CHAPTER
3
THE ORIGIN OF LAWS
Since the time of Sir Isaac Newton most
scientists have assumed that the orderliness that we find in the universe stems
from the fact that there are a number of principles or laws which govern (or
describe) the behavior of all things.
Newton laid down this philosophy clearly in his Principia:
To tell us that every species of things is endowed
with an occult specific quality by which it acts and produces manifest effects
is to tell us nothing. But to
derive two or three general principles of motion from phenomena, and afterwards
to tell us how the properties and actions of all corporeal things follow from
those manifest principles, would be a very great step in Philosophy, though the
causes of those principles were not yet discovered.
In this statement Newton indicates a time sequence -
properties and actions of all bodies follow from principles. The principles have separate (if not prior) existence apart
from the bodies whose behavior they govern (or describe). It was Newton's belief, and that of
scientists ever since, that man could come to know these principles and that
the same principles obtained everywhere in the universe. Because the principles applied to all
"corporeal things" (bodies) they were general principles or laws. A statement about a specific species of
thing was scientifically worthless.
Newton said it is "to tell us nothing".
There is no doubt that scientists have
made great progress on the basis of the assumption (faith, belief, intuition)
that there are general principles (although for some reason they have not tried
to discover the causes of those principles). I believe that it is time for a careful examination of this
implicit assumption of the scientific enterprise. I believe that the existence of general principles would be
strong evidence of design in the universe and, if there is design, there must
be a Designer. Since I do not
accept the idea that the evidence for the existence (or non-existence) of a
Designer can be found from examining nature, either animate or inanimate, I
must hold that the existence of general laws or principles is illusory.
But how is the illusion created? It is, I will argue, mainly due to the
natural recurrence of certain specific "species of things" - the
fundamental particles of the universe.
This means that the order that
we experience in the universe, which I do not deny exists, can be
accounted for in terms of the specific qualities by which certain species of
things "act and produce manifest effects", with no general principles
whatsoever. I have dropped the
word "occult" in connection with specific qualities; presumably
Newton was implying that no natural explanation could be found for specific
qualities. Newton was somewhat
biased; as you notice he did not label general principles "occult"
even though he added "though the causes of those principles were not yet
discovered".
If I take the position that the
explanation of the order we find in the universe is in terms of specific
qualities, rather than laws, any law which we have in Physics must be shown to
be either a statement about specific qualities (a fact) or an artifact. By artifact I mean something not based
on the real world, a creation of man.
Laws or principles must be shown to be either fact or artifact, or a
mixture of these two. A scientific
fact is a statement such as "the mass of the moon is 73.5 thousand,
billion, billion kilograms" (I use one thousand million as a billion). This particular fact about a
one-of-a-kind thing like the moon would not be generally useful, but the fact
that the mass of an electron is 9.11 thousand, billion, billion, billionth of a
kilogram is extremely useful, because there are so many natural recurrences of
electrons. If you know one, you
know them all.
If a law, or principle, transcends a
particular "species of thing", I say that it must be explained. So,
in a sense, I am taking the exactly opposite point of view from Newton. Newton
said that facts about specific things must be explained by showing how they
follow from general principles. I maintain that general principles must be
explained by showing how they follow from facts about specific things. In the
next chapter I will be looking more generally at what needs explanation.
I have indicated Newton's view of general
laws and said that this view has persisted to this day. Here is a quote from a modern
university textbook by F.W. Constant called Fundamental Laws of Physics:
The great laws of physics are those that express
principles or relations which are independent of the specific properties of
certain materials or objects. These laws will therefore be called our fundamental
laws; they must be distinguished
from those restricted laws which
apply only to certain materials and only under a limited range of conditions. [1]
Sound familiar? Here is a more philosophical statement by Reichenbach:
The fact that nature lends itself to a description in
terms of causal laws suggests the conception that reason controls the
happenings of nature;... if-then-always is all that is meant by a causal relation. [2]
Reichenbach says earlier in his book,
"Generalization, therefore, is the origin of science" and continues:
All these laws are generalizations; they say that a
certain implication holds for all things of a specified kind... What we mean by explaining an observed
fact is incorporating that fact into a general law. [3]
He, like Newton, says that facts need
explanation (Newton called them "occult") whereas general laws do
not. The explanation of a fact
according to Reichenbach consists merely in "incorporating that fact into
a general law". So you can
see Newton's great influence in our scientific thinking.
We saw earlier that the interest in
natural theology by the bug hunting Victorians was an attempt by man "to
explore nature in the only way that seemed to make nature, as well as God,
intelligible - in terms of design". Charles Darwin showed that the
apparent evidence of design or teleology in nature could be explained as far as
the animate world is concerned.
