Where do the Physical Laws come from?

[stevefaulkner]

We keep searching for the Physical Laws but is anyone looking for the Laws that brought them about?

Is it not inconsistent to expect Physical Laws to have no cause?

Foundations of The Quantum Logic

 

[Dadface]

I think physical laws come from observations.They don't necessarily explain how nature behaves they summarise how we perceive it to behave and any law is only as good as the observations it conforms to and correctly predicts within its own zone of applicability.

 

[WaveJumper]

We keep searching for the Physical Laws but is anyone looking for the Laws that brought them about?

Is it not inconsistent to expect Physical Laws to have no cause?

Foundations of The Quantum Logic

They likely come from where matter comes from - from the undefined.

 

[apeiron]

If laws are the result of emergent regularity - the self-consistent patterns or attractor states that a set of initial conditions will settle into as an equilibrium - then you could put their "cause" into the future of a system, rather than its past.

The second law of thermodynamics already has this form, for example. Systems will develop towards their equilibrium.

 

[magpies]

A law is made because we see things that must always happen. Like when you see an object tossed into the air it will always come down, unless its a rocket. So we make a law that says all non rocket objects tossed into the sky come down. Now of course that law is not exactly like the laws of physics but its an approximation. However all the laws we currently have are basicaly just an approximate rule if only by the fact that there should really only be one law of physics that can cover all that exists. That is however not the way we seem to be going in history it seems we started out with one law and then started making many so I would guess in the future we will have more then we do now and not less.

 

[Pythagorean]

What's wrong with the frame that physical laws just always were, and cause/effect is the result of them? I don't see any reason to go into infinite regress here. The physical laws themselves don't have to obey anything, they are simply obeyed.

Oh, and the physical laws come from humans who make observations and have a very linear, logical way of thinking and so have to lay down "laws" (now called "hypothesis" or "principals") so that they can derive some kind of consistency out of their environment. Classification and prediction is an important part of human thinking and learning.

 

[mikelepore]

"Laws" in this context means patterns or regularities that we keep finding.

I copied the following paragraph from Carl Sagan, _Cosmos_, Chapter 3:

"If we lived on a planet where nothing ever changed, there would be little to do. There would be nothing to figure out. There would be no impetus for science. And if we lived in an unpredictable world, where things changed in random or very complex ways, we would not be able to figure things out. Again, there would be no such thing as science. But we live in an in-between universe, where things change, but according to patterns, rules, or, as we call them, laws of nature. If I throw a stick up in the air, it always falls down. If the sun sets in the west, it always rises again the next morning in the east. And so it becomes possible to figure things out. We can do science, and with it we can improve our lives."

I copied the following paragraph from the essay "On Nature" by John Stuart Mill, 1874:

"As the nature of any given thing is the aggregate of its powers and properties, so Nature in the abstract is the aggregate of the powers and properties of all things. Nature means the sum of all phenomena, together with the causes which produce them; including not only all that happens, but all that is capable of happening; the unused capabilities of causes being as much a part of the idea of Nature as those which take effect. Since all phenomena which have been sufficiently examined are found to take place with regularity, each having certain fixed conditions, positive and negative, on the occurrence of which it invariably happens, mankind have been able to ascertain, either by direct observation or by reasoning processes grounded on it, the conditions of the occurrence of many phenomena; and the progress of science mainly consists in ascertaining those conditions. When discovered they can be expressed in general propositions, which are called laws of the particular phenomenon, and also, more generally, Laws of Nature."

 

[Freeman Dyson]

Paul Davies writes talks a lot about this. Why are the laws this way and where do they come from?

When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance. The laws were treated as “given” — imprinted on the universe like a maker’s mark at the moment of cosmic birth — and fixed forevermore.

Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favorite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they are — they just are.” The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.

Can the mighty edifice of physical order we perceive in the world about us ultimately be rooted in reasonless absurdity? If so, then nature is a fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and absurdity somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rationality.

