It sometimes seems obvious that the universe should be ruled by law-relationships among measured quantities that are always accurately true -but it actually isn't. It's a miracule that only look obvious because of one's cultural and religious prejudices, specificially the idea from Greek stoic philosophy that Nature, Logic and God should all be the same thing. The power of this idea makes it notoriously difficult for us to ask where law might come from. But it turns out that many of the most useful laws -rigidity of solids, for example, the electrical properties of metals or the rules of heat- definitely do come from somewhere. They are organizational, and they emerge from chaos as the system size grows larger the way political consensus might, or the way a Monet painting does as one steps away. The growing body of experimental evidence accumulated in the last 60 years has demonstrated explicitly that many engineering laws fail when the system size gets small. But there is also accumulating evidence at the level of big science that ALL physical laws known to science may be in this category, including those of Newton (which emerge from quantum mechanics) and those of the empty vacuum of space-time. This observation has the disturbing implication that entire idea of fundamental law, and the search for the theory of everything based on it, may be ideological, and thus not science at all. |