Scientists Say the Laws of Physics May Be Changing
The cosmos is stranger than we know.
/ Off World/ Cosmos/ Isaac Newton/ Laws Of Physics
You know the old saying: the only thing constant is change.
But
we’d wager most people don’t think that line applies to the actual
rules of the universe itself. As it turns out, though, researchers at
Microsoft, along with scientists at Brown University and even one expert
who consulted for Disney’s “Wrinkle in Time” think the laws of physics
might actually be slowly changing, complicating our quest to understand
the cosmos.
Popular
Mechanics published a lengthy explainer this week about a paper, titled
“The Autodidactic Universe” and published earlier this year, in which
the team argued for that precise mind-bending hypothesis. An autodidact,
of course, is someone who learns without a mentor or teacher — and,
these researchers say, the universe itself may be one.
“We
ask whether there might be a mechanism woven into the fabric of the
natural world, by means of which the universe could learn its laws,” the
authors wrote in the paper, which has not yet been peer reviewed.
Over
time, the theory goes, the universe has sought stability. PopMech draws
parallels to animal evolution, too. There are no trilobites or
dinosaurs anymore, but cats and dogs have survived because they adapted
to the environment around them — and the cosmos may have done the same.
In
an early version of the universe, for example, Newton’s laws of gravity
— that all matter in the universe attracts other matter with a force
directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely
proportional to the square of the distance between their centers — might
not have been true yet.
“Over
time, that system will teach itself, and some fundamental laws will
arise, and that’s really what they’re talking about [in the paper],”
Janna Levin, a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of
Columbia University who wasn’t involved in the research, told PopMech.
“If the universe can compute with a given set of algorithms, then maybe
it can do the same kind of thing we see in artificial intelligence,
where you have self-learning systems that teach themselves new rules.
And by rules, in cosmology we mean laws of physics.”
The
paper’s authors also acknowledge their own skepticism and wrote their
conclusions with caution, warning that their work is only a baby step in
the formation of a new theory and requires additional research.
“Of course, this is just a first step,” the authors write. “There are varied potential spin-offs from our approach.”
It’s
mind-bending to imagine that the laws of physics might learn and adapt
over time. But it reminds us that the universe is stranger than we’ll
ever know.