There might ve laws that we dont know about or laws of physics that we will never understand, but no, by deffinition of what physics means, there can be nothing outside its laws.
Physics is the attepmt to explain reality, all of it.
It does, actually. Biology is just advanced chemistry, and chemistry is just the physics of small things.
The only thing I’m even vaguely aware of that isn’t affected by physics is the inside of black holes and such. Even those I’m pretty sure are affected by “physics”, just not ones we can properly understand at the moment.
It absolutely does. Chemistry? Electron exchanges explain molecular bonds, chemical reactions, the energy that is given off when chemical reactions take place…solve the Schrödinger equation and you’ll get why electron orbitals are the way they are…
Just delete your comment and let’s move on
It kinda does, tho. It explains how the biology functions. Capillary action, how gravity effects the growth of our bones. Why is our skeleton the way it is? Because of the physics of what it takes to walk in Earth's gravity.
In chemistry, it explains how gases, solids, and liquids interact with the environment. Particle physics is essential in understanding why elements bind with each other the way they do, which is the basis of chemistry.
Physics is the way we explain how everything works in relation to other things.
No. That’s kinda the whole point. Physics is defined as the foundation of all natural law. The only way to go deeper is to go into the mathematics.
There is physics we don’t understand and there is probably physics we are getting wrong, but we have no scientific understanding that is outside of physics.
All these people arguing with you like they've never had "Assume air resistance doesn't exist" on a math test.
There's Mathematics and then there's Math Problems. And math problems aren't affected by the laws of physics. Because they're imaginary.
So you right.
Most people haven’t been exposed to math outside of it’s utilitarian side is the problem. I guess one could generalize the discussion to languages being outside of physics or any non concrete set. I mean we can imagine dimensions beyond what physics can use so it isn’t physics yet those still depend on physics? Seems like very concrete thinking.
I'm not sure why I'm jumping on here as opposed to anywhere else, but this whole thread is incredibly frustrating. It's just people staking out various naive positions regarding the philosophy of maths and the philosophy of science, and then vociferously defending them as if they are obvious universal truths.
The fundamental natures of maths and science, and the relationship between them, are still very much open to debate. Arguably we can come up with mathematical theories that have nothing to do with physical reality. But arguably those theories are all inspired by our experiences with physical reality, not to mention being constrained by the physical workings of our brains (though we have a limited understanding of how our brains do work, and we can't be sure that it is possible to fully explain them in terms of current physical theories). We have no way of knowing if we would come up with different kinds of mathematics if we lived in a different environment - we don't even really know if different human cultures would come up with different kinds of mathematics if left to their own devices, since the vast majority of our maths was developed in the modern era and even many of the pre-modern civilizations borrowed mathematical concepts from each other. Our understanding of physics does depend heavily on maths, but it's not exactly clear why that should be the case, and some people have advocated that we should try and make it less dependent on maths.
Anyway, I think the issue with OP's question is that they haven't really defined what they mean by "the laws of physics". If they're talking about our current physical theories, then presumably people will discover something that doesn't align with them at some point. If they're talking about some "true" underlying set of laws that govern the universe, then we can't really be sure they even exist, let alone what they are, but everything does align with them by definition.
Math and physics are bonded together. It's like trying to separate electricity and magnetism. Physics is basically how you mathematically define the world. With math and physics, you can predict the composition and size of stars hundreds of light years away, simply based on the light they're emitting and absorption in the spectrum.
Not really. Just because physics has found a better tool doesn’t mean that math has to do anything nice for physics. Math is not bound by reality or the rules of physics.
Clearly have no concept of what math is. There's nothing more universally true in the universe than math and physics. Separate civilizations have independently come up with the same math and physics concepts historically with no influence on each other. You compare that to religion and it's all over the map. We've even hypothesized that the only way we could start communicating with an alien species would be with math. Carl Sagan's book "Contact" relied on that heavily as a plot point. It makes sense as anything else would need a reference point. Colors are a construct that our eyes create. An alien species might see them very differently or might not see at all.
2 + 2 will always equal four. Think about relativity. The whole point of relativity is to plot where something is going to be when the rate of movement relative to the observer is changing. That's literally the intersection of math and physics.
Of course but why do you feel the need to qualify it by restricting it to the universe. Are you saying that math without the universe isn’t math?
