On Constancy and Universality of the Laws of Nature

Laws, Regularities, or Habits...

Gemini generated image.

Many people - among them scientists, have implicitly theological concepts of the natural laws, but don’t realize it. The concept of natural laws is old, and its origin comes from theological cosmology—the belief that God created an orderly universe with constant, unchanging laws. Later, even scientists who rejected God preserved the theory of constant, unchanging laws. However, after rejecting God, it becomes unclear where these laws originate from, especially when there was nothing before. Scientists who believe in the primacy of laws also believe that the world can be fully understood within a finite amount of time. Such views, reminiscent of the idealistic philosophies of Plato and Pythagoras, are a result of faith—they cannot be experimentally tested.  

Many physicists believe that we are on the brink of a new revolution in understanding. This is because two fundamental theories of physics—General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics—are incompatible with each other. According to some scientists, this revolution will create an ultimate Theory of Everything. But “Everything” is limited to everything we know. I like this comparison: imagine that all our knowledge fits into a sphere (a ball). The outside of this sphere is the unknown. The surface of this sphere—the most advanced knowledge—touches the unknown. As our knowledge increases, the knowledge sphere expands, but so does the surface that touches the unknown. That is, the more we know, the more we realize how much we don’t know.

Science is based on the observation of reality, and scientific theories are tested in practice—quantifying their capabilities through mathematical models—to describe known phenomena and predict new ones. However, there may be an infinite number of such observable phenomena, and we only know a limited number of them. Based on this limited knowledge, we create new theories. It can be mathematically proven that a limited number of known phenomena and facts can be described by an infinite number of mathematical models. Which of them will be the absolute truth, the Theory of Everything? As our knowable reality expands, old models are discarded, and new ones are created. The lifespan of scientific theories is finite, so the Theory of Everything will never encompass everything and will eventually be discarded. Unless, through some miraculous means or divine intuition, we discover all the secrets of nature, find the key to understanding nature, or reveal the algorithm of nature's development. But according to the definition of science, this would not be scientific knowledge.

If we conceptually replace laws with regularities, we can abandon the assumption of their immutability and think that nature developed along with natural regularities. This would remove the inconsistency between denying God and claiming the primacy of laws of nature. Even many religious scientists and philosophers question the immutability of natural laws. The Big Bang theory suggests that matter did not form all at once but does not imply that in the beginning of time the laws already existed and governed the formation of matter. English physicist Paul Davies noted that natural regularities may emerge and develop in a similar way to human habits, and how societal habits become traditions. This can be interpreted as nature gradually evolving from chaos to orderly. He provides several examples, one of which is the growth of crystals. The first time a crystal is grown, it is a difficult and slow process, but as the crystal grows, its growth accelerates—as if the crystal itself discovered the optimal way to grow. All phenomena with feedback loops may exhibit similar behavior. The concept of evolving natural laws is not entirely new – it resonates with the Assembly theory and the concept of the Adjacent Possible proposed by American medic, biologist, and complex systems researcher Stuart Kauffman. But Davis’s formulation is elegant and intuitive in its similarity to the formation of traditions. It is too early to say whether this concept holds water, but it seems more plausible to me than the belief that natural laws preceded nature itself.

I would like to logically expand Paul Davies' ideas. Geographically distant civilizations developed differently and created different cultures. Correspondingly, we can assume that various distant parts of the universe may have developed almost independently from each other. The further they are from one another, the less they interact. Very distant and therefore minimally interacting parts of the universe may have very different natural regularities and can be described by physical laws different from our own. Just as minimally interacting societies had very different traditions. Humanity via technological progress has, over the last few centuries, become geographically and culturally closer; however, the universe continues to expand, and various parts of it are moving further apart.

