The talk questions two foundational assumptions of modern science: that the laws of nature are eternal and fixed, and that the fundamental physical constants are truly constant. The ‘laws’ may be more like habits, and the constants may fluctuate.
We inherited the idea of eternal laws from ancient Greece—Pythagoras’ eternal numbers and Plato’s eternal forms. St. Augustine wove these forms into the mind of God, making them part of the eternal Logos. Early scientists like Newton, Galileo, and Kepler were devout Christians who believed they were discovering these God-given mathematical laws. In the 19th century, atheism dropped God but kept the eternal laws, assuming an eternal universe governed by them.
Yet our scientific worldview has shifted from a static cosmos to an evolutionary one: first social progress (the Enlightenment), then biological evolution (Darwin), and finally an evolving universe (Hubble, Lemaître, the Big Bang).
How can an evolving universe be governed by a complete set of fixed laws supposedly present at the very beginning?
Instead of fixed laws, I propose that nature’s regularities are more like evolving habits.
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