What if the rules of physics are NOT the same everyywhere?

[Cath]

Nothing is set in stone. The moment we start setting our ideas, our scientific theories etc in stone is the day we stop evolving. That's assuming the 'technology' we have so far discovered is going to help us in the long term (I have my doubts).

[mariaone]

my two pennies worth,

firstly to the debate on the 'Laws of Physics' as someone who has studied the wide branches of physics the first thing we learn is that there are no 'Laws' whenever you see the word 'Law' you should be thinking more of theory or as a general rule.

The word 'Law' stems from before the time of Newton (dont know the exact date i study physics not history) and was used in the scientific community of that time as it appeared that all they could see around them followed those rules so each set of rules or principals were called Laws. evenutally it was replaced as the scientific community became more aware of what was going on around them with the term 'Theory' as if something was proved wrong it was much easier to prove a theory wrong as apposed to proving a law wrong, Hence Evolution is called a theory not a law, and the same with general and special relativity.

The general rules on whatever ever scale you happen to be interested in whether down at the Quantum or out in the universe (which operate suprisingly similar all round) are defined by what can be observed or infered from those observations, so when someone comes along and says that the 'Laws' of Physics are the same everywhere, it simply means that everything that can be seen appears to following some general or basic rules, which is then turned into a mathematical formula to help predict the positions and events of all the stuff thats out there.

The important thing is to forget about the word 'Law' it is a misnomer, and should not be taken entirely as a fact. One good example is a black hole, close down to the singularity the 'Laws' of physics do not apply, matter travels faster than light for example as it approaches the singularity. Physics cannot explain this, but it happens. Phyics also cannot explain the singularity itself. It does not mean that the 'Law' is wrong, it simply means that we don't fully understand it yet.

And that is the beauty of physics, its about trying to understand all those things that don't follow the general rules and until such time that we do understand it and have a set of ideas for everything, theories will put forwards and either proved consistent with the observable universe or not.

[JamesF]

my two pennies worth,

firstly to the debate on the 'Laws of Physics' as someone who has studied the wide branches of physics the first thing we learn is that there are no 'Laws' whenever you see the word 'Law' you should be thinking more of theory or as a general rule.

The word 'Law' stems from before the time of Newton (dont know the exact date i study physics not history) and was used in the scientific community of that time as it appeared that all they could see around them followed those rules so each set of rules or principals were called Laws. evenutally it was replaced as the scientific community became more aware of what was going on around them with the term 'Theory' as if something was proved wrong it was much easier to prove a theory wrong as apposed to proving a law wrong, Hence Evolution is called a theory not a law, and the same with general and special relativity.

The way this reads suggests to me that you're using the word "theory" interchangeably with "hypothesis". Whilst that might be a common usage, it's not generally what scientists mean when they talk about a theory.

James

[mariaone]

The way this reads suggests to me that you're using the word "theory" interchangeably with "hypothesis". Whilst that might be a common usage, it's not generally what scientists mean when they talk about a theory.

James

Not at all When i use the word theory i mean it in the scientific defination of the word, a hypothesis is the underlying idea from where all theories come from but they are not the same thing.

to quote the great Richard Feynman on this, to get a scientific theory, first you have an idea or guess, then you think of all the consequences of that idea, then you test some predictions of that idea, and if they don't match up to the observable then its wrong. its as simple as that.

So when i mentioned the word theory i mean theory in the scientific sense and not hypothesis.

[ollypenrice]

I liked Mariaone's post and felt it confirmed my own discomfort with the term 'laws.' I could never see any distiction between 'laws' and theories. It reflects the way that science has changed philosophically, too, in that science is no longer universally confident that there is an absolute truth out there to be discovered. Rather, there will only ever be our best estimation of a 'truth as it appears to us' and that this estimation will change.

Edit; in fact the OP used the terms Rules of Physics. For me the only rules would be the rules of how to do it, but even those may well evolve further. It's interesting that philosophers of science like Kuhn came well after the scientists who were already doing it without a clear concensus of what constituted scientific method. I know a scientist who did many years of post doctoral research before reading anything about scientific method. She was 'just doing it.'

I suspect that one area that will be scrutinized by the philosophers of science will be the 'black box theories' which describe inputs and outcomes without having anything to say about mechanisms. Perhaps we should have more constraints placed upon them or be sure to consider them differently from more conceptual theories?

Olly

[JulianO]

Yes - laws are just relics of terminology really.

Newtons second law for instance, F=ma - it's one of the things the MOND community tinker with for instance - replacing it with F=m µ(a/a₀), and it's also not true for relativistic systems. However its so well used that everyone accepts it, and you can rely on it in most everyday situations. It's just not a truth that holds for all places and all conditions.

