I read Steven Weinberg's Dreams of a Final Theory some years back and disagree with the premise — fishfry

But he also says this (NYT): ''half-baked philosophy has sometimes gotten in the way of doing science."

:smile:

But he also says this (NYT): ''half-baked philosophy has sometimes gotten in the way of doing science." — jgill

And the converse!

The rules of this universe and the laws of all universes are not all the same. There is the all possible world's interpretation which runs parallel to m-theory.

amino acids come in complementary pairs, with a left hand and a right hand version. these are mirror images of each other but not interchangeable (in the way that you cannot put your left hand in a right hand glove).

this property is called chirality.

thing is, all life forms that we know of have the left hand version of the amino acid. right hand versions of these compounds exist, but no life forms utilise them.

no one knows why this happens, or whether it is a pre-condition for life to exist, or whether life is possible with right hand amino acids. it just is the way it is and no one knows why.

so within the context of the OP's question, is this a law of the universe, or is it merely a spooky coincidence? who or what decides what is or is not a law of the universe?


Kaarlo Tuomi

Despite the law of entropy, due to the nature of chaos going both ways, anything goes. It's permissible that relatively orderly stable laws could form and compound upon themselves (evolve).

Nice art works, Bob. Welcome to the forum. :cool:

There is no reason. If we are to postulate that the big bang was the "beginning", then there should be no reason for any rules on what could, and could not form.

So lets take this to its logical end. Lets say that there was matter that didn't follow rules, and matter that did follow rules. If anything could have formed, by probability with that amount of mass, we would have both.

If we understand stability for, "Things to exist the same way over a tick of time", then instability would be for something to "Eventually exist differently over a tick of time".

This leads to a second question, "Why is there still existence after all of these trillions of years?" After all, the question of, "Why don't things just vanish? is in the same vein. Again, logically, there must have been bits of matter that just vanished after a period of time, and for all we know, some matter that exists today has a rule that it will vanish after a period of time from existence.

But we could put the two questions together and postulate that matter that would be limited in its existence over trillions of years is likely less stable. Matter that existed for trillions of years is highly stable.

Thus we could conclude that the reason why after trillions of years, we have matter that behaves in a predictable fashion is because it is stable enough to last trillions of years. Perhaps the first few millions of years were quite a chaotic time, and what is left over is that matter that just won't quit, and insists on existing, and being what it is.

the laws we see in the universe are the only laws that a universe can have this gives fuel to the deterministic philosophy in which things have to/ will occur a certain way rather than completely by chance. — Benj96

The laws of the universe being mathematical means they're both deterministic and indeterministic. As such, Godel, Heisenberg, and quantum mechanics all suggest a level of indeterminacy in nature. The distinctions between indeterminism and complete chaos is a different matter though. Complete chaos presumably would preclude human existence among other things... .

Similarly, there could be other so-called possible worlds that have a different set of laws governing their or its existence. A totally different language as it were. Some multiverse theories obviously include such possibilities.

It's a great question! It's like asking why do self-aware beings inhabit the universe (?). Determinism and indeterminism in nature is subordinate to our metaphysical sense of wonderment.

Why have any consistency to anything? Why not have a gravitational force that changes constantly or a conservation law that works "most" of the time. — Benj96

FIrstly, even if they changed constantly we'd still write equations describing the frequency by which they change, or the type of randomness. The "rules" are just a description of what we see, so they'll always be rules.

Secondly, perhaps they do change over vast distances / timescales / bubble universes? We can't rule that out right now, and indeed many physicists suspect that this is the case. In which case, the laws just look static to us because we're the beat of a hummingbird's wings in the grand scale of things.

When person creates all sorts of methods to figure lottery game, they at times have winning method, but then later it stops working. Imagine that this successful method was used not for one or few lottery games and prove itself, but to prove our reality, our scientific laws for thousands of years. People would inevitably believe they have some serious law that rules their cosmic surrounding. They'd believe and use it for their best advantage only until given law stops working. But if it does not change, millions of years might pass confirming the true nature of a given , concocted by people physical law or method to solve ongoing problems. The people as a species might not have enough time in their past and future history to disprove some physical law they lived with, because once the law of physics changes, people as species might go extinct. People might also morph into yet another kind of species and those in turn will match their aspirations to yet anther physical laws. Still those laws are temporary by the standards of Universe or larger construct consisting of multitude of Universes.