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Everyone used to say that the only rules which can’t be broken are the laws of physics. That’s still true but in a radically different way. You can’t break Mother Nature’s restrictions because there really aren’t any.
Physics really has no laws
You can stop trying to make sense out of the universe because there’s none to be found. There are no laws of physics. The cosmos is actually in complete anarchy. Each of us happens to be stuck with the universe we’re surrounded by and things are the way they are, just because.
Things could be radically different just a single universe away and there are an infinite number of them. What that means is “all things are possible,” somewhere. Even “skiing through a revolving door.”
This isn’t some radical new idea. String theorist Robbert Dijkgraaf came up with the concept long ago, writing a whole article in Quanta Magazine, called “There are no laws of physics.” Modern researchers agree. At least one of them, Sankar Das Sarma at New Scientist.
“You might think it a bit odd for a physicist to argue that there are no laws of physics but I agree with him. In fact, not only do I agree with him, I think that my field is all the better for it. And I hope to convince you of this too,” he writes.
Things we call laws, like Newton’s concerning motion, are really nothing but “consistent mathematical theories that seem to match some parts of nature.” Newton ruled until Einstein came up with relativity.
Schrödinger and Dirac came up with some mind blowing equations which predict the right answer often enough to be practical. None of them are carved in stone and instantly get thrown to the side the moment a new model comes along. One that makes better predictions.
Elusive theory of everything
Most scientists probing the outer reaches of reality, through theoretical physics and related fields, have devoted their lives to unscrewing the inscrutable. Instead of uncovering the “ultimate laws,” the experts are beginning to realize there aren’t any. Solid unbreakable laws simply don’t even exist. That’s because the ones we come up with only apply to one universe.
We can’t even say for sure we are all in the same universe. At least we can be reasonably certain that the vast majority of conditions are the same in the local clump of universes we share. So that when Hooke calculated how much force is needed to stretch a spring, the answer will be the same for you or I as it was for him. That doesn’t mean it’s always an exact match.
Instead of physical laws, experts are forced to be happy with a best guess based on local conditions. That throws the entire reductionist philosophy out the door.
We can’t keep breaking things down to smaller and simpler pieces. Instead, we need to holistically embrace the infinite possibilities of the multiverse. Anything you can imagine probably exists somewhere, no matter how wild your imagination.
String theory is an incredibly promising avenue of research, which many were convinced would eventually produce the long sought “theory of everything.” It comes really close with “a theory that is very mathematically tight and rather magical in the way that it treats gravity and quantum mechanics equivalently, matching many of our observations of the universe.”
One of both the prizes and problems coming from it is the “rather thorny stumbling block known as the landscape problem.” Literally zillions of universes “are acceptable solutions of the theory.” One of “those zillions of universes must be our universe.” While “all one needs to do is to somehow find that particular solution.” The “laws” in this one aren’t the same everywhere so, it can’t be done. “Of course, this is an impossible task.“
