Do natural laws mutate?

To the best of my limited knowledge, the laws of physics are the direct result of all the values of the various cosmological constants that were determined at the moment of the Big Bang. In other “bubbles,” the cosmological constants may have set to different values, causing entirely different law of physics in their respected universes.

If this thinking has changed recently, I’ll read that article and comment further down the thread…

BTW, This next comment isn’t based on any current scientific thinking. It is purely my own speculation (as far as I know, though other people may have thunk it on their own as well).

It has occurred to me that, maybe, the cosmological “constants” aren’t constant at all, but rather vary depending on the density of matter in the general vicinity. Perhaps the reasons for the Fermi paradox are because the cosmological constants, and thus the laws of physics, and thus of chemistry, are just slightly off enough between stars to prevent beings from traveling between stars.

Ugh! You people with your big brains… I’m surprised your heads don’t explode…

I wouldn’t think so. Just as Darwin didn’t ‘change’ species or speciation itself, but only increased our understanding of what was already and had always been right in front of us, then Newton did the same thing with physics, and Einstein added ‘more understanding’. It doesn’t mean that any natural laws changed at any time, only our understanding did.

Same with quantum physics. I understand, without understanding ‘how’, that ‘simple observation’ can change results of physical experiments and outcomes. It doesn’t mean that any natural laws change to make that happen, it means that ‘there is another natural law’ to understand deeper, if we can.

So maybe a better way of expressing what I’m trying to get at is that there is a Darwinian process to science itself that leads to ‘more complex understandings* of what is already there’ replacing outmoded, simplistic or incomplete ideas.

* Or ‘more nearly complete’, even if not always more complex.

The laws of the universe are not subject to evolutionary pressures. Multiverse theory is still in its infancy, so we don’t really know what is happening. However, there is nothing to disprove that different universes have different laws of physics. The laws of physics can’t evolve, because there is no goal. Also, universes, as far as we know, do not reproduce. There is no way for universes to pass on there laws. Each new universe can have laws completely unrelated to the universes before it. The only form of selection would be that some universes with non-functioning laws collapse quickly, while others last longer. However, bad laws aren’t eliminated, and good laws aren’t passed on. When that universe ends, those laws dissappear, until they are recreated in another universe by chance.

(Once a universe has a set of laws, they don’t change. Well, at least our universe’s laws don’t change.)

No. The laws of physics cannot be subject to natural selection because natural selection itself is a product of those laws. The laws of physics being fundamental and absolute, by definition, could not have any external influence acting upon them.

The laws themselves, I doubt it, though I guess we haven’t observed things over a long enough time frame.

Our understanding of the laws, yes. Those that work stick around, those that don’t die. Its only a very approximate version of darwanism though.

Thanks for your answers. What about Smolin’s baby universes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_universe#Fecund_universes

The fecund universes theory (also called cosmological natural selection theory) of cosmology suggests that a process analogous to biological natural selection applies at the grandest scales. The theory surmises that a collapsing black hole causes the emergence of a new universe on the “other side”, whose fundamental constant parameters (speed of light, Planck length and so forth) may differ slightly from those of the universe where the black hole collapsed. Each universe therefore gives rise to as many new universes as it has black holes. Thus the theory contains the evolutionary ideas of “reproduction” and “mutation” of universes, but has no direct analogue of natural selection. However, given any universe that can produce black holes that successfully spawn new universes, it is possible that some number of those universes will reach heat death with unsuccessful parameters. So, in a sense, fecundity cosmological natural selection is one where universes could die off before successfully reproducing, just as any biological being can die without having offspring.

Leonard Susskind, who promotes a similar string theory landscape, stated: “I’m not sure why Smolin’s idea didn’t attract much attention. I actually think it deserved far more than it got.”

Science has gone in the space of a few years from describing a universe of complete predictability where nothing can happen to one where nothing is certain and where anything can happen. The question is, what does that mean for Man and his relationship to the world?

@mattbrowne Interesting, but its not quite natural laws mutating.

Still, its a neat idea

The new universe inside the black whole would have different natural laws. Why not call them a mutation?

@mattbrowne I usually think of mutation is a random change from a fixed process. In this case, the change is part of the process.

@roundsquare – Well, the mass of the black hole is the result of a random process. Perhaps this mass has an influence on the laws of the baby universe.

@mattbrowne I agree, thre must be some randomness involved.

Question: What does the “other side of a black hole” mean?

We don’t really know. A black whole is a singularity, similar to the state of the big bang. All of this is speculation.

@mattbrowne So, does this theory have anymore weight than my farting god theory?

@roundsquare – Yes, because it comes from Lee Smolin, one of the leading scientists in the quantum gravity field.