropriate because they thought of God as a kind of cosmic emperor whose writ ran everywhere, and whose omnipotence acted as a cosmic law-enforcement agency.Read more at location 1489
Some philosophers of science avoid these awkward questions by denying that scientific laws are transcendent, eternal realities; they argue instead that they are generalisations based on observable behaviour. But this amounts to an admission that the laws of nature evolve and may not be fixed for ever.Read more at location 1494
Nevertheless, whatever some philosophers may say, eternal laws are deeply embedded in the thinking of most scientists. They are implicit in the scientific method.Read more at location 1498
Observations should be replicable. Why? Because the laws of nature are the same at all timesRead more at location 1500
In this chapter, I suggest an alternative to eternal laws: evolving habits.Read more at location 1501
The materialists thought that changeless atoms of matter were eternal, while Pythagoras and his followers believed that the entire universe, especially the heavens, was ordered according to eternal non-material principles of harmony.Read more at location 1506
Plato (428–348 bc) was strongly influenced by the Pythagoreans but went further. He generalised the notion of eternal mathematical truths to a wider vision of Forms or Ideas (Platonic Forms and Ideas are traditionally written with initial capitals), or archetypes or universals, including not only mathematicsRead more at location 1513
The cosmos is ordered by this realm that transcends it.Read more at location 1517
Plato famously compared the objects of sense experience to shadows in a cave experienced by prisoners, permanently chained so they can watch only the blank cave wall, with their backs to a fire.Read more at location 1519
Many elements of Platonic philosophy were incorporated in Christian theology, and are implicit in the opening of St John’s gospel, which, like the rest of the New Testament, was written in Greek. ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ ‘Word’ with a capital W is the translation of logos.Read more at location 1532
He compared God to a gardener forming the world according to the pattern of the logos.Read more at location 1539
The founding fathers of modern science, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Kepler and Newton, were all essentially Platonists or Pythagoreans. They thought that the business of science was to find the mathematical patterns underlying the natural world,Read more at location 1541
Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity was firmly in this tradition, and Arthur Eddington, who provided the first evidence in favour of the theory, concluded that it pointed to the idea that ‘the stuff of the world is mind stuff . . .Read more at location 1550
Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics: [M]odern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word: they are forms, structures,Read more at location 1557
Some constants are considered to be more fundamental than others, including the velocity of light, c, the Universal Gravitational Constant, known to physicists as Big G, and the fine-structure constant, ?, which is a measure of the strength of interaction between charged particles, such as electrons, and photons of light.Read more at location 1564
Unlike the constants of mathematics, such as ?, the values of the constants of nature cannot be calculated by mathematics alone: they depend on laboratory measurements.Read more at location 1567
They are continually adjusted by international committees of experts known as metrologists.Read more at location 1571
However, some physicists, notably Paul Dirac (1902–84), speculated that at least some of the fundamental constants might change with time. In particular, Dirac proposed that the Universal Gravitational Constant might decrease slightly as the universe expands.Read more at location 1577
he was merely proposing that a mathematical law might govern the gradual variation of a constant.Read more at location 1580
the disparity in measurements of G by different laboratories increased, rather than decreased.10 Between 1973 and 2010, the lowest value of G was 6.6659, and the highest 6.734, a 1.1 per cent differenceRead more at location 1585
What if G really does change? Maybe it does so because measurements are affected by changes in the earth’s astronomical environment, as the earth moves around the sun and as the solar system moves within the galaxy.Read more at location 1597
Gershteyn’s team looked only for daily fluctuations, but G may well vary over longer time periods as well;Read more at location 1608
Another way of looking for real changes in nature is to compare astronomical observations of galaxies and quasars of different ages to see if there is any difference in the light they emit that implies long-term changes in constants. The Australian astronomer John Webb has applied this approach to the fine structure constant,?.16 Around the turn of the millennium, his team found that ? was slightly smaller in distant parts of the sky, suggesting that it had changed over billions of years.Read more at location 1614
Finally, what about the speed of light, c? According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, the speed of light in a vacuum is an absolute constant, and modern physics is based on this assumption. Not surprisingly, early measurements of the speed of light varied considerably, but by 1927, the measured values had converged to 299,796 kilometres per second. At the time, the leading authority on the subject concluded, ‘The present value of c is entirely satisfactory and can be considered more or less permanently established.’20 However, all around the world from about 1928 to 1945, the speed of light dropped by about 20 kilometres per second.21 The ‘best’ values found by leading investigators were in impressively close agreement with each other.Read more at location 1626
The implications of varying constants would be enormous. The course of nature would no longer seem blandly uniform; there would be fluctuations at the heart of physical reality.Read more at location 1658
According to the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, the fact that the ‘laws’ and ‘constants’ of nature are just right for human life on this planet requires an explanation. If these laws and constants had been even slightly different, carbon-based life would not exist.Read more at location 1661
One response is to suggest that an Intelligent Designer fine-tuned the laws and constants of nature at the moment of the Big Bang so they were exactly right for the emergence of life and human beings. This is a modern version of deism.Read more at location 1663
