Chapter 3: Laws of Nature
Why is there a universe with its atoms, molecules, solar systems, and galaxies? Why has it come into being? How has it arisen? Through some lucky coincidence or by intelligent design? Everything in physics has a cause. Also the universe. So we must ask ourselves: Who (or what) has caused the universe to arise, to be, to exist? What have some of the world’s foremost physicists found out about this? - Paul Davies is a British/Australian Professor for theoretical Physics. He writes in his book The Mind of God (1992:16, 39) about the universe and its origin:
"I belong to the group of scientists who do not subscribe to a conventional religion, but nevertheless deny that the universe is a purposeless accident. Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. There must, it seems to me, be a deeper level of explanation.
"We usually think of causes as preceding their effects. ... There is a widespread assumption that this ‘something’ cannot lie within the scope of scientific inquiry; it must be in some sense supernatural. Scientists, so the argument goes, might be very clever at explaining this and that. They might even be able to explain everything within the physical universe. But at some stage in the chain of explanation they will reach an impasse, a point beyond which science cannot penetrate. This point is the creation of the universe as a whole, the ultimate origin of the physical world."
"Thus we find that the early astronomers such as Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, in deducing the laws of planetary motion, believed that in studying the ordinary processes of nature they were uncovering God’s rational design. ... Newton himself believed strongly in a Designer who worked through fixed mathematical laws. For Newton and his contemporaries the universe was a vast and magnificent machine constructed by God. ...
"For Descartes and Leibniz, God was the fountainhead and guarantor of the total rationality that pervades the cosmos. It is this rationality that opens the door to the understanding of nature by the application of human reason, itself a gift from God. In Renaissance Europe, the justification for what we today call the scientific approach to inquiry was the belief in a rational God whose created order could be discerned from a careful study of nature." - Davies, P. (1992:76, 77).
The physical laws are written in a mathematical code. - In what kind a code (or language)?
Prof. Paul Davies: "Using a computer metaphor, we might say that the laws of nature encode a message. We are the receivers of that message, communicated to us through the channel we call scientific theory. ... all information about the world can in principle be represented in the form of binary arithmetic (ones and zeros), this being the form most convenient for computer processing. ‘The universe,’ claims Mayerstein, ‘can be simulated as an enormous string of 0’s and 1’s; the purpose of this scientific endeavor then being nothing else than the attempt at decoding and unscrambling this sequence with the objective of trying to understand, to make sense of this ‘message.’ What can be said about the nature of this ‘message’? Quite obviously, if the message is coded, this presupposes the existence of some pattern or structure in the arrangement of 0’s and 1’s in the string; a thorough random or chaotic string must be considered to be undecodable.’
"So the fact that there is cosmos rather than chaos boils down to the patterned properties of this string of digits. ... Many people, including some scientists, would like to believe that the cosmic code contains a real message for us from an Encoder. They maintain that the very existence of the code is evidence for the existence of an Encoder, and that the content of the message tells us something about him. ... Where do they (= the physical laws) come from? Who ‘sent the message’? Who devised the code? Are the laws simply there - free-floating, so to speak - or should we abandon the very notion of laws of nature as an unnecessary hangover from a religious past?
"To get a handle on these deep issues, let us first take a look at what a scientist actually means by a law. Everybody agrees that the workings of nature exhibit regularities. The orbits of the planets, for example, are described by simple geometrical shapes, and their motions display distinct mathematical rhythms. Patterns and rhythms are also found within atoms and their constituents. ... On the basis of such experiences, scientists use inductive reasoning to argue that these regularities are lawlike. ... Just because the sun has risen every day of our life, there is no guarantee that it will therefore rise tomorrow. The belief that it will - that there are indeed dependable regularities of nature - is an act of faith, but one which is indispensable to the progress of science.
"It is important to understand that the regularities of nature are real. Sometimes it is argued that laws of nature, which are attempts to capture these regularities systematically, are imposed on the world by our minds in order to make sense of it. ... I believe any suggestion that the laws of nature are similar projections of the human mind is absurd. The existence of regularities in nature is an objective mathematical fact. (1992:80-82).
What else proves that we have not simply made up the laws of nature?
Prof. Paul Davies: "Another reason why I don’t think the laws of nature are simply made up by us is that they help us to uncover new things about the world, sometimes things we never suspected. The mark of a powerful law is that it goes beyond a faithful description of the original phenomenon it was invoked to explain, and links up with other phenomenon too. Newton’s law of gravity, for example, gives an accurate account of planetary motion, but it also explains the ocean tides, the shape of the Earth, the motion of spacecraft, and much else. Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory went far beyond a description of electricity and magnetism, by explaining the nature of light waves and predicting the existence of radio waves.
"The truly basic laws of nature thus establish deep connections between different physical processes. The history of science shows that, once a new law is accepted, its consequences are rapidly worked out, and the law is tested in many novel contexts, often leading to the discovery of new, unexpected, and important phenomena. This leads us to believe that in conducting science we are uncovering real regularities and linkages, that we are reading these regularities out of nature, not writing them into nature. Even if we don’t know what the laws of nature are, or where they have come from, we can still list their properties. Curiously, the laws have been invested with many of the qualities that were formerly attributed to the God from which they were once supposed to have come.