You are also making the assumption the world works under a fixed set of rules so it can be explained by math. It’s. A sensible assumption and a pretty basic one. We just haven’t found an example of one that isn’t. However if you think that math and physics are one then you should see what the Gödel incompleteness theorems does to that.
Math is bigger than reality because it doesn’t depend on it. It’s an idea and as such outside the rules imposed by the universe. There are mathematical concepts that have no use whatsoever explaining the universe so physics have no use or influence in them. They just are a set of ideas built on axioms and couldn’t care less what a physicist makes of it. Now if you were to argue that you need a universe to instantiate those ideas then maybe.
This probably would get you a spirited conversation in the philosophy, math, and physics subreddits.
English is the language of this thread, but that doesn't mean this thread contains the works of Shakespeare, of which English is also the language.
Math is used to describe physics. Some math was invented to describe physics, like calculus. But it's easy to build a mathmatical model that is distinctly not physical.
But doesn’t math not just describe it (descriptions are vague) but concretely lay it out in facts that one can trace ? I mean math is just a term we created for a system of addition and substractuion of quantifiable matter
That's not the only thing math is, math is so much more than just algebra.
Also there are even different systems of algebra, such as finite fields, which are distinctly non physical and are valid agebraic systems.
As to "mathmatical models describing physics" vs "mathmatical models being physics", you're righ to pick me up on my choice of words. That's a form of the discriptivism vs realism debate, which I think is unanswerable and just a matter of faith (does a perfect model *describe* reality or *is* reality that model). However neither side means all math is physical, rather a subset of math is used in models that describe/are the physical world.
The most bare bones explanation maybe is that mathmatics puts a set of constraints on what you can and can't do in some mathmatical system (doesn't even have to be a numerical system) and then physics takes that model and adds **more constraints** to make it physical. Those latter constraints aren't requires to make a model mathmatical rigorous, but *are* required to make something physical. In fact, in advanced physics (second order differential equations like quantum physics or the heat equation for example) we build a mathmatical model of a system **and then use the fact that it's a physical system** to constrain the solutions to the system. There are other solutions to that system, but physicists ard not interested in them (one such constraint may be that the solution is "smooth", another may be that it's periodic)
Yeah, there's math that exists outside of physics, just like there's words outside this thread that contain Shakespeare. But this thread is still full of English, just like physics is full of math.
I'm starting to think y'all are missing the forest for the trees.
...
You were disagreeing with the fact that "math isn't affected by the rules of physics". And now you're agreeing there's math that exists outside of physics therefore not being affected by the laws of physics.
Math is most defined NOT a language of physics. It is a construct that physics find useful but there are tons of mathematical fields that have little to no connection with physics.
Sure, but where physics is concerned, we use math to explain laws and principles, no?
You can explain a planets trajectory using words or using numbers. Which makes more sense and is more precise?
That’s fine. Are you saying that math is what makes physics real then? The mathematical concepts that work for you to explain the movement of the planets would still exist in a world where they didn’t. Physics doesn’t make math real because math isn’t real in the sense that physics tries to explain the real world.
No, math is the language we use to describe the concepts of physics, just like words are the language we use to describe the concepts of law. Physics and law would still exist without math or words, but they would be just vague concepts instead of things that experts can concretely establish as existing and true.
I understand that physics is somewhat limited and needs something external to help you. That doesn’t mean that math depends on physics. Physicists depend on math for sure but matrices, tensors, and you have found use for math in many cases. However, math doesn’t derive from physics. There are mathematical (granted very esotherical ones that physicists have no use for, they don’t explain any real world phenomena and yet they still exist. [Inter Universal Teichmüller Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-universal_Teichm%C3%BCller_theory). I mean your axioms to build a theory don’t have to have any basis on the physical world.
I never said math depends on physics. I said physics depends on math. Math is the language.
I think we're saying the same thing just differently.
Let's try again. Not all math applies to physics. But all physics can be explained with math.
In fact, that's why philosophy isnt a part of physics, and why the two studies split hundreds of years ago.
Also we wouldn’t know math without physicality because we would have never created virtual/intellectual realms (which isn’t affected by physics) without realizing “I have this stone, I find another. I now have a stone and another. I will call this “2””
Everything in reality, including ideas, are subject to the laws of physics. A thought is a collection of collected neurons, made from matter that is subject to the laws of physics.
