Peter Atkins - Where Do the Laws of Nature Come From?

What’s real? What’s fundamental? There are regularities in nature, things that are or work the same—always, everywhere, across the universe just like across your kitchen. Down deep, what are the laws of nature? What makes them laws? What is their origin? Did they come into existence or did they always exist?

Peter William Atkins is a British chemist and former Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Lincoln College.

Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[Hoseaistheone]

One of the best interviews yet! Insightful, measured, instructive and above all full of wisdom. Thank you.

[fredm]

Thank you very much for this interview. Wonderful conversation! Wonderful questions! Wonderful interaction! What a human qualities! The universe is more and more alive in us each day!

[patientson]

Sir Peter Atkins, I solemnly thank you and "absolutely" appreciate your fatherly advise to us kids in the application of science and technology. My sincere apologies for not saying this earlier, 5 hours ago before I posted what I assume to be what I wanted to say. I had to sleep to first to listen to you and Mr Robert.

[MightyDrunken]

Wow, I remember studying Peter Atkins' chemistry books decades ago. Good stuff. Looks like the interview was from 2009.

[AwakenedOne-qu]

The Laws of Nature are understood by the limits of human understanding. We are in Platos cave, we only see the shadows of reality. There is something much deeper going on in existence, than we know today.

[RangerN]

The question of, “Does God have to abide by the laws of the universe?” is so fundamental. I love it! In our effort to understand this question, we are really getting at the meat of things. Can God set the rules or break them? For example: Can God eliminate love without also getting ride of hate, or eliminate light without also eliminating dark? God seems to exist in some way on the border. I’ll tell you this, the truth permeates everything. We are searching for truth on the tips of our noses. It’s lovely. We can’t yet see it. Not knowing is awesome. So long as we keep our curiosity.

[stephenzhao]

2:10 ... I think a law is fundamentally a framework of comprehension and then the fundamental constants are a way of mapping that comprehension onto the reality that you experience. 2:30 ... of course we don't know that in the very first fractions of second of the universe which we can't yet observe whether something funny was going on then and we certainly don't know what's going to happen in the long-term distant future. 3:11 (but the nature of law is an assumption that people make but it's so fundamental to how we deal with reality) yeah I think you should distinguish the law from the theory that underpins the law 【】so the law is a summary of observation and it's quite conceivable that the observations change with time um I can't think of an example of that at the moment but um okay sort of entropy might come back down again rather instead of just going up but the theory that underpins it should be able to cope with the evolution of the law because you the theory might predict that the law the observations will change over time (what's an example of how a theory articulates with a law being under more fundamental so the law ? ) well let's use all sorts of things I suppose the propagation of light (okay) is one example 4:24 the law is it travels in straight lines but crudely the underlying theory is the wave theory of light Maxwell's electromagnetic theory effectively now at the moment this underlying mathematical structure doesn't in the least predict any evolution of the behavior of light but it's certainly conceibable that you could dream up a more complex theoretical substracture which led to the speed of light gradually changing something like that. 5:00

[adrianwright]

2:00 "...leads to a benign Universe for us" Depends how you define that: 99.999....% of the Universe, - a vacuum or a star - would not be benign for us. We live in a tiny and extremely unusual part.

[Darren_McGovern-ROF]

Important points. Many people get a bit carried away with speculation and forget that most of the big developments were built on our past knowledge and didn’t suddenly make past knowledge obsolete.
But there is a trend of distrust of established science and Dunning Kruger-ites.

[adrianwright]

4:00 ? For me "a Theory" and "a Law" have always been pretty much the same thing: People speak of Newton's law or theory of Gravity. Observations are what the law/theory try to explain.

[artstrology]

I think the guys who wrote the paper, "The Law of Increasing Functional Information" are onto something. If we measure material according to function, elements and amino acids correlate in a highly interesting way. How we use the material must be considered as "functions". When we do that, the determinative functions of the individual amino acids, correlate in beautiful sequence and function with primordial elements, Tin - Ytterbium. The order of the alphabet, is self forming.

[mykrahmaan]

What is obvious from this conversation is the fact that the framers of the fundamentals of science don't even consider it necessary to link the purpose of all search for knowledge, viz. practical satisfaction of the needs of beings, to those fundamentals in any manner.

[vinm]

"Creation" by Peter Atkins
That was a great book, and it's aged well

[briangarrett]

Good to see you again, Peter. Very solid chap! He used to drive a Rolls around Oxford - pure class!

[genghisthegreat]

Inverse Square based laws seem to have a geometric root. But the constant embedded in laws is more difficult to explain. Gravitational Force, relates to masses, through G.

G needs to be, fundamentally, in a coherent relationship with the other constants, and we don't know the basis of that relationship.

If the constants, take their particular values, from a " condensation " of fields, then we will struggle to explain their particular values, other than to be sure that if they're inconsistent with life, we don't have that problem.

[studlord]

When snow melts, where does the white go?

[DannyWitmer]

They never got around to the title - Where do the laws of nature come from? 🤷‍♂️

[sammy]

May lords grace be us upon all belivers

[Don.Challenger]

It may be that the laws of nature are the same [practically] everywhere because the initial pace of their change was distanced/delayed by the mechanism of inflation which projected the occurrences of those changes into a vastly far future.

[brothermine]

The guest starts with a mistake when he says the law of Conservation of Energy doesn't depend on any fundamental constants. For example, when an electron and a positron annilihate into two photons, the energy before the annihilation is 2mₑc² and the energy after is 2hυ. That equation has three fundamental constants. Or, when a ball is tossed upward and its kinetic energy transforms into gravitational potential energy, the gravitational constant G is part of the equation.