Davies did a lecture on it. He called it the ultimate explanation. You can watch it here.

 

[Pythagorean]

Science likes to be certain, and where it can't be certain, it likes to be able to quantify its certainty. We look at what is, things you can measure and test and say (with certainty) "this is what happens when you do this"

So yeah, "why does it happen" or "where did the laws come from" doesn't fit anywhere in science.

 

[apeiron]

So yeah, "why does it happen" or "where did the laws come from" doesn't fit anywhere in science.

Why would it not fit into a science of self-organising systems?

Ordinary systems theory is about how systems self-organise through creating boundary constraints. And it is easy to see that the laws of physics are our emergent and prevailing boundary constraints.

So it is then just a matter of extrapolating the discovered principles of self-organisation to the cosmological scale.

Here are some refs that illustrate the variety of approaches now being taken to the identification of these principles...

http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~comp4006/CxSys%20Readings/Antichaos/Antichaos%20and%20Adaptation.htm

http://www.mdpi.org/entropy/papers/e6030327.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_law

http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2005/PP-02-10.PDF

And more generally, a little excellent history from wiki...

The term "self-organizing" was introduced to contemporary science in 1947 by the psychiatrist and engineer W. Ross Ashby[1]. It was taken up by the cyberneticians Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Stafford Beer and Norbert Wiener himself in the second edition of his "Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine" (MIT Press 1961).
Self-organization as a word and concept was used by those associated with general systems theory in the 1960s, but did not become commonplace in the scientific literature until its adoption by physicists and researchers in the field of complex systems in the 1970s and 1980s.[2] After 1977's Ilya Prigogine Nobel Prize, the thermodynamic concept of self-organization received some attention of the public, and scientific researchers start to migrate from the cybernetic view to the thermodynamic view.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization

So principles first needed to talk about life/mind are being generalised to the more fundamental physical level of thermodynamics. So just another step towards ToEs.

We have already seen attempts to unite the big three - GR, QM and thermo - in efforts like Hawking's. But the difference here is that the cosmologists have been attempting to incorporate century-old thermo and not the thermo that has been emerging the past 30 years.

However it is the obvious next step IMO.

 

[DanP]

We keep searching for the Physical Laws but is anyone looking for the Laws that brought them about?

Matching experiment and observational data with mathematical consistence.

Is it not inconsistent to expect Physical Laws to have no cause?

Foundations of The Quantum Logic

No explanation is required. This is not equivalent to "to have no cause". Perhaps some day our science will be able to explain "WHY" an electron behaves as it does, as opposed to only giving equations which answer to "HOW" it behaves. No inconsistency so far.

 

[apeiron]

No explanation is required. This is not equivalent to "to have no cause". Perhaps some day our science will be able to explain "WHY" an electron behaves as it does, as opposed to only giving equations which answer to "HOW" it behaves. No inconsistency so far.

That's why this is a philosophy forum matter. We don't have to be dull and boring. We get to ask the interesting questions.

 

[Pythagorean]

Why would it not fit into a science of self-organising systems?

Ordinary systems theory is about how systems self-organise through creating boundary constraints. And it is easy to see that the laws of physics are our emergent and prevailing boundary constraints.

So it is then just a matter of extrapolating the discovered principles of self-organisation to the cosmological scale.

Here are some refs that illustrate the variety of approaches now being taken to the identification of these principles...

http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~comp4006/CxSys%20Readings/Antichaos/Antichaos%20and%20Adaptation.htm

http://www.mdpi.org/entropy/papers/e6030327.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_law

http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2005/PP-02-10.PDF

And more generally, a little excellent history from wiki...


So principles first needed to talk about life/mind are being generalised to the more fundamental physical level of thermodynamics. So just another step towards ToEs.

We have already seen attempts to unite the big three - GR, QM and thermo - in efforts like Hawking's. But the difference here is that the cosmologists have been attempting to incorporate century-old thermo and not the thermo that has been emerging the past 30 years.

However it is the obvious next step IMO.