Quoting Reichenbach again:
Chance in combination with selection produces
order. It was the great discovery
of Charles Darwin that the apparent teleology of living organisms can be
explained in a similar way by a combination of chance
and selection. [4]
But Darwin was trying to show that there were general
principles that governed (or described) the behavior of living things: the
principle of evolution, the principle of natural selection, the principle of
variation, and so on. His placing
of the quotation by Whewell on the title page of the Origin shows this
ambition.
But with regard to the material world we can at least
go so far as this - we can perceive that events are brought about not by
insulated interpositions of Divine Power, exerted in each particular case, but
by the establishment of general laws. [5]
The establishment of general laws was presumably by
the "Divine Power".
The need for general laws is deeply
rooted. It is like the need for a map of the land to let you know where you
are. Ernst Mach spent a long time thinking about laws. In his book The Significance and Purpose
of Natural Laws he writes:
In our view of the matter, natural laws are the
consequence of our psychological need to find our way in nature, and to avoid
having to confront it as a confused strange world... The earliest attempts at
self-orientation are mythological, demonological, and poetic... the period of
Copernicus and Galileo strove for a primarily qualitative, preliminary
orientation, and ease of comprehension, simplicity and aesthetic satisfaction
were accordingly the principles governing the search for those laws which might
contribute to the mental reconstruction of the observed facts... With the
accumulation of information... the demand for intellectual economy... and as
general an applicability and practicality as possible becomes particularly
pressing... It is only natural that in periods lacking in epistemological sophistication the psychological motive
for scientific research is projected into nature itself. It is God or nature which strives toward
simplicity and aesthetic satisfaction - at a later period toward a firm
regularity and specificity - finally, toward frugality and economy in all
respects, toward the attainment of every end with the least possible expense.
[6]
Mach brings up several themes here that we will have
to explore in detail. Beside
self-orientation, the laws "contribute to the mental reconstruction of the
observed facts". This is an
information science point of view of science and is to me, as a computer (or
information) scientist, the essence of science - to distil information into a
compact form so that it can be stored for retrieval or passed along from
generation to generation. Anyone
familiar with the information explosion will appreciate the paramount importance
of information compression. If we
have a compressed piece of information, like a scientific formula, we can
explode it (often using a computer) into detailed information about specific
situations. From a practical point
of view that is really all science needs to do for us other than to discover
new facts. But that is a great deal!
But as Mach continues, there is a
"psychological motive for scientific research". Scientists have striven to see in
nature "simplicity and aesthetic satisfaction" and later
"frugality and economy in all
respects". Does it
make nature more "intelligible" to see simplicity or beauty? Is there a need to feel the Designer's
hand ever-present? Or do we need confirmation that our view must be correct
because our laws are simple or mathematically elegant? Listen to Heisenberg:
Especially in physics the fact that we can explain
nature by simple mathematical laws tells us that here we have met some genuine
feature of reality, not something that we have - in any meaning of the word -
invented ourselves. [7]
Bridgman questions this stand in his book on The
Nature of Physical Theory:
The feeling that all the steps in a mathematical
theory must have a counterpart in the physical system is the outgrowth, I
think, of a certain mystical feeling about the mathematical construction of the physical world.
This mystical feeling involves, I think, a feeling for the "real
existence" of principles according to which this universe is run. [8]
Very often a scientist will have preconceived ideas of the
nature of the principles on which the "universe is run" and if he is
the right person at the right time he can make progress by matching his
preconceptions to observed facts - using his metaphysics to do physics. Lewis
S. Feuer has analyzed the philosophic influences on several outstanding
physicists of this century in his book on Einstein and the Generations of
Science:
Every great physicist approaches the world of
physical phenomena with guiding philosophical analogies that express his innermost
emotions and longings. He is
fortunate if the objective physical data and problems allow for a fruitful
conjuncture with his subjective standpoint. The emotional-intellectual standpoints of creative
scientists can be utterly diverse; Newton was enthralled by a vision of a neo-Platonic unity; Einstein was
sustained by the spirit of Marxian-Machian rebellion; Bohr felt the dramatic
urge of Kierkegaard's qualitative dialectical leaps of the stadia of human
existence... Indeed in the history of scientific ideas it is probably the case
that the overwhelming majority of such generative emotions underlying the
variations in ideas, that is, the novel scientific hypotheses are extinguished
by the factual, experimental environment. Yet without such generative emotions,
the nisus toward scientific creativity would be gone. [9]
To have a "guiding
philosophical" viewpoint is no guarantee of success in science. As with
mutations, most "generative emotions" are not productive. But what is surprising is that scientists
like Newton, Einstein, and Bohr, all with revolutionary ideas, have strong
philosophic viewpoints; most of them have shared these viewpoints in scientific
memoirs after their fame was achieved. The philosophic viewpoint remember is
not the science, it is only a guide to creativity in science. It is a
heuristic: an aid to guessing a solution. The philosophic viewpoints of
different scientists can be diametrically different. Feuer says:
Einstein sought to subsume all reality within a
system; Bohr denied that such a system was possible, and wondered whether
"all reality" had a meaning. [10]
Even a single scientist can change his philosophy
during his career. Look at Einstein according to Feuer:
By the end of World War I, Einstein's relativist mood
began to subside. His thinking was
no longer isoemotional with revolutionary trends. His longing was for harmony, indeed, for a realization
of God's mind in nature... Asked
by a Rabbi whether he believed in God, Einstein responded: "I believe in
Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all being"... He
[God] entailed the "inner consistency and the logical simplicity of the
laws of nature"... His [Einstein's] Spinozist faith, however, was more
than a personal admiration or even religious ethic; it became a regulative
principle for discovery of the laws of nature. [11]
Here Feuer calls Einstein's philosophic viewpoint
"a regulative principle for discovery", what we call a heuristic principle.
