物理定律会改变吗?

Sunday, December 22, 2019
First Aired:
Sunday, August 13, 2017

What Is It

从头顶飞过的飞机到我们体内的细胞活动，世界上发生的所有事件都遵循物理定律。物理学家似乎越来越接近于理解支配我们宇宙的物理定律。但如果我们的物理定律改变了呢?这有可能吗?物理定律的改变会如何影响我们?或者只是我们认为的法律随着时间的推移而改变?我们还应该称物理定律为“定律”吗?The philosophers conserve mass with Massimo Pigliucci from the City University of New York, author of高跷上的废话:如何区分科学和谎言。

Part of our seriesA Philosophical Guide to the Cosmos.

Listening Notes

Ken wonders if the idea of the laws of physics changing even makes sense, to which guest host Jenann Ismael, visiting from the University of Arizona, answers that the evolution of physical laws could be possible. She proposes that a kind of “cosmic selection” could have selected for the fine-tuned universe that we have today. That is, after different trial runs, the physical laws that could not sustain cosmology died out, while the ones that could survived. But Ken is still skeptical that the laws of physics are mutable, reminding us that we inherited the concept of “fundamental physical laws” from Newton. Even the idea that the laws of physics abide by a law of evolution seems paradoxical to Ken.

哲学家们欢迎纽约城市大学哲学教授马西莫·皮格里奇(Massimo Pigliucci)参加节目的第二轮。马西莫认为“定律”这个词(在“物理定律”或“自然法则”的语境中)是有问题的。他坚持认为，法律的概念提出了一个问题:谁或什么决定了法律是这样的。马西莫还指出，尽管牛顿坚持物理学家应该从不可改变的自然规律的角度思考，但这个想法在他的时代是有争议的。与牛顿同时代的人，包括伽利略，认为科学家应该避免对物理定律的夸夸其谈，因为他们认为科学观察只是局部的和经验的。由此，哲学家们一致认为，与生物学或社会学等其他领域不同，物理学坚持基本定律，这可能对它不利。

After a few callers and a short break, Ken asks Massimo what consequences would follow if physicists confirmed that the laws of physics change. Massimo responds that evidence for changing physics would force physicists to consider how different causal interactions and parameters in physics create novel effects more in depth. He adds that the philosophy of physics is now increasingly turning to biology in order to understand phenomena of this kind.

  • Roving Philosopher(Seek to 6:57):Holly McDede interviews Sidney Perkowitz about the obligations and ethical commitments that science fiction works have.
  • 60-Second Philosopher(Seek to 46:41):Ian Shoales explains how indeterminacy, such as non-local entanglement in Quantum theory, became recognized as a feature, not a bug, of quantum mechanics, and cites Einstein as its begrudging skeptic. He also briefly discusses how the peak of high energy physics in the 1960s interfaced with hippie counterculture at the time.

Transcript

Comments(4)

Harold G. Neuman's picture

Harold G. Neuman

Wednesday, August 9, 2017 -- 3:17 PM

Physics laws (?)

问题是:物理定律会改变吗?是的,他们可以。我们只是不知道该怎么做。Yet.

Harold G. Neuman's picture

Harold G. Neuman

Sunday, December 1, 2019 -- 10:52 AM

On a comment about a

On a comment about a different post, one reader made a reference to time travel, appearing to say that it is inevitable. I don't know if anyone has said this before, and since I am pedestrian when it comes to physics, I have no way of knowing if it could be true. Does anyone know? Thanks,
Neuman

Tim Smith's picture

Tim Smith

Wednesday, December 11, 2019 -- 9:36 AM

This is the droid you looking

This is the droid you are looking for ...
https://www.ttbook.org/show/time-travel
This is perhaps more on topic of the show and blog...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hi4VbERDyI

李·斯莫林虽然不受尊敬，但很聪明。他在节目中被提及。

Time travel is real, relative and tricky as heck to think about. You can travel back in cosmological time by looking at the sky at night unfortunately in fewer and fewer environs. You could do the same by looking at your analog TV screen between the channels. That too is being removed with digital broadcasts (another form of light pollution or is there a conspiracy a foot to completly detach humans from the real world?)

If that seems like cheating then what is perception? The sun could blow and we wouldn't know it until 8 minutes later. The mirror is a similar way of looking at your past self.

Certainly time is relative, it travels at different rates. In a similar vain nothing goes faster than the speed of light yet muons traverse certain media faster than light... that is cherenkov radiation.

Physics confounds me. I hope someone actually answers your question ... but I tell you everything I have written above is likely true and the majority of Physicists would agree ... except for the part about Lee Smolin being smart.

Harold... complete threadjack here but... you were exactly right about Bentham BTW... I put an inter library loan request in and it was not honored. I was able to get some of his writing over the dark web. That evidently is real even if dark matter and energy can't be detected through millions of public science dollars.

Best to you. We are at least traveling in the same time if at different rates, it seems to be speeding up in my reference frame. That speeding up however is the only law I'm certain of at the moment.

Tim Smith's picture

Tim Smith

Wednesday, December 11, 2019 -- 9:35 AM

Cross posting this with the

Cross posting this with the blog... I liked this show but it made me feel not so confident I know anything.

This is my blog post...

Physics has so so much to do.

Newton was falsely taken in by his times and internecine academic rivalry to rise above his inherent bias toward the fundamentality of creation. He saw it as part and parcel of his world view. I would have to read his work much more in depth to say whether the previous sentence is right or not. Now that I have said it... I think back and I do recall several passages where Newton seems to break and speak directly to the reader, like Galen, that the reader or future generations must decide and look.

Regardless of Newton's own view, his very astute insight has caused us all to believe we understand the heavens and that laws here are laws there... and by this profundity... laws exist. They don't. Einstein has done worse. He has defied reason, used his own profundity to question entanglement... and by this denial... created a bit of a cult. Science persists with or without cults but is the worse for indulging them. This is evidenced in wasted effort and denial of plausible alternative hypotheses. It is a sham that Darpa is often the forward thinking fund source over our own public science. But ... I digress.

假设因果关系是可以的。我更喜欢海龟一路下来。物理学有它自己的突现范式，反驳因果推理……我认为。

为什么有12个费米子却只需要3个就能得到我们所知道的一切?其他九个做什么?什么是暗物质或暗能量?为什么我们不能像牛顿那样探测到重力?为什么暗物质只在宇宙尺度上相互作用?为什么引力这么弱，为什么没有引力子?为什么我们只能接触到5%的物质?这样的例子不胜枚举……物理学是一团糟。别让我开始谈资金问题。有一个音素可以通向路易斯·卡罗利恩的兔子洞。 Again I digress... but it is all about the benjamins.

Yet Physics is pointed to as a fundamental science. It is not. It is only a science. A very important science but not the most important one. Certainly it is no indicator of immutable laws, which is what Newton unfortunately promulgated.

我很难想象，当时间和感知与大脑的活动和接近程度联系在一起时，我们如何能探测到宇宙甚至个人尺度上的规律变化。如果去掉梭状回，我们就无法识别面孔但我们仍然理解面孔的概念甚至能看到它??我不确定一代人的观念是否会在我的有生之年得到保留。物理定律可能会改变一千年，而这可能是无法计算的。我们也没有这么做更不用说解释宇宙的超级空洞了。

数以百万计的粒子以无法解释的速度撞击地球。有很多法律需要重写。让乌龟上场。科学都是关于海龟的…一直往下。

This is kind of cool. You can download an app to help detect these cosmic rays...https://crayfis.io/about

我不知道是什么让我加了最后一项……我不确定其中是否有因果关系。但我也不会把我的退休金赌在这上面。