I don't think you're really saying much with that though. SOC systems still follows laws (I wrote a baby-SOC program myself, once). We still come to a point of infinite regress. Where do the laws that govern the SOC system come from?

We can cop-out and say that they come from human interpretations of their own observations, but this still doesn't answer the actual question. We're still studying something out there that exists as a valid, repeatable observation. The thing we're studying exists independent of our contemplation of it. Our interpretation may be shallow at best, but that doesn't mean it's purely a figment of our imagination. I believe the OP is still asking about the actual thing itself. Where did the SOC laws themselves come from?

In science, we don't care why the law is, we just learn to accept that it is. To some of us, the question doesn't make sense because we operate under the assumption that the laws simply always were.

We could also take an anthropomorphic approach, "the laws are there because they are required to be there for existence to take place" But this probably isn't very satisfying either.

All in all, I think this kind of question is properly placed in the philosophy forums.

 

[apeiron]

I don't think you're really saying much with that though. SOC systems still follows laws (I wrote a baby-SOC program myself, once). We still come to a point of infinite regress. Where do the laws that govern the SOC system come from?

Your choice. I won't let it stop me.

But you may be misunderstanding. SOC are ruled by their own emergent global "laws". So a scalefree network will tune itself to an ambient state of connectivity. The global law of that gives the k for the system is part of what self-organises.

Of course everyday examples of SOC are embedded still in a larger universe and its laws. And it is these that we would seek to explain in a similar SO way.

Infinite regress does seem a problem. Which is where a more radical step would be required - the abandonment of the idea that beginnings are crisp rather than vague. And as you hint, a need to take a teleological view where attractors are indeed causes found in the future of systems rather than their pasts.

An attractor is of course always possible "from the beginning", but it is only crisply expressed in emergent fashion at the end.

And the point is that quite a number of people have and are taking this approach to the laws. Your doubts probably won't bother them either.

In science, we don't care why the law is, we just learn to accept that it is. To some of us, the question doesn't make sense because we operate under the assumption that the laws simply always were.

The old shut up and calculate school of thought is fine for society's techologists. They don't need to understand the tools they use.

 

[wofsy]

We keep searching for the Physical Laws but is anyone looking for the Laws that brought them about?

Is it not inconsistent to expect Physical Laws to have no cause?

Foundations of The Quantum Logic

- Can you give me an example a new physical law that has come into being during the present incarnation of the Universe?

- What mechanism for creating new laws can we imagine?

- Is there a difference between physical laws and physical theories? I know physicists distinguish between phenomenological theories - descriptive theories such as the Shroedinger equation - and fundamental theories that attempt to construct the universe or some piece of it. While I don't really understand this distinction I think of classical electromagnetic theory that describes the phenomenon of electrical force as an inverse square law and the quantum mechanical description that identifies the force as the sharing of a photon.

- Einstein wondered whether the laws of the Universe at inception were necessary. As he put it, he wondered whether God had any choice when he created the Universe. This question it seems to me may ultimately have an answer. It would involve two things perhaps. First necessary laws of evolution and secondly necessary initial conditions.

- Anything prior to the creation confuses me because there would not have been time. The only picture I can make of this is the solution of a PDE which starts with a time zero initial condition. The notion of a solution prior to time zero might make no sense - e.g. in solution of the heat equation where the initial conditions are discontinuous.

- I can think of new fundamental objects coming into being and changing the functional meaning of physical laws. For instance in a non-linear wave equation a shock discontinuity propogates according to the equation but is a newly created object.

- If one takes the Heracleitian view that change is primary, one then can ask how form/ specific laws can emerge from it. One would then model a more fundamental process out of which laws could emerge. There are many computer models of intrinsically random processes that reach various equilibria and thus take on the lawfulness of those equilibrium states. In some models there are more than one possible equilibrium and therefore more than one possible untimate set of laws. This would not contradict Einstein but it would give him pause.