In an editorial in the American
Scientist, Melvin Kranzberg stresses
the personal nature of a scientist's method of doing science:
Because the myth of "the scientific method"
stresses objectivity and impartiality, we too often lose sight of the human
personal element in science. Thus
in research reports the passive voice predominates... To depict science as an
impersonal body of agreed-on knowledge is to deny the fact that scientific
knowledge is constantly undergoing change and correction... The fact is that
science possesses a personality or many personalities - because individual
scientists approach problems in distinctly different ways. To deny the personality of science is
to deprive it of the human element and to deny that the human creative imagination,
ingenuity and intelligence have anything to do with enlarging boundaries of
scientific knowledge. [12]
Kranzberg is emphasizing that the science itself
bears the stamp of the scientist and his philosophic influences.
This is the way that scientists work; but
does the science they create validate their philosophic or theological position
in any way? Can the theology be
wrong and the science right? Mach
worries about this with respect to scientists like Newton:
The question may now justly be asked if the point of
view of theology which led to enunciation of the principles of mechanics was
utterly wrong, how comes it that the principles themselves are in all
substantial points correct. The
answer is easy. In the first place
the theological view did not supply the contents of the principles but simply determined
their guise, their matter was derived from experience. [13]
Einstein was originally influenced very
much by Mach's work and admired Mach's willingness to re-examine physical
theory from the point of view that it was "man-made" rather than
"God-given". This
encouraged Einstein to have revolutionary thoughts about space and time. Einstein wrote about Mach, emphasizing
Mach's views about being critical of every theory, law, or principle:
Notions which have proved useful in the ordering of
things acquire such an authority over us that we forget their worldly origin,
and accept them as irrevocable givens. [Mach taught us to]... analyze the too
familiar notions... by doing so their excessive authority is broken. [14]
But it is not usual in science to go
around "doubting everything" as Descartes advised. Kuhn notes:
Normal science, the activity in which most scientists
inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that
the scientific community knows what the world is like. [15]
And if we "know what the world is like" we
must be ultra-conservative if someone comes along with an upsetting new way of
looking at things. Kuhn continues:
... Maxwell's equations were as revolutionary as
Einstein's, and they were resisted accordingly... a new theory, however special its range of application, is
seldom or never just an increment to what is already known. Its assimilation requires the
reconstruction of prior theory and the re-evaluation of prior fact, an
intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed by a single man
and never overnight. [16]
Kuhn explains that although new ideas are resisted,
and reasonably so, scientists are more open to them whenever their present view
encounters facts that it cannot incorporate or when progress seems to be at a
dead end:
Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists
throughout their careers. They
constitute what I am here calling normal science... Nor do scientists normally
aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by
others... [But] normal science possesses a built-in mechanism that ensures the
relaxation of the restrictions that bound research whenever the paradigm from
which they derive ceases to function effectively. [17]
I have said that I have a somewhat unusual viewpoint: that the existence of laws, by which I mean general laws or principles, is illusory. I believe that we should seek to unmask the illusion. But why would I not be happy to leave well enough alone? As I explained, I have found logical discrepancies in the theories presently accepted. This led me to questioning the fundamental laws. In my questioning I was guided by a philosophic viewpoint that rejects natural theology, no matter how well disguised it may be. I believe too, that too much reliance on the laws may be why we have difficulty in moving forward. After all, special relativity is over 75 years old and quantum theory over 50. Perhaps we are making strides in understanding nuclear structure or particle systematics but we have not had any new "general laws" lately. A fresh viewpoint can perhaps be beneficial.
Copyright © 1983 J.N.P. Hume All rights in this book reserved