What is a law of nature?
Marc Lange,
Aeon,
Mar 11, 2022
There are some truisms about laws of nature. For example, everything obey them. It is impossible for them to be broken, and any object must obey them. Except, "although all these truisms about the laws of nature sound plausible and familiar, they are also imprecise and metaphorical." They're not like laws that 'govern' at all. Rather, "Scientists discover laws of nature by acquiring evidence that some apparent regularity is not only never violated but also could never have been violated." What this means (roughly) is that we cannot imagine a stable and consistent world in which the law of nature doesn't hold. This article goes into great detail about what that means, exactly.
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