Laws of Nature

[David Morris]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18law.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin

"Gravity," goes the slogan on posters and bumper stickers. "It isn't
just a good idea. It's the law."

[...]

There is in fact a kind of chicken-and-egg problem with the universe
and its laws. Which "came" first — the laws or the universe?

If the laws of physics are to have any sticking power at all, to be
real laws, one could argue, they have to be good anywhere and at any
time, including the Big Bang, the putative Creation. Which gives them
a kind of transcendent status outside of space and time.

On the other hand, many thinkers — all the way back to Augustine —
suspect that space and time, being attributes of this existence, came
into being along with the universe — in the Big Bang, in modern
vernacular. So why not the laws themselves?

Dr. Davies complains that the traditional view of transcendent laws is
just 17th-century monotheism without God. "Then God got killed off and
the laws just free-floated in a conceptual vacuum but retained their
theological properties," he said in his e-mail message.

But the idea of rationality in the cosmos has long existed without
monotheism. As far back as the fifth century B.C. the Greek
mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras and his followers proclaimed
that nature was numbers. Plato envisioned a higher realm of ideal
forms, of perfect chairs, circles or galaxies, of which the phenomena
of the sensible world were just flawed reflections. Plato set a
transcendent tone that has been popular, especially with
mathematicians and theoretical physicists, ever since.