- In current physical theory, and perhaps you could explain this to me, what happens to the laws of quantum mechanics when there is no time - e.g. in a black hole - or before the big bang? If the Hamiltonian still exists but is not evolving then a random quantum mechanical event could occur without time and ignite the the big bang.

 

[MaxwellsDemon]

Personally, I've always thought that the laws of physics are a reflection of some deep, eternal, logically necessary, absolute truth. It is interesting to wonder whether there are actually rules that things in nature follow, or whether we create these rules to describe a sort of complex behavior that arises from very simple things interacting. (Either way, I would imagine that these simple things would still be a manifestation of some absolute truth) I wonder whether the universe really makes use of things like Schrödinger's equation and Newton's 2nd law, or whether these are just ideas we invent and project onto nature. Do our laws ultimately tell us more about ourselves and the way we think, than about the universe around us? I wold think that certainly they must have some foundation in an objective truth...I think that the ultimate goal of science is to obtain that truth.

 

[wofsy]

Personally, I've always thought that the laws of physics are a reflection of some deep, eternal, logically necessary, absolute truth. It is interesting to wonder whether there are actually rules that things in nature follow, or whether we create these rules to describe a sort of complex behavior that arises from very simple things interacting. (Either way, I would imagine that these simple things would still be a manifestation of some absolute truth) I wonder whether the universe really makes use of things like Schrödinger's equation and Newton's 2nd law, or whether these are just ideas we invent and project onto nature. Do our laws ultimately tell us more about ourselves and the way we think, than about the universe around us? I wold think that certainly they must have some foundation in an objective truth...I think that the ultimate goal of science is to obtain that truth.

I completely share your view. I sometimes wonder whether the Universe as we observe it and our own consciousness as we experience it are merely hints at the underlying truth which is itself hidden from view.

 

[apeiron]

I wonder whether the universe really makes use of things like Schrödinger's equation and Newton's 2nd law, or whether these are just ideas we invent and project onto nature.

Of course the world and our models are usefully related. That has been proven by the way the models predict the aspects of reality we measure. So in some sense, we are really talking about the world.

But the difference would seem to be that the world is a process with emergent regularities. And our models are formal structures that encode the regularities as symmetry statements. So much of this equals so much of that.

So the world approaches limits. Our models then take these limits.

It is like how we have come to deal with infinity. It was once accepted as a process approaching a limit - counting forever. Then maths just imagined the limit is reached and used that as a modelling construct.

The world does not "use laws". It is the law. It is its emergent regularities. But humans use models. And that is done efficiently via a reduction of information. We throw out all the process involved (all the actual counting to reach infinity) and just say it is the law that these regularities exist.

 

[wofsy]

Of course the world and our models are usefully related. That has been proven by the way the models predict the aspects of reality we measure. So in some sense, we are really talking about the world.

But the difference would seem to be that the world is a process with emergent regularities. And our models are formal structures that encode the regularities as symmetry statements. So much of this equals so much of that.

So the world approaches limits. Our models then take these limits.

It is like how we have come to deal with infinity. It was once accepted as a process approaching a limit - counting forever. Then maths just imagined the limit is reached and used that as a modelling construct.

The world does not "use laws". It is the law. It is its emergent regularities. But humans use models. And that is done efficiently via a reduction of information. We throw out all the process involved (all the actual counting to reach infinity) and just say it is the law that these regularities exist.

I have been reading some of the articles that you have linked. Can you suggest any on biological Evolution? I would be interested in a discussion of punctuated equilibrium from the point of view an emergent regularity in a eco-system. Is punctuated equilibrium actually predicatable?

 

[WaveJumper]

I completely share your view. I sometimes wonder whether the Universe as we observe it and our own consciousness as we experience it are merely hints at the underlying truth which is itself hidden from view.

This view gets one more vote.

 

[apeiron]

I have been reading some of the articles that you have linked. Can you suggest any on biological Evolution? I would be interested in a discussion of punctuated equilibrium from the point of view an emergent regularity in a eco-system. Is punctuated equilibrium actually predicatable?

