[PBondurant]

> “It leads to a new philosophy of physics that rejects the idea that the universe is a machine governed by unconditional laws with a prior existence, and replaces it with a view of the universe as a kind of self-organising entity in which all sorts of emergent patterns appear, the most general of which we call the laws of physics.”

Is this distinction as meaningful as it first seems; my assumption was that all 'laws of physics' are in essence only ever an expression of our current best understanding of these observed 'generalised patterns'?

By talking about the 'laws', it's easy to start treating these as though they are firm, a-priori rules, but my assumption was that - to physicists - these were always simply a short-cut way of describing a set of common, repeated and testable observations about the universe. Iow they were never 'rules' in the sense that they existed independent of the phenomena they were describing? I'm not a scientist, btw.

[ericmay]

I think you're right w.r.t laws.

From reading the article this morning I hadn't thought of something like "there sure is a lot of carbon in the universe as far as we know" in terms of natural selection.

But maybe it's circular where "evolution" as it was originally used to describe biological systems/organisms on earth is just a way of describing changes in the universe but locally and specific as well. In other words, Evolution may be the Grand Theory of describing how the universe works and perhaps observing a black hole is akin to observing how elephants behave.

Although as someone else has pointed out here, maybe that theory is bunk too. [1]

> I'm not a scientist, btw.

Same here. I also have not yet had coffee this morning ;)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35218567