Which came first: law or order?

It's a version of the chicken-and-egg argument:  are laws the result of discovering order and describing it or is order imposed, whether in fact or just logically, by laws?

Robert Laughlin, a professor of physics at Stanford and winner of the 1998 Nobel prize in physics, has written a new book, A Different Universe:  Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down, addressing this topic.  An essay adapted from the book is in the current issue of the Chronical of Higher Ed and focuses on one particular aspect of this question:  the personal aspect.  Are we masters in the universe (imposing order) or is the universe a master of us.  As he says, "At its core the matter is not scientific at all but concerns one's sense of self and place in the world."

How to think clearly about this?  Prof. Laughlin is a great guide.  Here is how he starts:

A few years ago I had occasion to engage my father-in-law, a retired academician, on the subject of the collective nature of physical law. We had just finished playing bridge late one afternoon and were working on a couple of gin and tonics in order to escape discussing movies of emotional depth with our wives. My argument was that reliable cause-and-effect relationships in the natural world have something to tell us about ourselves, in that they owe this reliability to principles of organization rather than microscopic rules. The laws of nature that we care about, in other words, emerge through collective self-organization and really do not require knowledge of their component parts to comprehend and exploit.

After listening carefully, my father-in-law declared that he did not understand. He had always thought that laws cause organization, not the other way around. He was not even sure the reverse made sense. I then asked him whether legislatures and corporate boards made laws or were made by laws, and he immediately saw the problem. He pondered it for a while, and then confessed that he was now deeply confused about why things happen and needed to think more about it. Exactly so.

It is a terrible thing that science has grown so distant from the rest of our intellectual life, for it did not start out that way. The writings of Aristotle, for example, despite their notorious inaccuracies, are beautifully clear, purposeful, and accessible. So is Darwin's Origin of Species. The opacity of modern science is an unfortunate side effect of professionalism, and something for which we scientists are often pilloried -- and deservedly so.

One of the reasons science has become so opaque is that it has become, in many circles, not interested in things but only in concepts.  It doesn't care about explaining how things work but only in elegant theories and fundamental concepts.

When I was a kid I drove with my parents to Yosemite for a rendezvous with my aunt and uncle, who had driven in from Chicago. My uncle was a brilliant and highly successful patent attorney who seemed to know everything and was not shy about sharing this fact. On this occasion he and my aunt checked in at the Ahwahnee, the fanciest hotel in the place, held court there with us, consumed a few buffet breakfasts, and then left to drive over Tuolumne Pass to the desert and home. I don't think they saw a single waterfall up close. There was no point, since they had seen waterfalls before and understood the concept.

The worldview motivating my uncle's attitude toward Yosemite, and arguably also Brian Greene's [author of The Elegant Universe] attitude toward physics, is expressed with great clarity in John Horgan's The End of Science (Addison-Wesley, 1996), in which he argues that all fundamental things are now known and there is nothing left for us to do but fill in details. This pushes my experimental colleagues beyond their already strained limits of patience, for it is both wrong and completely below the belt. The search for new things always looks like a lost cause until one makes a discovery. If it were obvious what was there, one would not have to look for it.

Unfortunately this view is widely held. I once had a conversation with the late David Schramm, the famous cosmologist at the University of Chicago, about galactic jets. These are thin pencils of plasma that beam out of some galactic cores to fabulous distances, sometimes several galactic radii, powered somehow by mechanical rotation of the core. How they can remain thin over such stupendous distances is not understood, and something I find tremendously interesting. But David dismissed the whole effect as "weather." He was interested only in the early universe and astrophysical observations that could shed light on it, even if only marginally. He categorized the jets as annoying distractions on the grounds that they had nothing in particular to tell him about what was fundamental. I, by contrast, am fascinated by weather and believe that people claiming not to be are fibbing.

Even if you're not especially interested in science in general or physics in particular, you'll still enjoy this interesting essay on the nature of order and how it relates to understanding where we stand in the scheme of things.  Read the whole thing.

If you like the essay, then you might enjoy the website 3 Quarks Daily with its collection of materials on poliltics, philosophy, science and the arts.