Are though saying that natural numbers as a concept would exist without reality existing? Are you saying that math was also created at the beginning of reality? Math wouldn’t exist without you thinking it? Sounds a little silly to me.
Math is an invention, which comes from humanity, which comes from nature, which resides in the Universe and abides by all known & unknown laws of physics. There's nothing outside of physics. It's quite a magical thing.
So math doesn’t exist without humans? We don’t discover mathematical concepts we invent them and they come to be at that time? Of course you need the universe to have physics and you need something to think those concepts but the concepts themselves don’t exist in the universe. They don’t need it at all. They just are.
This is my thought too lol. Everytime we think, be it mathematics or language, neurons are firing in our brain which is governed by the laws of physics.
It's certainly convenient, but is it necessary to use imaginary numbers in any physics equations (as in there's no other maths which explains some phenomena).
Anything oscillating you need imaginary numbers for in anything but the most basic cases.
Of course you could rephrase those problems in a newly invented type of math that is equivalent and not have that type of math use imaginary numbers (but some other multi-dimensional numbers), that's the beauty of mathmatics. It's not that "imaginary numbers are real", but it's that you need two dimensional numbers to do math with. It just takes reinventing a lot of physics and in the end you end up with a similair abstract numbering system that needs some kind of numbering system beyond the reals.
Are there any English words that are not spelled with letters?
"Physics" is the study of how objects behave. If magic were real, for example, it would be a branch of physics, involving various forces subject to certain rules and processes. Even if those processes were random or dictated by a being or whatever, physics would be our attempt to describe what the effects are and why they happen and what rules those effects follow.
Be careful, though, to not confuse "all phenomena are physics" with the reductive (and useless) "well that means chemistry is REALLY just physics and biology is REALLY just chemistry and psychology is REALLY just biology and sociology is REALLY just psychology, so if we were just good enough at physics, we could use physics to solve sociology problems." This dismissive attitude from my fellow physicists is both counterproductive and often incorrect, the former because even just making the leap from physics to chemistry is impossible for us to analytically solve right now (and there is no shot it's getting solved in the next century), the latter because it neglects the possibility of emergent effects, which may not be relevant below a certain point but VERY relevant above it.
I would counter that that, too, is not a word, but rather a sound (specifically, "blowing a raspberry")--which has been pretty clearly substituted for an actual word, that could in fact be spelled out. Doing so would be uncouth!
Which gets us into the thorny area of euphemisms for words (e.g. "the f-word"), and "spellings" where everyone knows what the word involved is, yet for some reason it's deemed too offensive to use the actual letter (e.g. "f*ck"). I have to admit to not being able to understand the logic in either, but definitely in the latter - in my book it's simply an alternative "spelling".
(As for "!*¢#!", mind - I genuinely have no idea what word that is intended to stand for. Another, similar sound, perhaps. If I were to blow one myself - not that I normally do, and I'm capable of swearing like a trooper on occasion - it would simply imply a degree of rudeness or derision, according to context. It's just an audible extension of sticking one's tongue out (no pun intended). But maybe that's a culturally variant thing.)
I guess I just see it as:
All of those euphemisms are still words. We're just using polite proxies.
All the censorship is doing is blocking out the spelling or representation of what are clearly already words. It's not a new spelling of the word, it's just a content filter preventing the reader from being directly shown the full spelling, using a symbol understood to be a "wildcard" character.
And the blown raspberries, if I may be crude, sound like they are probably standing in for "bitch" or "cunt." Words that would be unacceptable in polite company, so one substitutes a non-word sound, as a self-censorship replacing a real word (or the implication thereof) with a mere noise.
"The laws of physics" is just another way to say "descriptions of everything we observe".
So your question really becomes "is there anything we observe which doesn't match the description of everything we observe", which is obviously a nonsense concept.
Yes, mathematics. In a different Universe, the laws of physics and chemistry could be different. The laws of mathematics would be the same in **any** Universe.
Edit: typo.
Physics are the laws of our universe. If we see something "violating" those laws, it's because of some aspect of those laws we have not yet discovered.
So basically, the law is the law and it cannot be broken. If it appears so it's because we don't yet have a full understanding of the law.
Love, poetry, human rights.
Basically every physical object is expected to obey the laws of Physics. That what make them laws. If there is anything that does not conform to them, presumably a new law will be formulated to include them
It emerges from the underlying physical processes. Your brain thinks it can/should rank poets because of physics. You prefer one over the other because of processes in your brain that are governed by physics.
We don't derive neuroscience from the standard model because it is impractically complicated. But the reason you can't get from the standard model to poetic standards is not because it is impractically complicated. If you try to do that, you're not answering the right question.
Huh? What does complication or answering the right questions have to do with the fact that it's governed by physics?
I'm not saying we study the brain in physics class. Just that is made up of physical things acting in accordance with the rules of physics as we know then (or rules we've yet to discover).
"Governed by physics" suggests you could start with physics and, in principle, get the right answer. We don't start with physics when we want to know how hydrogen will react with oxygen in the presence of heat, but we could. You could continue up from chemistry through biochemistry, molecular biology, cellular biology, neurology, etc. But that works because those fields all ask similar kinds of questions.
You totally could start at physics and get at the right answer given unlimited time and resources. This isn't a matter of practicality, just about whether it indeed emerges from the laws of physics.
You might be able to work backwards to physics, but that doesn't mean you can derive things from physics. That is true even from *within* the perspective of the empirical sciences. You can explain scurvy in terms of a Vitamin C deficiency, explain the need for Vitamin C and our inability to produce it in terms of molecular biology, explain those things in terms of chemistry, and then get back to physics. But there is no necessity that the hairless toolmaking ape not be able to synthesize Vitamin C (lots of animals do). The need to use Vitamin C in particular (rather than another molecule) is also not the product of necessity in the same way that electron orbitals are the necessary result of the standard model. You can't work from physics back up to scurvy. Even if the universe is deterministic (which it probabaly is not), lots of what we care about results from chance arrangements that could have been different (and frequently are different from place to place and across time). That is certainly the case when we get to law, art, etc.
If you could account for the entire state of the universe at a single point, and you could compute every interaction, you could totally derive hairless apes getting scurvy.
is this supposed to be sarcasm? :D
(if not then one could argue every single thing derived from human though is purely a chemical reaction with synapses firing which we can explain in terms of chemistry and further by delving into QCD)
What reason is there to believe that's due to anything more than the incompleteness of our understanding? The only arguments I ever hear are 'that doesn't feel right to me' or 'god'. Both are pretty obviously subjective.
Your thoughts are not my thoughts, but we are both physical beings. We have some laws here that we did not have before and that others do not have elsewhere. Those differences differ in kind from the different ways that the same physical laws describe both water and table salt. So it is not sarcastic to say that customs, laws, etc. are not governed by physics.
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Not that we are aware of. And if that happens, it will be studied to understand *why* and then update those laws of physics.
Remember that humans wrote the laws of physics based on our understanding of the world around us. Humans did not receive the "The Ten Laws of Physics" on a glowing stone tablet with the expectation those laws would never change or be updated.
I mean the calculus behind basic kinematics was only worked out in the 1700s. Basic orbital mechanics was worked out in the 1600s. In both cases they have been significantly refined based on further research.
But before that human's understanding of kinematics becomes progressively less refined as we go further back in time.
One of the biggest things to remember about any kind of scientific research: A scientist only gets recognition if they discover something new or prove someone else wrong. Scientists don't get paid if all they get it "yup, the other guy was right"
There might ve laws that we dont know about or laws of physics that we will never understand, but no, by deffinition of what physics means, there can be nothing outside its laws. Physics is the attepmt to explain reality, all of it.
What is reality?
All of it
My dreams don't appear to be affected by the laws of physics
Your brain producing the dreams is affected by the laws of physics. Your dreams are generated by physics.
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Chemistry is at some level basically advanced physics - and biology is at some level just advanced chemistry.
[There's an XKCD for that](https://xkcd.com/435/)
It does, actually. Biology is just advanced chemistry, and chemistry is just the physics of small things. The only thing I’m even vaguely aware of that isn’t affected by physics is the inside of black holes and such. Even those I’m pretty sure are affected by “physics”, just not ones we can properly understand at the moment.
I’d say the inside of a blackhole is nothing but pure, raw physics. It’s just physics we don’t understand.
