Science explains a lot! Many of us take as a matter of faith that science explains everything.
By Josh Mitteldorf
It’s not that old. It was only about 150 years ago that scientists adopted the hypothesis that:
Nature obeys fixed laws, exactly, no exceptions, and the laws are the same everywhere and for all time.
Within a few decades, this went from a bold land-grab by the scientists, to a litmus test for whether you really believe in science, to an assumption that everyone made, a kind of synthetic a priori that “must” be true for science to “work”. (Feynman put this particular bogie man to bed in his typically succinct and quotable style*.)
I call it the Zeroth Law of Science, but once it is stated explicitly, it becomes obvious that it is a statement about the way the world works, testable, as a good scientific hypothesis should be. We can ask, “Is it true?”, and we can design experiments to try to falsify it. (Yes, “falsification” is fundamental to the epistemology of experimental science; you can never prove a hypothesis, but you can try your darndest to prove it wrong, and if you fail repeatedly, the hypothesis starts to look pretty good, and we call it a “theory”.)
Well, the Zeroth Law only lasted a few decades before it was blatantly and shockingly falsified by quantum mechanics. The quantum world does not obey fixed laws, but behaves unpredictably. Place a piece of uranium next to a Geiger counter, and the timing of the clicks (that tell us that somewhere inside it an atom of uranium has turned to lead) appears not fixed, but completely random […]
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