The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy [2014] by Lee Smolin Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Author:Lee Smolin, Roberto Mangabeira Unger [Smolin, Lee; Mangabeira Unger, Roberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

5. The mutability of the laws of nature

CHANGING LAWS

Do the laws of nature change? Many philosophers and scientists have claimed that the immutability of the laws of nature is a premise of the work of science. In pressing this claim, they reify a particular idea of science: an idea that takes the central tradition of physics, from Newton to Einstein, as the model of science. For it is only in this tradition that the notion of changeless laws of nature has had a secure place. Nevertheless, only very few physicists, Dirac and Feynman first among them, have explicitly questioned the immutability of the laws of nature and suggested that they must have been different in the early universe.

There are other branches of science in which the notion of unchanging laws does not immediately occur to a practicing scientist unless he is anxious to show how his scientific practice can be made to conform - or to appear to conform - to the supposed master science, modern physics. We commonly think of the explanatory force of the regularities of natural evolution that are enshrined in the contemporary Darwinian synthesis as having developed together with life. This joint transformation of the phenomena and of the regularities that they exhibit is not a one-time phenomenon; it keeps happening. For example, our account of the workings of the Mendelian mechanisms in the course of evolution is modified by the arrival of sexual reproduction.

A weak reductionism may assert that these effective laws can all be reduced to the supposedly fundamental and immutable laws of physics. However, such a claim amounts to little more than an empty genuflection to the model of explanation established in the dominant tradition of physics. It has no consequence for explanation in the earth and life sciences. [Page 260]

The idea of the unchanging character of the laws of nature has an especially close connection to the Newtonian paradigm. Changeless laws are invoked to explain change within a configuration space the contours of which are defined by unexplained initial conditions. A working assumption of this explanatory practice is that the laws applicable to the phenomena within the configuration space are held constant; the theoretician-observer remains in a timeless and godlike position outside the configuration space, wielding, as his instrument, the immutable laws of nature. It is precisely the universe as a whole, however, rather than any particular part of it, that is in question when we assert or assume the laws of nature to be unchanging.

This style of explanation - we argue - cannot be legitimately applied to the whole of the universe (so to apply it amounts to the first cosmological fallacy); its province is the explanation of local realities, bounded by stipulated initial conditions. The enthronement of physics as the exemplary science is followed by the extrapolation to cosmology of an explanatory strategy that has no legitimate cosmological use.

Those who claim that the immutability of the laws of nature is a requirement of any science also make another mistake, alongside their baseless entrenchment of a particular way of doing science.

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