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Can the laws of nature change?

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Kjetil

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What should Objectivists answer when people say things like "We must be open to the hypothesis that the constants of the laws of physics / the laws of nature may be subject to change"?

Change from what to what?  By what method? What is the basis (evidence) for the hypothesis?  Is skepticism the basis for knowledge?  Is certainty possible?  

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What should Objectivists answer when people say things like "We must be open to the hypothesis that the constants of the laws of physics / the laws of nature may be subject to change"?

 

They should one up that: the laws of nature aren't just subject to change, they WILL change. The laws of nature are context dependent, just like the rest of human knowledge. They can change with context. 

 

We pretty obviously don't fully know the entirety of the Universe, so it's also very clear that our context of knowledge will change, and with it the laws of nature will too.

 

laws of natures are in fact laws of causality.

No, causality is the epistemological basis for the laws of nature.

Edited by Nicky
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I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that the Universe is significantly different now then it was right after the Big Bang.  Elements had not yet formed, until it cooled a bit (someone can elaborate).  And the Universe may be a significantly different 15 billion years from now.  I'm not aware of any coherent theory (quantum, relativity) that doesn't have holes in it.  So we'd be hard pressed to state that we have some omniscient understanding of the "laws of nature" in the first place.

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The 'ultimate' laws of nature are just the facts about how the world works that aren't further reducible.

 

The relevant question is whether a certain 'law' is the sort of thing that is capable of changing.  For instance, gravity could become stronger per mass if the thing that causes gravity is able to change in a way that it creates a higher value for gravity.

 

As an analogy.  If we lived on a planet with an almostly perfectly constant temperature (a bit silly example), then encountering temperature would lead to us thinking the laws of nature changed.  However, what really happened is that we discovered our theories weren't incorporating something.

 

Likewise, gravity strength can't change if the strength of gravity is just a basic fact about matter.  But gravity can change if its really a fact about how some variable thing is 'sitting' in relation to matter.

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