· "First and foremost, the laws are universal. A law that only works sometimes, or in one place but not another, is no good. The laws are taken to apply unfailingly everywhere in the universe and at all epochs of cosmic history. No exceptions are permitted. In this sense they are also perfect.
· "Second, the laws are absolute. They do not depend on anything else. In particular they do not depend on who is observing nature, or on the actual state of the world. The physical states are affected by the laws, but not vice versa. When a scientist talks about the ‘state’ of a system, she or he means the actual physical condition that the system is in at some moment. ... The state is not something fixed and God-given; it will generally change with time. By contrast, the laws, which provide correlations between states at subsequent moments, do not change with time.
· "So we arrive at a third and most important property of the laws of nature: they are eternal. The timeless, eternal character of the laws is reflected in the mathematical structures employed to model the physical world.
· "Fourth, the laws are omnipotent. By this I mean that nothing escapes them: they are all-powerful. They are also, in a loose sense, omniscient (= having infinite awareness, understanding, and insight), for, if we go along with the metaphor of the laws ‘commanding’ physical systems, then the systems do not have to ‘inform’ the laws of their states in order for the laws to ‘legislate the right instructions’ for that state. This much is generally agreed. ...
"A helpful analogy here is with the concepts of hardware and software in computing. The laws of physics correspond to software, the physical states to hardware. (Granted, this stretches the use of the word ‘hard’ quite a bit, as included in the definition of the physical universe are nebulous quantum fields, and even space-time itself.) The foregoing issue can then be stated thus: Is there an independently existing ‘cosmic software’ - a computer program for a universe - encapsulating all the necessary laws? Can this software exist without the hardware?
"I have already indicated my belief that the laws of nature are real, objective truths about the universe, and that we discover them rather then invent them. But all known fundamental laws are found to be mathematical in form. ... If physical reality is somehow built on the laws of physics, then these laws have an independent existence in some sense." - Davies, P. (1992:82. 84).
"It is easy to see that the web of causal interconnections spreads outward very rapidly until it encompasses the entire cosmos. ... The cosmic initial conditions are ‘given’ just like the laws of physics. Most scientists regard the cosmic initial conditions as lying outside the scope of science altogether. Like the laws, they must simply be accepted as a brute fact. ... the laws are ‘out there,’ transcending the physical universe. It is sometimes argued that the laws of physics came into being with the universe. If that was so, then those laws cannot explain the origin of the universe, because the laws would not exist until the universe existed. This is most forcefully obvious when it comes to a law of initial conditions, because such a law purports to explain precisely how the universe came to exist in the form that it does." (1992:88-92).
Mathematics: Independently of Mankind
Human scientists have only found the mathematics, which the physical world contains. They have not made it. It has already been there long before them. - Why, then, is there mathematics in the universe?
Prof. Paul Davies: "To the scientist, mathematics is the guarantor of precision and objectivity. It is also, astonishingly, the language of nature itself. No one who is closed off from mathematics can ever grasp the full significance of the natural order that is woven so deeply into the fabric of physical reality. Because of its indispensable role in science, many scientists - especially physicists - invest the ultimate reality of the physical world in mathematics. A colleague of mine once remarked that in his opinion the world was nothing but bits and pieces of mathematics. ... Although the universe is complex, it is clearly not random. We observe regularities. The sun rises each day on schedule, light always travels at the same speed, a collection of muons always decay with a half-life of two-millionth of a second, and so on. These regularities are systemized into what we call laws. As I have already stressed, the laws of physics are analogous to computer programs. Given the initial state of a system (input), we can use the laws to compute a later state (output).
"The information content of the laws plus initial conditions is generally far less than that of the potential output. Of course, a law of physics may look simple when written down on paper, but it is usually formulated in terms of abstract mathematics, which itself needs a bit of decoding. ... Underlying the complexity of nature is the simplicity of physics." (1992:93, 135).
"The astronomer James Jeans once proclaimed that God is a mathematician. His pithy phrase expresses in metaphorical terms an article of faith adopted by almost all scientists today. The belief that the underlying order of the world can be expressed in mathematical form lies at the very heart of science, and is rarely questioned. So deep does this belief run that a branch of science is considered not to be properly understood until it can be cast into the impersonal language of mathematics. ... ‘The book of nature,’ opined Galileo, ‘is written in mathematical language.’ Why this should be so is one of the great mysteries of the universe. ... Mathematical objects and rules enjoy an independent existence: they transcend the physical reality that confronts our senses. For example, Heinrich Hertz, the first to produce and detect radio waves in the laboratory, once said: ‘One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence of their own, and that they are wiser than even their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.’
