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Saturday, October 12. 2013

Are there permanent laws of nature?


Prof. Lee Smolin has doubts: Think About Nature.



The problem that I've identified—that I think is at the root of a lot of the spinning of our wheels and confusion of contemporary physics and cosmology—is that you can't just take this method of doing science and scale it up to the universe as a whole. When you do, you run into questions that you can't answer. You end up with fallacies; you end up saying silly things. One reason is that, on a cosmological scale, the questions that we want to understand are not just what are the laws, but why are these the laws rather than other laws? Where do the laws come from? What makes the laws what they are? And if the laws are input to the method, the method will never explain the laws because they're input.


Posted by The Barrister in Our Essays, The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 12:59 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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Lee Smolin is confused about many things. I still remember his claim that his physics was better because it was more socially correct. As far as I can tell, his main contribution to physics consists of BSing in places like edge.
#1 chuck on 2013-10-12 15:27 (Reply)
One of my physics profs said the problem is that the universe is not described by second-order equations.
#2 Sam L. on 2013-10-12 16:37 (Reply)
Yes, there are! I recommend Francis S. Collins book, "The Language of God" it's excellent.
#3 LP on 2013-10-12 18:12 (Reply)

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