[Tiki]

"Just Six Numbers" is a book by Sir Martin Rees which addresses the question of the OP. Certain critical parameters would only have to have been slightly perturbed to make a radically different Universe.

[Qualia]

...science has changed philosophically, too, in that science is no longer universally confident that there is an absolute truth out there to be discovered. Rather, there will only ever be our best estimation of a 'truth as it appears to us' and that this estimation will change.

Ay, the sacred image of something fixed and eternal be it from religion, science or morality is gradually crumbling away, para-pharasing Nietzsche, 'God is dead and it is us who will have killed it'.

This notion of 'truth as it appears to us' or Verisimilitude is a fascinating area to tease the brain cells. The problem is how we can formulate a measure of something truthlike without presupposing truth . For example, if I ask "what is 2 plus 4?" Person A answers "5" and person B gives "8". Both are wrong but it makes sense to say that A was closer to the correct answer than B; however, this relies upon my knowing that 6 was the true result. Could I assign a degree of correctness, so to speak, if I didn't already know the answer?

This instance is obviously simplistic but in science, if we have a theory that accounts for some thing, we typically admit that a scientific theory can never be known to be certain but we want to say that it is close enough, or closer than some other workable theory that was deposed or left behind. This involves some conception of verisimilitude: how we measure the relative truth of a theory without knowing the truth in the first place, which if we knew it would render the nearly-true theory obsolete?

- - - - - - - -

A Little Short Tale

Qualia: Consider how one might travel physically from point A to point B. How many hypotheses could one develop and still come up with sound and valid or highly likely arguments concerning the same phenomenom? I've been informed that there are many equally strong and differing explanations of quantum reality. I've heard the number could be unlimited, as I know there are more than double that number when describing human behaviour or economic and political phenomena. With scant exaggeration, then, one can claim that in any given discipline, at any given time, there are a large number of likely and strong hypotheses that can explain the given observables.

Rob: But if that's true, this observation is completely nihilistic.

Qualia: How so?

Rob: Well, if the scientific method is supposed to select amongst the observables a single hypothesis and yet that number just keeps on growing, then the objective truth value will remain inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge. It'll put the discipline under serious attack especially from nutty think-tanks (read creationists) mixed up in education systems around the world.

Einstein: I'd like to add something here. "The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. In this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were any number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally well justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically. But the development of physics has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest."

Qualia: You see? There is no logical path. The scientific endeavour is about intuition, being sympathetic! Now, you may ask, what kind of scientific language is that? And what is meant by 'at any given moment'? Are you saying, Mr. Einstein that scientific truth is contingent to the function of time? But Einstein, dear boy, you've just destroyed the fundamental premise of science.

Kuhn: Yeah, I've been saying the same thing for quite a while. "Some scientific truths last for centuries, others for less than a year. Scientific truth is not good for eternity, but a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything else."

Pirsig: You know fellas. I've even come up with a law about this. "...the time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the intensity of scientific effort. Thus the scientific truths of the twentieth century have a much shorter life-span than those of the last century because scientific activity is now much greater. If, in the next century, scientific activity increases tenfold, then the life expectancy of any scientific truth can be expected to drop to perhaps one-tenth as long as now. What shortens the life-span of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the more the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth."

Kuhn: Yes, as we try to move towards that objective, unchanging truth, we actually move away from it. It is the application of the scientific method that is causing it to change.

Rob: And if this is so, why do you think it is that some folk attatch themselves to one truth and not another?

Qualia: I think Nietzsche's observation is important here.

Rob: Which was?

Nietzsche: "In every philosophy there is a point where the philosopher's conviction steps onto the stage: or, to use the language of an ancient mystery: adventavit asinus / pulcher et fortissimus.

Rob: Which means?

Nietzsche: In came the ass / beautiful and strong.

[mariaone]

i don't think i could have put it any better or more eloquently than that.

[rfdesigner]

As I understand it, there have been experiments to try and determin if at least some of the laws are the same at large distances. I'm aware of one set of observations made of a supernova where the progression of the light sphere was observable off the interstella gas surrounding the event, knowing how far away the original star was it was possible to determin the local speed of light to within reasonable limits, and suprise suprise, the bounds for speed of light measured contained 2.998e8 m/s. I'm sure this wasn't the only example but it shows that checks have been and are being made.

So far, it's all constant.

Derek

[JulianO]

As I understand it, there have been experiments to try and determin if at least some of the laws are the same at large distances.