Punctuated equilibrium is a very old hat debate if you mean the Dawkins vs Gould clash.

A modern take on species extinction would be that the rate of evolutionary change is just fractal - i/f noise. And so it would be predictable in this powerlaw sense.

Of course, there is then the new debate you would be familiar with if you were a wall st quant - is the randomness actually powerlaw, or log-normal, etc?

If you have more specific queries, PM me or open a thread in the biology section perhaps.

 

[magpies]

Without stuff/matter to act upon physical laws would be meaningless so my question is "where does stuff/matter come from?". I think if we can answer the question of where stuff comes from we would have a good idea as to where to look for the question about "where do the laws come from?". So does anyone want to give a best guess as to where stuff comes from?

 

[WaveJumper]

Without stuff/matter to act upon physical laws would be meaningless so my question is "where does stuff/matter come from?". I think if we can answer the question of where stuff comes from we would have a good idea as to where to look for the question about "where do the laws come from?". So does anyone want to give a best guess as to where stuff comes from?

From post 3:

They likely come from where matter comes from - from the undefined.

"It is sometimes suggested that pair production can be used to explain the origin of matter in the universe. In models of the Big Bang, it is suggested that vacuum fluctuations, or virtual particles, briefly appear.[9] Then, due to effects such as CP-violation, an imbalance between the number of virtual particles and antiparticles is created, leaving a surfeit of particles, thus accounting for the visible matter in the universe."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluctuations


The "undefined" was a loose term and denotes the lowest energy state of a quantum field. You might also be interested in a fascinating aspect of quantum field theory: the Unruh effect. It implies that contrary to all physical intuition, the notion of particles is relative to the observer.

 

[wofsy]

Without stuff/matter to act upon physical laws would be meaningless so my question is "where does stuff/matter come from?". I think if we can answer the question of where stuff comes from we would have a good idea as to where to look for the question about "where do the laws come from?". So does anyone want to give a best guess as to where stuff comes from?

I have never been able to understand what is meant by stuff. Starting out with the intuitive idea that it is the "outside world" I get lost after that. Can you explain more what you mean?

 

[Pythagorean]

The old shut up and calculate school of thought is fine for society's techologists. They don't need to understand the tools they use.

Well, now you're making stuff up. There's still plenty of curiosity without calculations in discovering new laws or refining old laws. Still, nobody has a clue where they come from, and imo, it's a futile pursuit. But I'm more interested in the discovery of the laws themselves, not their origins. Cosmologists themselves don't consider existence before the big bang.

 

[apeiron]

Well, now you're making stuff up...Cosmologists themselves don't consider existence before the big bang.

Well now you're making stuff up. So let's call it quits. We should just blame the forum thread format for the soapbox tone it encourages?

But what I was reacting to was your: "In science, we don't care why the law is, we just learn to accept that it is."

Which to me sounds like you saying I can't be a scientist because I do choose to focus on precisely these boundary areas.

From where I stand, I think there is a genuine problem for science when it gets uber-positive with these kinds of statements.

It appears to be largely a reaction to the "mystery and faith" espoused by the religious alternative. And "all is reason" armchair philosophy gets lumped in with that camp. So what we are seeing is a religious fundamentalism producing a scientific fundamentalism - a mirror image that is equally unreasonable in its own sweet positive, hypotheses non fingo, way.

Is science about the questions or the answers? And why would we impose limits on our questioning.

There is of course the serious problem of hypothesis and measurement. This is what, in fact, is imposing practical limits on our questioning - string theory, pre-bang, etc.

But does than mean science has to come to an end? Or does it instead mean science evolves into something which is again more akin to philosophy? Does it mean there will grow a clearer divide between applied and theoretical approaches?

So when you say "in science, we...", are you speaking for some mainstream consensus in a certain domain at the moment? Or are you talking for what might reasonably be the future of science?

 

[Pythagorean]

So when you say "in science, we...", are you speaking for some mainstream consensus in a certain domain at the moment? Or are you talking for what might reasonably be the future of science?