Modern cosmology suggests that our universe developed from a singularity, so it must have had the same initial conditions. To what extent these initial conditions determined the entire subsequent development, especially when the universe expanded rapidly? Determinists would say that the initial conditions determined the entire development, so all parts of the universe should follow the same regularities and could be described by the same physical laws (models). But these views again are based on the primacy of laws that guide the evolution of the universe. Not just laws, but deterministic laws with no room for a chance. However, quantum mechanics has disproved hard determinism. Random events may and must have played an important role in the development of the universe.

Now let me present one possible worldview of evolving laws. The finite life of the universe suggests that it emerged from nothingness. Nothingness does not need spacetime. It doesn’t occupy space, and it doesn’t change in time. After the perfect symmetry of nothingness/void broke down, space and time emerged, and matter began to emerge. What drives the evolution of the universe? In physics we assume that evolution is guided by increasing entropy, or by desire of the system to get into the stable lowest energy state. But these concepts deal with something already existing and obeying laws. I claim that survivability is the most primal and fundamental driving force of existence. Survivors created reality that we know. Surviving in different worlds may require different conditions that constantly evolve. What helps survival? We know that our space is three-dimensional, and time is one-dimensional. But it is possible that other spatial and temporal dimensions emerged after the Big Bang. Unlike space dimensions, time dimensions are causally separated – evolution along one time axis does not affect the evolution of another world along different time axes. This allows for the existence of multiple worlds with different physics. Causally disconnected time dimensions preserved the emerging worlds from annihilating each other. The anti-matter world will not annihilate our world because they do not interact. In other words, other temporal dimensions causally disconnected from ours increase the survivability of the emerging worlds - this makes them more probable. This is another logical path to the multiverse worldview.

But how about the stability of emerging worlds? The fine-tuning hypothesis states that our universe is stable and suitable for life because 25 fundamental constants of Standard Model plus gravitational constant are what they are. Have they deviated from the current value by few percentage points the universe would have been unsuitable for life or would have been too unstable to exist. This hypothesis, however, has its critics. Paul Davis notices that the fine-tuning hypothesis does not distinguish between optimal conditions for life from acceptable conditions for life. Acceptable conditions for life would set less stringent requirements on the values of fundamental constants. Even more relaxed values would satisfy the stability of the universe’s condition. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that there is just a single point and its vicinity in the 26-dimensional fundamental parameter space which satisfies the stability and life conditions. No one, to the best of my knowledge, tried to mathematically solve this enormous optimization problem. In conclusion, we can state that the fine-tuning hypothesis does not impose very stringent requirements on physical constants if we allow for acceptable conditions for life, and even more relaxed for the stability of the universe. Hence, we can assume that even evolution along the same temporal axis (i.e. our universe) can lead to diverse “laws of nature.” The probability that different regions of our universe "take different paths" and create different conditions and different regularities is very high. The more the universe expands, the less increasingly remote regions of the universe interact and affect each other. The autonomy of different regions grows. Imagine our universe as a matrix of regions (galaxies or regions with multitude of galaxies) with different physics. Physics - let’s say fundamental constants and forces vary gradually with distance. Some regions may not be suitable for any life; many more may not be suitable for intelligent life. Our physics is not the same as physics in faraway regions, close to the causal horizon. Consequently, when we receive electromagnetic or gravitational signals from distant (in space and time) parts of the universe, we should not interpret those signals through our local physical laws/models. These signals we see through a distorted lens. In conclusion, the rejection of the primacy of natural laws also negates their universality.

P.S. My colleagues (many of them atheists) claim that the development of the universe and its regularities contradict the concept of God as the Creator. They argue that if God created a perfect world, our world would not be constantly changing. In fact, there is no contradiction. God must have existed beyond space and time in order to create space and time. Therefore, by observing from beyond, the creation of the world has been completed. But as inhabitants of spacetime, we are still observing its creation and participating in it. The Bible states that God sometimes enters our world at specific points in space and time. Then, God also sees His unfinished creation through human eyes and tries to fix it. But these are rare exceptions.