Steven Weinberg - Where Do the Laws of Nature Come From?

Steve when you think about the laws of nature laws of physics how do you characterize them or categorize them that's a great discovery that nature is governed by laws this is something that wasn't apparent for a long time that you know used to be thought that everything had to be explained by the intervention of some nymph or God or something and in fact the idea of laws of nature was was rejected by a philosopher al-ghazali in the 13th century on the ground that the very concept put God in Chains you know that things happen not because there are laws of nature but because God wants them to happen that way and they gave for example the idea of burning a piece of cotton the cotton burns not turns black not because of the fire but because God wants it to turn black of course that attitude makes Sun it's difficult we have all kinds of laws and the engineering student learns various laws of Ohm's law and tells you how current and resistance and voltage are related in an electric circuit and so on many of these laws are derived from deeper laws of fact that's true of most of the laws we learn as as students and some of them are are purely empirical we don't know why they work but most of the ones that have been well tested have then been understood on the basis of deeper laws I mean for example Ohm's law we understand on the basis of the theory of electricity and magnetism together with certain assumptions about the way electric currents move in in solids we keep peeling away deeper laws and deeper laws the most useful laws are not necessarily the deepest ones an electrician doesn't need to know about why Ohm's law is true and in fact for many purposes the laws of nature that we have now are perfectly adequate and for example I think it's very unlikely that any future discovery in physics will have any implications at all for biology because the laws of chemistry and by out and the laws of chemistry and physics that we have are adequate now insofar as they as in so far as we all can understand biology the the lack of understanding is not because of any failure of understanding the laws and we know why chemistry works the way it does in terms of the laws of physics at least in the sense that there there's no future discoveries in physics that will improve our understanding of chemistry but we desperately want to know why things are the way they are and we want to peel away and and understand why the laws that we have now are the way they are the deepest laws that we have at present the laws that from which all other laws can be deduced insofar as they can be deduced from anything are the the laws of the standard model a set of equations governing quantum fields which manifest themselves as various particles electrons and quarks and photons and the next big step is to say why is the standard model the way it is that's not a final law what is underneath that we don't know you've talked about beauty and elegance in describing physics in the physical world tell me what you mean by that I'm not too sure what I mean by elegance elegance is usually used as a term of approval of intellectual athleticism you know someone is does something very elegantly if he if he or she does it with a minimum of mathematical effort beauty I think is is a more serious quality.we lee or at least I think of a theory as being beautiful if you can see that it is the way it is that it hasn't been jiggered to work out to fit the data none of our theories is entirely beautiful in that sense they all have certain arbitrary features but the more rigid they are the the more they are based on a simple principle without any fine-tuning with the way they the more they flow from a simple assumption and and and the richness they produce yes and yet produce and yet encompass a tremendous variety of phenomena the more beautiful they are Einstein's general theory of relativity is very beautiful because it it describes all the phenomena associated with gravity in terms of a simple assumption about the equivalence of gravitation with inertia and it it plus a little bit of extra assumption which Einstein didn't actually recognize adequately that the equations shouldn't be too complicated in their form he rejected certain complications he could have included in the equation somewhat arbitrarily we understand now but better than he did why those equations have to take the simple form he assumed but it's a very beautiful theory it's in in some ways it's an archetype of a beautiful theory quantum electrodynamics is another beautiful theory it's the theory of electrons and photons and again with certain assumptions about the equations not being too complicated it can't be you can't fool around with it it is the way it is it makes predictions which are accurate to nine decimal place the fantastically accurate assumptions but today we understand quantum electrodynamics the basis of a deeper theory the modern standard model of elementary particles which is describes a much richer variety of phenomena in a way is less beautiful but much more comprehensive and has quantum electrodynamics as a consequence

Channel: Closer To Truth

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Keywords: closer to truth, deepest questions, ideas of existence, life's big questions, robert lawrence kuhn, search for purpose, ultimate reality of the universe, Steven Weinberg, nobel laureate interview, Nobel laureate, steven weinberg nobel prize, Nobel laureate in Physics, What's real, what is real, Where Do the Laws of Nature Come From, What's fundamental, what is fundamental, what are the laws of nature, laws of nature, weinberg closer to truth, existence

Id: zqafS67QZIE

Length: 6min 52sec (412 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 06 2020