Difference between laws of reality and laws of nature/science

[prometheuspan]

regarding bees and flight. You all got mixed up.

 

The actual story is like this. There are maths which describe aerodynamics and how they work.

 

The math which allows for an airplane or bird or etc is all the same math. That math applied to a bumble-bee would predict that the bumble bee can't fly.

 

The actual original problem was in fact with the oversimplicity of the math. It proves the reverse of what people seem to think it does; in fact what it shows is that the math was only a very good description which held true for planes and birds.

 

Bumble bees proved the math wrong.

 

Not WRONG WRONG... but, incomplete.

 

An entirely new set of maths had to be constructed in order to explain why and how bees do manage to fly.

 

Once that was done, a more complicated version of total aerodynamics was generated, which now

allows for both bees and birds and planes to fly.

 

This isn't actually very different from mach or supersonic or re-entry fluid dynamics, where new rules must be added in due to higher velocities, or the math falls apart.

 

All of this is due to the problem of reducing complexity and natures way of liking to be irreducibly complicated.

 

The laws didn't change, nature didn't change, what changed was that the description became transparently meaningless as conditions became more exotic.

 

dog/GODS MATH never changed. Our math was too simple by half because we tend to favor simple descriptions over complicated ones, and because in most instances, reducing complexity down makes sense.

 

In short, what happened was the epistemological problem- but in mathematics instead of verbal language.

[prometheuspan]

The difference is that scientific laws can change, or at least not hold under some conditions (see how Newton Law of Gravity has to be modified under conditions within a vacuum). Also, there are many laws of science.

 

However, there is only one "law of reality" and it never changes, it holds under all conditions, it is called the Law of Identity (or A=A).

 

We call them laws, but thats language. In reality nature doesn't have rules it has guidelines.

 

You can't name a single one of them that isn't violated under exotic conditions, including the A=A axiom when applied to certain quantum mechanics events.

 

The "law" of conservation of mass and energy, for instance, holds true from our perspective

99.99 percent of the time. Peer down into the micro scale of the universe, and there is no mass, there is no energy, there is only quantum information and probability and mass and energy are being created and destroyed all the time, and virtual particles slip in and out of phase with reality.

:(

 

There are no laws in physics, and any serious physicist will admit we only call them laws

out of habits from the 18th century.

 

what there are is apparent habits of the universe at specific scales which we have meaningful descriptions of. Thats it. We describe, and our description is correct in that it is more or less true most of the time sort of.

 

Thats not a law. Calling it a law if you understand the difference is fine. But actually thinking that its a "LAW" in the legal sense is reifying physics and physical sciences.

[Rade]

According to Kant, there are no laws of reality (noumena), only laws ascribed to the phenomena by our intellect.

Not exactly how I understand Kant:

 

...We assert, then, the empirical reality of space, as regards all possible outer experiences; and yet at the same time we assert its transcendental ideality....E. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason

 

As explained by philosopher Robert P. Wolff (Philosophy: A Modern Encounter, 1971), what Kant is getting at with this statement, is that "the physical universe is an appearance of ultimately real things-in-themselves whose nature we can never know. But, although the spatio-temporal world is thus "transcendentally ideal", still, it is "empirically real", for physical objects are not mere illusions or hallucinations."

 

For Kant, the forms of Plato exist but the Platonic realm of external objective forms and those "laws" are completely cut off from humans and are unknowable.

[Rade]

...Peer down into the micro scale of the universe, and there is no mass, there is no energy, there is only quantum information and probability and mass and energy are being created and destroyed all the time, and virtual particles slip in and out of phase with reality.

This statement does not falsify the Law of Identity (A=A). Virtual particles = Virtual particles (A = A). Quantum Information = Quantum Information (A = A). Reality = Reality (A = A).

 

To exist (either as virtual particles, information, reality) means to have a specific nature with specific attributes. Virtual particles are, well, virtual, they slip in and out of phase. Information has a specific attribute = constraint on the variety of a set of things. Notice how people get in trouble when they do not apply the Law of Identity to information---when they treat information as if it is an attribute of the thing and not the set of all possible things under discussion.

 

Also, I do not agree that there are not laws of physics, there are, and they are used along with facts of physics to form theories of physics. What is sometimes not made clear is that the laws of physics are not absolute, they can change or be modified over time.

[Pyrotex]

... If a bumble bee can fly, then according to the laws of physics a bumble bee can fly. Unless you adopt a wierd definition of the laws of physics.

It hasn't been that many years ago that the mechanism for Bumblebee flight was discovered. The bee's wings sweep rapidly across its back. So quickly is this done, that the wings sweep much of the air away from the bee's back, causing a small low-pressure zone on its back. This low pressure "pulls" the bee upward. Or if you insist, the higher (excess) pressure on the bee's tummy "pushes" the bee upward.