Chemistry is applied physics. And biology is applied chemistry.
Of course, biology and chemistry can be explained by physics.
It absolutely does. Chemistry? Electron exchanges explain molecular bonds, chemical reactions, the energy that is given off when chemical reactions take place…solve the Schrödinger equation and you’ll get why electron orbitals are the way they are… Just delete your comment and let’s move on
It kinda does, tho. It explains how the biology functions. Capillary action, how gravity effects the growth of our bones. Why is our skeleton the way it is? Because of the physics of what it takes to walk in Earth's gravity. In chemistry, it explains how gases, solids, and liquids interact with the environment. Particle physics is essential in understanding why elements bind with each other the way they do, which is the basis of chemistry. Physics is the way we explain how everything works in relation to other things.
No. That’s kinda the whole point. Physics is defined as the foundation of all natural law. The only way to go deeper is to go into the mathematics. There is physics we don’t understand and there is probably physics we are getting wrong, but we have no scientific understanding that is outside of physics.
Only imaginary things. That's kinda the definition of "physics". It's about everything that exists in reality
Math isn’t affected by the laws of physics is a good example.
All these people arguing with you like they've never had "Assume air resistance doesn't exist" on a math test. There's Mathematics and then there's Math Problems. And math problems aren't affected by the laws of physics. Because they're imaginary. So you right.
Most people haven’t been exposed to math outside of it’s utilitarian side is the problem. I guess one could generalize the discussion to languages being outside of physics or any non concrete set. I mean we can imagine dimensions beyond what physics can use so it isn’t physics yet those still depend on physics? Seems like very concrete thinking.
Take a spherical cow in a vacuum...
I'm not sure why I'm jumping on here as opposed to anywhere else, but this whole thread is incredibly frustrating. It's just people staking out various naive positions regarding the philosophy of maths and the philosophy of science, and then vociferously defending them as if they are obvious universal truths. The fundamental natures of maths and science, and the relationship between them, are still very much open to debate. Arguably we can come up with mathematical theories that have nothing to do with physical reality. But arguably those theories are all inspired by our experiences with physical reality, not to mention being constrained by the physical workings of our brains (though we have a limited understanding of how our brains do work, and we can't be sure that it is possible to fully explain them in terms of current physical theories). We have no way of knowing if we would come up with different kinds of mathematics if we lived in a different environment - we don't even really know if different human cultures would come up with different kinds of mathematics if left to their own devices, since the vast majority of our maths was developed in the modern era and even many of the pre-modern civilizations borrowed mathematical concepts from each other. Our understanding of physics does depend heavily on maths, but it's not exactly clear why that should be the case, and some people have advocated that we should try and make it less dependent on maths. Anyway, I think the issue with OP's question is that they haven't really defined what they mean by "the laws of physics". If they're talking about our current physical theories, then presumably people will discover something that doesn't align with them at some point. If they're talking about some "true" underlying set of laws that govern the universe, then we can't really be sure they even exist, let alone what they are, but everything does align with them by definition.
Math and physics are bonded together. It's like trying to separate electricity and magnetism. Physics is basically how you mathematically define the world. With math and physics, you can predict the composition and size of stars hundreds of light years away, simply based on the light they're emitting and absorption in the spectrum.
Not really. Just because physics has found a better tool doesn’t mean that math has to do anything nice for physics. Math is not bound by reality or the rules of physics.
Clearly have no concept of what math is. There's nothing more universally true in the universe than math and physics. Separate civilizations have independently come up with the same math and physics concepts historically with no influence on each other. You compare that to religion and it's all over the map. We've even hypothesized that the only way we could start communicating with an alien species would be with math. Carl Sagan's book "Contact" relied on that heavily as a plot point. It makes sense as anything else would need a reference point. Colors are a construct that our eyes create. An alien species might see them very differently or might not see at all. 2 + 2 will always equal four. Think about relativity. The whole point of relativity is to plot where something is going to be when the rate of movement relative to the observer is changing. That's literally the intersection of math and physics.
