Even the idea that the laws of physics abide by a law of evolution seems paradoxical to Ken. The philosophers welcome Massimo Pigliucci, professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, to a second run on the show. He maintains that the concept of a law raises the question of who or what decided the law to be that way. Massimo also notes that although Newton insisted that physicists should think in terms of immutable laws of nature, this idea was controversial in his day. From this the philosophers agree that, unlike other fields like biology or sociology, physics insists fundamental laws to perhaps its detriment.
After a few callers and a short break, Ken asks Massimo what consequences would follow if physicists confirmed that the laws of physics change. Massimo responds that evidence for changing physics would force physicists to consider how different causal interactions and parameters in physics create novel effects more in depth.
He adds that the philosophy of physics is now increasingly turning to biology in order to understand phenomena of this kind. What if gravity suddenly stopped working? Could the fundamentals of physics really change? Wednesday, August 9, -- PM. The question was: could the laws of physics ever change? Yes, they could.
We just don't know how. Sunday, December 1, -- AM. On a comment about a different post, one reader made a reference to time travel, appearing to say that it is inevitable. I don't know if anyone has said this before, and since I am pedestrian when it comes to physics, I have no way of knowing if it could be true. Does anyone know? Thanks, Neuman. Wednesday, December 11, -- AM. This is the droid you are looking for Time travel is real, relative and tricky as heck to think about.
You can travel back in cosmological time by looking at the sky at night unfortunately in fewer and fewer environs. You could do the same by looking at your analog TV screen between the channels. That too is being removed with digital broadcasts another form of light pollution or is there a conspiracy a foot to completly detach humans from the real world?
If that seems like cheating then what is perception? The sun could blow and we wouldn't know it until 8 minutes later. The mirror is a similar way of looking at your past self. Certainly time is relative, it travels at different rates.
In a similar vain nothing goes faster than the speed of light yet muons traverse certain media faster than light Physics confounds me. I hope someone actually answers your question I put an inter library loan request in and it was not honored. I was able to get some of his writing over the dark web. That evidently is real even if dark matter and energy can't be detected through millions of public science dollars. Best to you.
We are at least traveling in the same time if at different rates, it seems to be speeding up in my reference frame. That speeding up however is the only law I'm certain of at the moment. Cross posting this with the blog I liked this show but it made me feel not so confident I know anything. Newton was falsely taken in by his times and internecine academic rivalry to rise above his inherent bias toward the fundamentality of creation.
Physics is the same everywhere and for all time. Well, again, probably. At least now we know the laws of physics certainly did not change over that fourteen-year period in the region of our solar system in a way detectable by an atomic clock experiment.
This is better than nothing. Source: Nature Physics via Wired. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses.
You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below. Philosophers of science have of course given a good deal of thought to all this, and a very common conclusion is that one cannot give a good definition of "laws of nature" except the working definition "our best summary so far of the regularities which have been perceived".
The whole of science is based on induction, which amounts to saying it is based on the reasonable conjecture that the universe will carry on being like it has been in the past, just changing over very long timescales. For example, the values of some of the parameters that physics normally treats as constant might possibly change over many billions of years.
Experimental searches for such effects have been carried out, taking advantage of the precision of atomic clocks and the long time-scales offered by astronomy. Just as we have no guarantee, when venturing out for a walk, that some calamity might not happen, such as a rock fall or an earthquake, equally we have no absolute guarantee that the fabric of the universe will not undergo some profound change which it has been building up to, all unknown to us.
So what shall we do? Better accept the uncertainty and go out for that walk, and also carry on with all our other efforts to do something creative. If any of the fundamental laws of physics suddenly became invalid, mayhem would ensue and carnage would result on all fronts- and the universe as we know it would end, and so would we.
But be not dismayed. One of the most basic laws governing the universe is the conservation of energy, which requires that all the rest of the laws of nature cannot simply stop working at any time. In other words, if the laws DID quit on us, energy would not be conserved anymore- and magic would become real, because magic is based on energy nonconservation! This is a branch of the philosophy of science explored by Nelson Goodman and David Hume, referred to as the Problem of Induction.
Essentially we can't experimentally differentiate between statements like "This emerald is green" and "This emerald is grue", with grue being defined as a colour that changes from green to blue at time X. This generalises to laws of physics. This is an interesting question, and as has been stated, our known laws are often approximations of more fundamental laws of physics.
It is obviously impossible to know if any of our known laws is a "fundamental" according to mother nature, or even if the concept is sensible.
As Anders touched in his answer, constants with dimensions like gravitational constant are not very good probes for changes in laws of physics. All such "constants" as measurements of something against a known measuring stick. How would you know it was not the stick that changed? There are dimensionless constants, the fine structure constant alpha as the best example. These would probably be better probes. Any kind of conclusive answer would be the discovery of a fundamental no-free-parameters-theory.
Such a theory would require no tuning, or experimental measurements, and there would be no arbitrary natural constants! Everything would just somehow pull itself out of pure mathematics.
The universe would be how it is, because to exist is to be identical to it. It's hard to imagine how one would even begin such a theory. But our knowledge of the laws may be almost certainly is sufficiently defective that something happens to change our understanding of them. Just for example, parity conservation was one of the presumed laws of physics until , when an experimental result changed that law. This is an interesting question. I do not know much about the law of physics, but I believe what you are suggesting, in some sense, happens continuously in the social realms.
In the latter realm, there is no "complete mess" scenario, up to a relatively conservative view regarding what "a complete mess" is are world wars a complete mess?
What I mean specifically is the following. I guess there could be two views about the "causal foundations" of social phenomena. They could be described by stochastic laws, which probably are more volatile than physics laws, or alternatively, there are no laws which describe it.
In the second case, I guess there is sign reversion all the time. In the first scenario, there is also sign reversion. People may react qualitatively differently to different stimuli, meaning that laws are stochastic at the individual level, but not in the aggregate I guess this is different in physics. In none of these cases the outcome is a complete mess. A brave analogy between the social and the physical realm could lead us to conclude that sign reversion may not imply necessarily complete destruction.
A vision according to which the social realm is just a more complicated physical realm could point in the direction that what we believe are interactions with a constant sign are only a realisation of aggregate stochasticity of which we do not view the other side. In this case, I guess everything is fine. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.
Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Can laws of physics suddenly change? Asked 9 months ago. Active 9 months ago. Viewed 3k times.
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