One of your main objections to the idea of eternal laws comes in the form of what you diagnose as the “Cosmological Fallacy” in physics. Your argument runs that the regularities we identify in small subsystems of the universe — laboratories mainly! — ought never to be scaled up to apply to the universe as a whole. You point out that in general we gain confidence in scientific hypotheses by running experiments again and again, and define our laws in terms of what stays the same over the course of many repetitions. But this is obviously impossible at a cosmological scale because the universe only happens once.
Physic Results: NET: No Earlier Than
The difficulty of doing this research, while the world looks on, can be gauged by the number of missed deadlines. Planck researchers originally hoped to have their polarization studies done this summer. Recently they had set November as their deadline, aiming to present the results at this conference in Ferrara. Likewise, the joint Bicep/Planck paper is now expected this month or in January.
Asked about this, David Spergel, a Princeton cosmologist and veteran of cosmic microwave studies who had spent the day fielding Twitter messages from Ferrara, said he had adopted an acronym often used by NASA in announcing launch dates: NET, meaning “No Earlier Than.”
Science Influences Culture: Newton and Clockwork, Quantum Entanglement
After Newton, philosophers conceived a clockwork universe. Individuals were seen as cogs in a big machine and could be slotted into vast bureaucratic systems.
But in the era of quantum entanglement and relativity, everything looks emergent and interconnected. Life looks less like a machine and more like endlessly complex patterns of waves and particles. Vast social engineering projects look less promising, because of the complexity, but webs of loving and meaningful relationships can do amazing good.
Is Quantum Entanglement Real?
The entangled particles could be separated across the galaxy, and somehow, according to quantum theory, measurements on one particle should affect the behavior of the far-off twin faster than light could have traveled between them.
.. In his article, Bell demonstrated that quantum theory requires entanglement; the strange connectedness is an inescapable feature of the equations. But Bell’s proof didn’t show that nature behaved that way, only that physicists’ equations did. The question remained: Does quantum entanglement occur in the world?