Mainstream consensus. This is why this discussion is in the philosophy forums, because it's a philosophical question.

I'm not saying that scientists aren't philosophical. In fact, I'm sure many scientists (even myself) have considered the question. But you still have to be able to separate science from philosophy if you're going to produce science. You can be all kinds of philosophical while you're doing science, but at the end of the day, you produce scientific knowledge and add to the scientific library, and that's separate from you philosophical musings, which you only discuss with your colleagues, or in the philosophy section of physicsforums. Sure, they may influence your scientific work, but they are still not science.

So, it's not incompatible with science, but it's not very scientific until you come up with a way to experimentally test your assertions and/or questions. Sure, that may be possible, and I wouldn't doubt many scientists themselves have even tried. They haven't appeared to publish anything though...

Which to me sounds like you saying I can't be a scientist because I do choose to focus on precisely these boundary areas.

This kind of ad hominem, methinks, and completely inaccurate. We're not talking about where I choose to focus. I could very well be trying to answer the questions in the OP in my spare time. The point is that I wouldn't do it at work... and I wouldn't call it science. That doesn't make it wrong or immoral or petty to think about. It's just not science! There's no need to make this personal.

There is of course the serious problem of hypothesis and measurement. This is what, in fact, is imposing practical limits on our questioning - string theory, pre-bang, etc.

We have no access to information before the big-bang. Anything we try to say about it is made up in our head. The chance that it's right is slim. The chance that we could test the hypothesis is even thinner. That's a good start to being non-scientific.

 

[apeiron]

Mainstream consensus. This is why this discussion is in the philosophy forums, because it's a philosophical question.

What is your point then? You think we shouldn't be taking the OP seriously when this is precisely a philosophy section?

You are sounding, as I say, very fundamentalist and excluding - too concerned about group boundary maintenance. And that surprises me as it is different to the tone of your posts in the past.

I simply don't agree that we can have no evidence about what came before the big bang. Although that is, I admit, because I take a systems science view of causality where the "wholeness" of what we observe is a map of the potential from which it arose.

Current physics cannot see that whole because it is too concerned about measuring the parts. It is stuck in a particular mode of modelling (which is very useful for applied science).

But the way I see it (and you will surely disagree) is that an emergence-based understanding of physical laws (or rather, global boundary constraints) will be revealing about what those laws emerged from.

And if we can accurately measure the state of the observable universe in these terms, we will have data about the pre-BB realm.

Yes, it may not be directly testable in the sense that we can re-run the history of the emergence of the universe, fiddling with the experimental parameters to demonstrate we have full causal control over the system in question.

But we could still make it more science than philosophy by demonstrating the basic ideas on systems within the universe. Toy demonstrations of the kind that are actually common in science. That would then give us some solid ground to extrapolate to the bigger picture.

You will know how people are currently, and very publicly, wrestling with the status of anthropic reasoning and selectionist approaches and top-down causality - physicists like Smolin, Davies, Gell-Mann, Weinberg. There are all sorts of views as to how things should go in the time ahead. And thank goodness for that.

 

[petm1]

It implies that contrary to all physical intuition, the notion of particles is relative to the observer.

Why would this thought be contrary to physical intuition? Thinking in 4d motion, when everything is a wave, as long as the geometry of the observers eyes are correct the world looks sharp and full of particles. But remove your glasses and its back into a would full of waves.

 

[baywax]

I completely share your view. I sometimes wonder whether the Universe as we observe it and our own consciousness as we experience it are merely hints at the underlying truth which is itself hidden from view.

Nothing is hidden. We just can't see it, yet.

I am convinced that the physical laws evolved in a manner similar to how we are able to discern life's evolution.

So that, from the amorphous singularity of a big bang, where no matter or even inkling of laws existed... the physical laws then developed through much trial and error or... natural selection, over 13.5 billion years, giving us what we are able to observe today.

And, it was Neils Bohr who said, "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature."