Particles of Thought

BOB HAZEN: Yeah. First of all, a fact is like I have a balance and I determine the mass of this object. That's a fact. So that's sort of trivial. A bunch of facts can help you though to determine a law, which is a mathematical statement. It basically says, "Here's an equation that explains how some aspect of nature works." And then a theory is a predictive, larger overarching structure, like Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, which describes, explains and puts into a larger context a bunch of ideas. And that can incorporate facts and laws and all that sort of thing. So we're talking about a law of nature. There's a mathematical description about how one part of nature works, and there may be about 10 or 12 existing laws, macroscopic laws. Big word. It just means what we experience.

Now, you wake up in the morning. Your alarm clock goes off. You have to get yourself out of bed. You're working against gravity. You go to the bathroom, you have hot running water. You make yourself a cup of coffee, which cools. And then all those actions you've just experienced, all of those are macroscopic laws of nature. Let's talk just real quickly. The first one, it's about 400 years ago, Isaac Newton comes up with the laws of motion. It's three statements that just tells you how masses and forces interact. You can lift up a coffee cup or you can roll a bowling ball, or you can drive your car, or send off a rocket, that's Newtons laws of motion.

MIKE WONG: Newton also came up with this law of universal gravitation. And this story about the apple falling from a tree and hitting him on his head, it was probably a apocryphal. But nonetheless, Newton made this very impressive insight that that act of the apple falling from the tree was the same process and can be described by the same law of nature as the Moon falling around the Earth. So one thing that we look for in natural laws are these equivalencies that bind seemingly disparate phenomena under the same framework. That's what makes a law a law. It is a universal statement that can apply to many different situations, many different phenomena at once, and capture them under this umbrella, this very simple, elegant statement. That's something that we recognized early on when we were working on this idea that natural laws are built upon these conceptual equivalencies, we call them, this idea that this thing unifies disparate phenomena.