Tuesday 17 December 2019

reference frames - Why should a (physical) principle be applicable to different systems in different positions in space and time?



This is a question with a philosophical, as well as physical, flavor.


Why should a physical principle (or a description of one), be applicable to different systems that can be in different positions in space and time?


In other words why should there be such (modulo) equivalence classes (with respect to a physical principle)? Why not a "custom (physical) principle per case"?


Let me give one simple example. Newton's laws are applicable to my desk, to my table, to your desk, to your table and to someone's table, say 1 year from now (or 1 year ago).


Why is this? Why should the same principle be aplicable to such different systems (different in the sense stated above)?


Anyone know how to approach such a question?


Note in order to avoid misunderstandings:


regardless of the tags of this question, this is not specifically about covariance, the tag was used, by an editor, because the original tag laws-of-physics was removed for other reasons



Answer



Let me try a more down to earth example: Let's say I formulate a law "I can kick with my leg in front of me without getting hurt." This law is indeed true in many cases, but in some cases it is not because there is a wall right in front of me and my leg kinda hurts after kicking. That is, the world is not everywhere the same.



Say I come to the same place in fifty years after the wall has been torn down and try to kick in front of me - I do not get hurt. So I can surely say that the world isn't everytime the same.


Thus, the same action at different places and different times gives different results. So what the heck are these physical laws saying that the world is the same everywhere and everytime? That's the funny thing, this is how fundamental physical laws are defined and formulated - as the stuff that applies at any time and at any place. If it does not apply the same at different points of space and time, it is not considered a physical law.


That is, we postulate that such a thing as physical laws does exist and then try to find them. We have to rid every situation of what is different and find and document repeating patterns. The difference of every point of space and time is expressed in things such as initial conditions and sources.


If for example tomorrow we found out that the "laws of gravity have changed" or apply differently for different objects, we would not throw away physics, we would say that our previous law was only effective, "local" and seek a deeper law that would describe this change of our local effective law. We could however also postulate a source which affects the phenomena we observe. A case analogous to the latter is the phenomenon of dark matter - we consider it either as an unknown source of gravitation or a consequence of a modified gravitational law.


In fact, this happens all the time throughout the history of science, but mainly through looking at different scales - we found different laws applying to the case of an atom and that of a macroscopic object. We didn't say there are just particular laws, we formulated a unified theory called quantum mechanics.


However, the most amazing thing is that every time so far, we have been able to find such a new law unifying more and more phenomena and have managed to reduce again and again the amount of types of sources and initial conditions (even though bearing more and more specific information about the situation). This is just what we find, there is hardly any explanation to it.


Nevertheless, there are some reservations towards the amazing might of the physical-laws-method. This follows from the fact that from a certain point of accuracy in the microscopic world, we have not managed to find any kind of pattern in the results. Our inability to predict this certain precision of results is reflected by the statistical nature of quantum mechanics and may as well be the final limit to the realm of physical laws.


The last remark is that we would require to somehow explain the sources and initial conditions - why in the end space and time really are different at different points. This is a conundrum mainly discussed in the science trying to encompass the whole of space and time, cosmology. And sincerely, nobody really knows if the scientific method can even in principle answer the questions of the type why the world is the way it is. Nevertheless, we presume the world will in our eyes continue to get organized into more and more wide and entangled patterns by more and more unified theories with more and more particularly arranged sources and configurations.


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