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

Author:Roberto Mangabeira Unger & Lee Smolin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781107074064
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

That the laws of nature may change becomes less surprising and perplexing once we allow for the variable relation between the laws and the states of affairs that they govern. The universe is so constituted that it undergoes moments of radical reformation in which the distinction between the laws and the governed phenomena diminishes or even vanishes. Causal connections may even cease to exhibit the recurrent and general regularities and symmetries that are their hallmark in the cooled-down universe. These are the same moments in which change changes more rapidly: the kinds of things that there are as well as the ways in which they turn into other things.

The phenomena may change more easily than the regularities: laws, symmetries, and supposed constants. The regularities that appear to underwrite our causal explanations but that are in fact only a codification of causal connections in their recurrent form, which we call laws of nature, change less readily and more rarely. The principles that these laws seem to obey, such as conservation of energy and least action, may change only at the limit of the most radical transformations in the history of the universe.

What changes, and how and when, are not truths that can be inferred from the logic of scientific inquiry or from the extrapolation of our local experience of nature into universal and eternal attributes of nature. They are facts of the matter. They are not, however, simply facts about local pieces of nature; they are facts about the universe and its history, including the antecedents of this universe in what may be a succession of universes or of states of the universe.

The idea that the laws of nature may change is thus quite simply the notion that these laws – the laws invoked by our causal explanations and even the basic and seemingly inviolate principles to which these laws conform, as well as the symmetries and supposed constants of nature – belong to the history of the universe. They are not outside that history and untouched by it.

* * *

Consider how the idea that the laws of nature may change, because they are inside time rather than outside it, relates to the intuitive core of what contemporary cosmology has to teach us: what it has to teach, that is to say, when considered without the blinkers of metaphysical assumptions hostile to acknowledgment of the inclusive reality of time.

Any suggestion that the laws of nature may be mutable confronts the countervailing fact that they appear to have been stable from early in the history of the present universe. Departures from this stability, such as the suggested variations in the fine-structure constant, are so uncommon and limited, as well as so disputed, that the possible exceptions seem only to confirm the permanence of the laws.

However, this fact, if it is a fact, can be read in a way that shows why the mutability of the laws of nature may be not only compatible with the findings of contemporary cosmology but also supported by them.

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