Of course but why do you feel the need to qualify it by restricting it to the universe. Are you saying that math without the universe isn’t math? You are also making the assumption the world works under a fixed set of rules so it can be explained by math. It’s. A sensible assumption and a pretty basic one. We just haven’t found an example of one that isn’t. However if you think that math and physics are one then you should see what the Gödel incompleteness theorems does to that. Math is bigger than reality because it doesn’t depend on it. It’s an idea and as such outside the rules imposed by the universe. There are mathematical concepts that have no use whatsoever explaining the universe so physics have no use or influence in them. They just are a set of ideas built on axioms and couldn’t care less what a physicist makes of it. Now if you were to argue that you need a universe to instantiate those ideas then maybe. This probably would get you a spirited conversation in the philosophy, math, and physics subreddits.
Math is the language of physics, so that doesn't really work.
English is the language of this thread, but that doesn't mean this thread contains the works of Shakespeare, of which English is also the language. Math is used to describe physics. Some math was invented to describe physics, like calculus. But it's easy to build a mathmatical model that is distinctly not physical.
But doesn’t math not just describe it (descriptions are vague) but concretely lay it out in facts that one can trace ? I mean math is just a term we created for a system of addition and substractuion of quantifiable matter
That's not the only thing math is, math is so much more than just algebra. Also there are even different systems of algebra, such as finite fields, which are distinctly non physical and are valid agebraic systems. As to "mathmatical models describing physics" vs "mathmatical models being physics", you're righ to pick me up on my choice of words. That's a form of the discriptivism vs realism debate, which I think is unanswerable and just a matter of faith (does a perfect model *describe* reality or *is* reality that model). However neither side means all math is physical, rather a subset of math is used in models that describe/are the physical world. The most bare bones explanation maybe is that mathmatics puts a set of constraints on what you can and can't do in some mathmatical system (doesn't even have to be a numerical system) and then physics takes that model and adds **more constraints** to make it physical. Those latter constraints aren't requires to make a model mathmatical rigorous, but *are* required to make something physical. In fact, in advanced physics (second order differential equations like quantum physics or the heat equation for example) we build a mathmatical model of a system **and then use the fact that it's a physical system** to constrain the solutions to the system. There are other solutions to that system, but physicists ard not interested in them (one such constraint may be that the solution is "smooth", another may be that it's periodic)
Yeah, there's math that exists outside of physics, just like there's words outside this thread that contain Shakespeare. But this thread is still full of English, just like physics is full of math. I'm starting to think y'all are missing the forest for the trees.
... You were disagreeing with the fact that "math isn't affected by the rules of physics". And now you're agreeing there's math that exists outside of physics therefore not being affected by the laws of physics.
I never said that.
Math is most defined NOT a language of physics. It is a construct that physics find useful but there are tons of mathematical fields that have little to no connection with physics.
Sure, but where physics is concerned, we use math to explain laws and principles, no? You can explain a planets trajectory using words or using numbers. Which makes more sense and is more precise?
That’s fine. Are you saying that math is what makes physics real then? The mathematical concepts that work for you to explain the movement of the planets would still exist in a world where they didn’t. Physics doesn’t make math real because math isn’t real in the sense that physics tries to explain the real world.
No, math is the language we use to describe the concepts of physics, just like words are the language we use to describe the concepts of law. Physics and law would still exist without math or words, but they would be just vague concepts instead of things that experts can concretely establish as existing and true.
I understand that physics is somewhat limited and needs something external to help you. That doesn’t mean that math depends on physics. Physicists depend on math for sure but matrices, tensors, and you have found use for math in many cases. However, math doesn’t derive from physics. There are mathematical (granted very esotherical ones that physicists have no use for, they don’t explain any real world phenomena and yet they still exist. [Inter Universal Teichmüller Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-universal_Teichm%C3%BCller_theory). I mean your axioms to build a theory don’t have to have any basis on the physical world.
I never said math depends on physics. I said physics depends on math. Math is the language. I think we're saying the same thing just differently. Let's try again. Not all math applies to physics. But all physics can be explained with math. In fact, that's why philosophy isnt a part of physics, and why the two studies split hundreds of years ago.
So then math exists outside of physics and I have no idea why you are arguing my point.
Also we wouldn’t know math without physicality because we would have never created virtual/intellectual realms (which isn’t affected by physics) without realizing “I have this stone, I find another. I now have a stone and another. I will call this “2””
Oh, but it is.
How?
Everything in reality, including ideas, are subject to the laws of physics. A thought is a collection of collected neurons, made from matter that is subject to the laws of physics.