"I once asked Richard Feynman whether he thought mathematics and, by extension, the laws of physics have an independent existence. He replied: ‘The problem of existence is a very interesting and difficult one. ...When you discover these things, you get the feeling that somehow they existed somewhere, but there’s nowhere for such things. Well, in the case of physics we have double trouble. We come upon these mathematical interrelationships but they apply to the universe, so the problem of where they are is doubly confusing... Those are philosophical questions that I don’t know how to answer.’"
"I have already explained, the essence of science is to uncover patterns and regularities in nature by finding algorithmic compressions of observations. But the raw data of observation rarely exhibit explicit regularities. Instead we find that nature’s order is hidden from us, it is written in code. To make progress in science we need to crack the cosmic code, to dig beneath the raw data and uncover the hidden order. I often liken fundamental science to doing a crossword puzzle. Experiment and observation provide us with clues. But the clues are cryptic, and require some considerable ingenuity to solve. With each new solution, we glimpse a bit more of the overall pattern of nature.
"As with a crossword, so with the physical universe, we find that the solutions to independent clues links together in a consistent and supportive way to form a coherent unity, so that, the more clues we solve, the easier we find it to fill in the missing features. What is remarkable is that human beings are actually able to carry out this code-breaking operation, that the human mind has the necessary intellectual equipment for us to ‘unlock the secrets of nature’ and make a passable attempt at completing nature’s ‘cryptic crossword.’ ... To be sure, we have a pretty rough struggle decoding nature, but so far we have had a good deal of success. The challenge is just hard enough to attract some of the best brains available, but not so hard as to defeat their combined efforts and deflect them onto easier tasks." (1992:140-149).
Why are the laws of nature mathematical?
Prof. Paul Davies: "Few scientists stop to wonder why the fundamental laws of physics are mathematical; they just take it for granted. Yet the fact that ‘mathematics works’ when applied to the physical world - and works so stunningly well - demands an explanation, for it is not clear we have an absolute right to expect that the world should be well described by mathematics. ...much of the mathematics that is so spectacularly effective in physical theory was worked out as an abstract exercise by pure mathematicians long before it was applied to the real world. The original investigations were entirely unconnected with their eventual application. This ‘independent world created out of pure intelligence,’ as James Jeans expressed it, was later found to have use in describing nature. ... Why should the mathematical approach prove so fruitful if it does not uncover some real property of nature?
"Penrose endorses the belief, which I have found to be held by most scientists, that major advances in mathematical physics really do represent discoveries of some genuine aspect of reality, and not just the reorganization of data in a form more suitable for human intellectual digestion. ... The universe is, in reality, an interconnected whole. ... We do not know why the strengths and ranges of the various forces of nature are what they are. One day we may be able to compute them from some underlying fundamental theory. Alternatively, they might simply be ‘constants of nature’ that cannot be derived from the laws themselves." (1992:150-158).
Universe: Lucky Coincidence or Design?
Why is there a universe? Why does it exist? How has it arisen: through some lucky coincidence or intelligent design? Can everything in the world be reduced to the laws of chemistry and physics?
Prof. Paul Davies: "It seems to me that, if one perseveres with the principle of sufficient reason and demands a rational explanation for nature, then we have no choice but to seek that explanation in something beyond or outside the physical world - in something metaphysical - because, as we have seen, a contingent physical universe cannot contain within itself an explanation for itself. What sort of metaphysical agency might be able to create a universe? ... As I have explained at length, creation cannot consist of merely causing the big bang. We are searching instead for a more subtle, timeless notion of creation which, to use Hawking’s phrase, breathes fire into the equations, and thus promotes the merely possible to the actually existing. This agency is creative in the sense of being somehow responsible for the laws of physics, which govern, among other things, how space-time evolves." (1992:171).
"The natural world is not just an old concoction of entities and forces, but a marvelously ingenious and unified mathematical scheme. Now, words like ‘ingenious’ and ‘clever’ are undeniably human qualities, yet one cannot help attributing them to nature too. ... the world of particle physics is more like a crossword than a clockwork mechanism. Each new discovery is a clue, which finds its solution in some new mathematical linkage. As the discoveries mount up, so more and more cross-links are ‘filled in,’ and one begins to see a pattern emerge. At present there remain many blanks on the crossword, but something of its subtlety and consistency can be glimpsed. Unlike mechanisms, which can slowly evolve to more complex or organized forms over time, the ‘crossword’ of particle physics comes ready-made.
"The links do not evolve, they are simply there, in the underlying laws. We must either accept them as truly amazing brute facts, or seek a deeper explanation. According to Christian tradition, the deeper explanation is that God has designed nature with considerable ingenuity and skill, and that the enterprise of particle physics is uncovering part of this design. ... The apparent ‘fine-tuning’ of the laws of nature necessary if conscious life is to evolve in the universe then carries the clear implication that God has designed the universe so as to permit such life and consciousness to emerge. It would mean that our existence in the universe formed a central part of God’s plan. ... My own inclination is to suppose that qualities such as ingenuity, economy, beauty, and so on have a genuine transcendent reality - they are not merely the product of human experience - and that these qualities are reflected in the structure of the natural world." - Davies, P. (1992:717, 213, 214).