The Laws of Nature

The cover story of this week’s New York Times science section asks the question of the nature of the laws of nature. It’s a fascinating article. First we see Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University who, on the Times’ editorial page asserted that all of science operated on the faith that the universe had order and that we could know that order. Davies is correct, of course. As the then Cardinal Ratzinger observes in the first chapter of Introduction to Christianity , in order to believe anything, man must have faith—which cannot be fully logically proved—in something. If we are to claim that science tells us real truths about the world, we must first believe that such truths exist and that we can know them. The belief in the order of the universe was, after all, what drove the beginning of modern science in the first place.

But other scientists differ whether faith in order is the foundation of science, and what this order is exactly. Some think that science has been confirming order for 2,000 years—in other words science predicts order and finds it, proving itself. That seems a bit shaky to me, but I’m not a scientist. There is the “ultimate Platonist” Max Tegmark of MIT who “maintains that we are part of a mathematical structure, albeit one gorgeously more complicated than a hexagon, a multiplication table or even the multidimensional symmetries that describe modern particle physics.” There are also scientists who do not believe in the laws of nature, or who believe that its fundamental law is the unpredictability of the particles of matter.

The one thing the scientists interviewed can agree on, however, is that there is no reason for the universe to have any order at all. If that is the case, then it might be worth asking the question of why it should have order and what or who could have given it that order. But that is the topic of many articles that have already been written, and, no doubt, many articles that are yet to come.