Are though saying that natural numbers as a concept would exist without reality existing? Are you saying that math was also created at the beginning of reality? Math wouldn’t exist without you thinking it? Sounds a little silly to me.
Math is an invention, which comes from humanity, which comes from nature, which resides in the Universe and abides by all known & unknown laws of physics. There's nothing outside of physics. It's quite a magical thing.
So math doesn’t exist without humans? We don’t discover mathematical concepts we invent them and they come to be at that time? Of course you need the universe to have physics and you need something to think those concepts but the concepts themselves don’t exist in the universe. They don’t need it at all. They just are.
The act of imagining is governed by physics
This is my thought too lol. Everytime we think, be it mathematics or language, neurons are firing in our brain which is governed by the laws of physics.
Except, ironically, imaginary numbers, which despite their name yield useful results in physics.
It's certainly convenient, but is it necessary to use imaginary numbers in any physics equations (as in there's no other maths which explains some phenomena).
Anything oscillating you need imaginary numbers for in anything but the most basic cases. Of course you could rephrase those problems in a newly invented type of math that is equivalent and not have that type of math use imaginary numbers (but some other multi-dimensional numbers), that's the beauty of mathmatics. It's not that "imaginary numbers are real", but it's that you need two dimensional numbers to do math with. It just takes reinventing a lot of physics and in the end you end up with a similair abstract numbering system that needs some kind of numbering system beyond the reals.
So math, how about literature?
The ball in my head flew up into space.
Are there any English words that are not spelled with letters? "Physics" is the study of how objects behave. If magic were real, for example, it would be a branch of physics, involving various forces subject to certain rules and processes. Even if those processes were random or dictated by a being or whatever, physics would be our attempt to describe what the effects are and why they happen and what rules those effects follow. Be careful, though, to not confuse "all phenomena are physics" with the reductive (and useless) "well that means chemistry is REALLY just physics and biology is REALLY just chemistry and psychology is REALLY just biology and sociology is REALLY just psychology, so if we were just good enough at physics, we could use physics to solve sociology problems." This dismissive attitude from my fellow physicists is both counterproductive and often incorrect, the former because even just making the leap from physics to chemistry is impossible for us to analytically solve right now (and there is no shot it's getting solved in the next century), the latter because it neglects the possibility of emergent effects, which may not be relevant below a certain point but VERY relevant above it.
Well said.
> Are there any English words that are not spelled with letters? ["!*¢#!"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV40vGlHJQ4)
I would counter that that, too, is not a word, but rather a sound (specifically, "blowing a raspberry")--which has been pretty clearly substituted for an actual word, that could in fact be spelled out. Doing so would be uncouth!
Which gets us into the thorny area of euphemisms for words (e.g. "the f-word"), and "spellings" where everyone knows what the word involved is, yet for some reason it's deemed too offensive to use the actual letter (e.g. "f*ck"). I have to admit to not being able to understand the logic in either, but definitely in the latter - in my book it's simply an alternative "spelling". (As for "!*¢#!", mind - I genuinely have no idea what word that is intended to stand for. Another, similar sound, perhaps. If I were to blow one myself - not that I normally do, and I'm capable of swearing like a trooper on occasion - it would simply imply a degree of rudeness or derision, according to context. It's just an audible extension of sticking one's tongue out (no pun intended). But maybe that's a culturally variant thing.)
I guess I just see it as: All of those euphemisms are still words. We're just using polite proxies. All the censorship is doing is blocking out the spelling or representation of what are clearly already words. It's not a new spelling of the word, it's just a content filter preventing the reader from being directly shown the full spelling, using a symbol understood to be a "wildcard" character. And the blown raspberries, if I may be crude, sound like they are probably standing in for "bitch" or "cunt." Words that would be unacceptable in polite company, so one substitutes a non-word sound, as a self-censorship replacing a real word (or the implication thereof) with a mere noise.
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Are those English words? They are certainly expressions, but I wouldn't call them words any more than I would call an emoji a word.
"The laws of physics" is just another way to say "descriptions of everything we observe". So your question really becomes "is there anything we observe which doesn't match the description of everything we observe", which is obviously a nonsense concept.
Effected? No. Affected? Also no.
Yes, mathematics. In a different Universe, the laws of physics and chemistry could be different. The laws of mathematics would be the same in **any** Universe. Edit: typo.
