Are the physical laws of this world?

What is the nature of the connection between the empirical world and its legislative arsenal, its physical laws? The first path consists in considering that physical laws are products of ‘thought’, at least inseparable from it. But what thought? Who is that human, who is just a small part of the universe? But then, how can this – our thought – grasp the structure of the whole it contains? And how will the laws of physics be able to participate in both the world you are building and the thought that makes up this world?

Two types of universe

By way of answer, one may choose to distinguish, beyond a certain Spinoza, two types of universe. or rather the same universe to be given in two different modes: on the one hand, the universe as conceived under the property of extension, that is, in its spatial spread; On the other hand, the universe as conceived under the adjective of reason, that is, it obeys the reasonable order of eternal laws. In other words, there will be, on the one hand, a physical and spatial universe, and on the other, a statutory world containing laws, principles, and rules that can be accessed by thought. But if we choose to make this hypothesis, we always come back to the same question: How do these two modes of existence of the universe communicate?

Eternal and perfect physical laws, completely independent of our universe?

One could also consider, like a certain Plato, the existence of eternal and perfect physical laws, which would be completely independent of our universe and which would be only an animated and imperfect image of it. Our universe will in a way be a degenerate physical echo of the mathematical purity it will keep under its control. But if this be so, and if one does not believe in the existence of a defect such as that cited in Timaeus, how does the world of ideas manage to structure the world of phenomena “at a distance”?

If we note the kind of conflict that exists between the historicity of the universe and the continuity of its laws, which of these paths seems most relevant? At first glance, this opposition encourages the idea that physical laws have a very different mode of existence than that of the entities of the natural world that determine their behaviour. In fact, the immutability of physical laws does not seem to agree with the idea of ​​a universe closed in on itself in the sense that it would “produce” from itself the laws that govern it: the physical laws must belong to another realm, to a fixed world that has the power to act on the historical unfolding of our universe.

But this concept is not unanimous. Some physicists consider the invocation of absolute invariances of physical laws, which would only remotely guide the evolution of the universe, to come from a metaphysical assumption that contemporary physics must discard. Indeed, the question arises of what the physical laws, which were supposed to be identical with themselves, were doing from eternity, before the advent of space, time, matter, and energy. Were they really there, patiently waiting for the universe to take the trouble to appear in order to make them effective? But what does it mean to wait when there is no time yet? (…)

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