many cosmologists prefer to think that there are innumerable actually existing universes besides our own, each with different laws and constants. In these ‘multiverse’ models the fact that we occupy a universe that is just right for us is explained very simply. This is the only universe that we can actually observe precisely because it is the only one right for us.Read more at location 1665
The multiverse model is popular among cosmologists for two other reasons. First, models of an ultra-rapid period of inflation in the earliest stages of the Big Bang suggest that if this period of inflation could generate one universe, our own, it could also generate many others, and go on generating them.Read more at location 1669
The other theoretical reason for the popularity of the multiverse is superstring theory. This ten-dimensional theory and the related eleven-dimensional M-theory generate far too many possible solutions, which could correspond to different universes, as many as 10500.Read more at location 1673
Some theorists go even further. The cosmologist Max Tegmark proposes that any mathematically possible universe must exist somewhere: ‘Complete mathematical democracy holds – mathematical existence and physical existence are equivalent, so that all mathematical structures exist physically as well.’Read more at location 1676
Some physicists and cosmologists are unhappy with these speculations. A vast number of unobserved universes violates the canon of scientific testability.Read more at location 1687
Lee Smolin summarised the situation in 2006: Hundreds of careers and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in the last 30 years in the search for signs of grand unification, supersymmetry, and higher dimensions. Despite these efforts, no evidence for any of these hypotheses has turned up.Read more at location 1692
Another class of speculative theories suggests that the universe is part of a series of universes, the progeny of a previous one and the progenitor of the next.Read more at location 1704
In modern cosmology, this ancient cyclic theory takes the form of the ‘bouncing universe’ model. After the Big Bang the universe expands for billions of years until its expansion slows down; it finally stops, and then begins to contract again under the force of gravity, finally collapsing in on itself in a Big Crunch. This in turn is the beginning of a new universe – a Big Bounce.Read more at location 1708
What all these theories have in common is a belief in the primacy of mathematics.Read more at location 1718
The alternative to Platonism is the evolution of the regularities of nature.Read more at location 1722
In the late nineteenth century, the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914; pronounced ‘purse’) pointed out that fixed laws imposed upon the universe from the outset are inconsistent with an evolutionary philosophy. He was one of the first to propose that the ‘laws of nature’ are more like habits, and suggested that the tendency to form habits grows spontaneously:Read more at location 1735
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), writing around the same time, went so far as to suggest that the ‘laws of nature’ underwent natural selection:Read more at location 1742
Likewise, Alfred North Whitehead suggested, ‘Time is differentiated from space by the acts of inheriting patterns from the past.’ This inheritance of pattern meant that habits built up. Whitehead said, ‘People make the mistake of talking about “natural laws”. There are no natural laws. There are only temporary habits of nature.’Read more at location 1755
The Big Bang theory became orthodox only in the 1960s.Read more at location 1761
My own hypothesis is that the formation of habits depends on a process called morphic resonance.41 Similar patterns of activity resonate across time and space with subsequent patterns. This hypothesis applies to all self-organising systems, including atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, plants, animals and animal societies. All draw upon a collective memory and in turn contribute to it.Read more at location 1763
A growing crystal of copper sulphate, for example, is in resonance with countless previous crystals of copper sulphate, and follows the same habits of crystal organisation, the same lattice structure.Read more at location 1767
resonance may pass through the quantum-vacuum field, also known as the zero-point energy field, which mediates all quantum and electromagnetic processesRead more at location 1797
The hypothesis of morphic resonance predicts that when chemists make a new compound for the first time, it might be difficult to obtain crystals of this compound because a morphic field for this crystal-form does not yet exist. When the crystals appear for the first time, a new pattern of organisation comes into being. The second time the compound crystallises, there will be an influence from the first crystals by morphic resonance all over the world. The third time, there will be an influence from the first and the second crystals, and so on.Read more at location 1804
Habits alone cannot explain evolution. They are by their very nature conservative. They account for repetition, but not for creativity. Evolution must involve a combination of these two processes: through creativity, new patterns of organisation arise; those that survive and are repeated become increasingly habitual.Read more at location 1867
Creativity is a mystery precisely because it involves the appearance of patterns that have never existed before.Read more at location 1870
Our usual way of explaining things is in terms of pre-existing causes: the cause somehow contains the effect; the effect follows from the cause. If we apply this way of thinking to the creation of a new form of life, a new work of art, or a new idea, we infer that the new pattern of organisation was already present: it was a latent possibility. Given the appropriate circumstances, this latent pattern becomes actual. It is discovered rather than created.Read more at location 1870
Bergson argued that we need not attribute to these possibilities, which are unknowable until they actually happen, a pre-existent reality transcending time and space.Read more at location 1892
Henri Bergson attributed this creativity to the élan vital or vital impetus. Like Darwinians, Marxists and other believers in emergent evolution, he denied that the evolutionary process was designed and planned in advance in the mind of a Platonic God.Read more at location 1897
The Big Bang theory locates cosmic creativity at the beginning. In the original miracle, all the laws of nature and all the matter and energy in the universe suddenly arose from nothing, or from the wreckage of a previous universe.Read more at location 1906
By contrast, a radically evolutionary view of nature implies an ongoing creativity, establishing new habits and regularities as nature evolves.Read more at location 1908