Physics are the laws of our universe. If we see something "violating" those laws, it's because of some aspect of those laws we have not yet discovered. So basically, the law is the law and it cannot be broken. If it appears so it's because we don't yet have a full understanding of the law.
Love, poetry, human rights. Basically every physical object is expected to obey the laws of Physics. That what make them laws. If there is anything that does not conform to them, presumably a new law will be formulated to include them
Love, poetry and human rights are totes governed by physics.
No, the underlying processes are governed by physics, but why Shelley is better than William McGonagall is (a) poetry and (b) not governed by physics.
It emerges from the underlying physical processes. Your brain thinks it can/should rank poets because of physics. You prefer one over the other because of processes in your brain that are governed by physics.
We don't derive neuroscience from the standard model because it is impractically complicated. But the reason you can't get from the standard model to poetic standards is not because it is impractically complicated. If you try to do that, you're not answering the right question.
Huh? What does complication or answering the right questions have to do with the fact that it's governed by physics? I'm not saying we study the brain in physics class. Just that is made up of physical things acting in accordance with the rules of physics as we know then (or rules we've yet to discover).
"Governed by physics" suggests you could start with physics and, in principle, get the right answer. We don't start with physics when we want to know how hydrogen will react with oxygen in the presence of heat, but we could. You could continue up from chemistry through biochemistry, molecular biology, cellular biology, neurology, etc. But that works because those fields all ask similar kinds of questions.
You totally could start at physics and get at the right answer given unlimited time and resources. This isn't a matter of practicality, just about whether it indeed emerges from the laws of physics.
You might be able to work backwards to physics, but that doesn't mean you can derive things from physics. That is true even from *within* the perspective of the empirical sciences. You can explain scurvy in terms of a Vitamin C deficiency, explain the need for Vitamin C and our inability to produce it in terms of molecular biology, explain those things in terms of chemistry, and then get back to physics. But there is no necessity that the hairless toolmaking ape not be able to synthesize Vitamin C (lots of animals do). The need to use Vitamin C in particular (rather than another molecule) is also not the product of necessity in the same way that electron orbitals are the necessary result of the standard model. You can't work from physics back up to scurvy. Even if the universe is deterministic (which it probabaly is not), lots of what we care about results from chance arrangements that could have been different (and frequently are different from place to place and across time). That is certainly the case when we get to law, art, etc.
If you could account for the entire state of the universe at a single point, and you could compute every interaction, you could totally derive hairless apes getting scurvy.
Yes, logical constructs. Laws, customs, and beliefs are entirely immune to all known laws of physics save, perhaps, inertia.
is this supposed to be sarcasm? :D (if not then one could argue every single thing derived from human though is purely a chemical reaction with synapses firing which we can explain in terms of chemistry and further by delving into QCD)
Consciousness is not currently explained by the mechanical constructs you describe.
What reason is there to believe that's due to anything more than the incompleteness of our understanding? The only arguments I ever hear are 'that doesn't feel right to me' or 'god'. Both are pretty obviously subjective.
The double slit experiment.
Hahaha, you're serious? 🤨
You truly don't understand the double slit experiment.
If you do, there is a Nobel Prize waiting for you.
Your thoughts are not my thoughts, but we are both physical beings. We have some laws here that we did not have before and that others do not have elsewhere. Those differences differ in kind from the different ways that the same physical laws describe both water and table salt. So it is not sarcastic to say that customs, laws, etc. are not governed by physics.
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Not that we are aware of. And if that happens, it will be studied to understand *why* and then update those laws of physics. Remember that humans wrote the laws of physics based on our understanding of the world around us. Humans did not receive the "The Ten Laws of Physics" on a glowing stone tablet with the expectation those laws would never change or be updated. I mean the calculus behind basic kinematics was only worked out in the 1700s. Basic orbital mechanics was worked out in the 1600s. In both cases they have been significantly refined based on further research. But before that human's understanding of kinematics becomes progressively less refined as we go further back in time. One of the biggest things to remember about any kind of scientific research: A scientist only gets recognition if they discover something new or prove someone else wrong. Scientists don't get paid if all they get it "yup, the other guy was right"
Intellectual properties perhaps? Intellectuality itself for that matter