Similarly there has been work done on alpha, the fine structure constant looking long distances to signatures in quasars. E.g., http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v107/i19/e191101

[nameunknown]

The "rules of physics" could vary as regards location in timespace in the sense of variations of:

• number of dimensions
  
• values of fundamental constants
  
• what particles could possibly exist
  
• the way particles interact (i.e how Feynman diagrams work)
  

In order for there to be a true "variation" it seems to me there must be a point where predictability (i.e. some "higher law" of which we might be ignorant) gives way to complete randomness.

I suppose you could re-frame the question as "what if the behaviour of women shopping was not the same everywhere?", but how that moves forward the search for understanding of the universe is lost on me and is probably not PC.

The "telescope assistant" agrees that the rules of physics do not always apply in the same way:

• Its further for me to walk than you in these shoes....
  
• That shopping weighs more because I am shorter....
  
• The computer works for you because you have a telescope....
  

P

[billhinge]

We assume galaxies and everything are the distance they are because we assume red shift is a phenomena similar to that here. But what if the rules are not the same? Who said they should be and why? Why should we be relying on "common sense" that the rules are the same everywhere? What if what appears to be redshift is because a different force is at work? One we wont understand for another thousand years?

Ditto another observed phenomena.

"There are more things in heaven and earth....."

Get a copy of Lee Smolin's new book Time Reborn - This question is the heart of the book, a thought provoking read in which he argues you can't make these assumptions since time not space is fundamental

There is a chapter on Shape Dynamics (apparently used in loop quantum gravity . He argues you can only compare nearby objects and say they are similar

eg if I recall, put a mouse next to a box and you can conclude that the mouse would fit in the box, however if the same box is in Andromeda you can't make the same assumption as moving the box (or measuring device) may trigger some unknown physical scale change and you can't say the mouse will still fit in the box)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Reborn-Crisis-Physics-Universe/dp/1846142997/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373118726&sr=1-1&keywords=time+reborn

[Watchman]

Physical theory is just that - theory. Even what we call the laws of physics are only laws that abide to current best theory so in fact you are pretty much correct in your post but maybe misunderstand what is meant by 'the laws of physics '. Even the very best we have at the moment, and I agree we are still pretty much cavemen when it comes to science, is still just theory.

I love science, physics in particularly as that is what everything comes down to eventually, and the most exciting thing of all is when current best theory is superceded with something new, which in turn changes our current set of 'laws' of physics.

[Physicist13]

No we dont!! Hypothesis are tested by experimental observation.

[Superdavo]

I sometimes wonder if our perception of physics is utterly wrong, but it still seems to work

[Physicist13]

What exactly do you mean by "perception" though? ?? Granted it wanders into philosophy at times!

[Cath]

Perception is just how it appears to be to us. How the universe appears to be to us doesn't really say anything about how the universe really is. We are totally and utterly at the mercy of the limited tools we have - our senses and the tools we currently create to try to emulate our senses (but at higher sensitivities, higher resolution, a wider range of frequencies etc).

We may have learnt how to malipulate basic matter and energy (to a very limited extent) to create the toys and tools we so far like to help make life easier and to try to satisfy our curiosity of how it all appears to work, but that has got to be just the tip of a very big iceberg. We haven't got the foggist idea of what senses we are missing or what else we missing.

Still, we appear to be doing ok at the moment with our ideas of what and how it works, which is all we can hope for. The trouble is, we don't have the intelligence (or more likely don't care) to kerb our misuse of our current tech - which is a great shame, as we could do sooo much more if we 'really' wanted to.

[Watchman]

Yep, as I brought up in an other thread, in a very real (subjectively) sense, perception is reality.

[ollypenrice]

I'll certainly read the new Smolin. I love his way of thinking.

Olly

[Cath]

I'll certainly read the new Smolin.

Which one's that Olly?

[ollypenrice]

Which one's that Olly?

Time Reborn, mentioned in a post above. His Life of the Cosmos was, to my humble mind, a most wonderful piece of thinking. I felt that whether his hypothesis was right or wrong was not the real issue. It was the approach to the problems it addressed that was so thrilling. Murray Gell-Mann was impressed as well so I guess that's good enough for me!

Olly

[Cath]

perception is reality.

Indeed it is.

[foundaplanet]

Watchman, on 27 July 2013 - 10:37 AM, said:

perception is reality.

Indeed it is.

Yes it is, even when one is deluded it is still reality..

[rfdesigner]

we all have our own and very personal reality.

occasionally we find someone with a similar personal reality.

scary things often ensue!