Post by @tribactam@social.vivaldi.net

@tribactam@social.vivaldi.net

2026-07-27 07:47 UTC

@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za @juergen_hubert@mementomori.social No Allen, the laws of thermodynamics, motion etc are mathematically describable. That's what makes them Laws. This is not a problem: the mathematical relationship is always that. There is no conjecture. Note that the word Law is applied to really fundamental things like gravity, motion etc. Hooke's Law - describes the behaviour of a spring under load. It never changes and applies to all springs, with the proviso that the elastic constant will depend on the material. But that's experimentally verificable. Many of these physical Laws (and chemical Laws) were elaborated in the 17th-19th Century. It wasn't a case of more confidence (think about their instruments compared to our), it was a case of observation-measurement over many cases. In contrast, only certain aspects of evolution are mathematically certain, the difference being that evolution refers to complex systems whereas a spring is a spring.

Replies (1)

@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za 2026-07-27 09:51

@tribactam@social.vivaldi.net @juergen_hubert@mementomori.social No, that doesn't sound right at all. The theories of relativity, and quantum theory, to pick very well-known examples, are both mathematically rigorous, derived from foundational principles and empirically tested. They are also better at making predictions that match reality. The Laws you've quoted tend to only work under limited conditions which weren't obvious when they were first formulated - they remain valid as very good approximations and give reliable predictions within their limits, but they fail under more extreme conditions where the realities behind the assumptions start to matter. I think that the concept of a natural law is archaic, and the reason we don't use the term anymore is because generations of scientists have watched these Laws come apart over time and have since realised that Science is not about cataloguing God's Laws of Nature, but creating a model of how the natural world works, describing it in a formal Theory, and refining or replacing that model over time as new data makes it necessary.

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