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Laws of Nature as Constraints

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Emily Adlam at Chapman University
Emily Adlam
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Abstract

The laws of nature have come a long way since the time of Newton: quantum mechanics and relativity have given us good reasons to take seriously the possibility of laws which may be non-local, atemporal, ‘all-at-once,’ retrocausal, or in some other way not well-suited to the standard dynamical time evolution paradigm. Laws of this kind can be accommodated within a Humean approach to lawhood, but many extant non-Humean approaches face significant challenges when we try to apply them to laws outside the time evolution picture. Thus for proponents of non-Humean approaches to lawhood there is a clear need for a novel non-Humean account which is capable of accommodating these sorts of laws. In this paper we propose such an account, characterizing lawhood in terms of constraints, which are understood as a form of modal structure. We demonstrate that our proposed realist account can indeed accommodate a large variety of laws outside the time evolution paradigm, and describe some possible applications to important philosophical problems.
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Foundations of Physics (2022) 52:28
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-022-00546-0
1 3
Laws ofNature asConstraints
EmilyAdlam1
Received: 30 September 2021 / Accepted: 31 January 2022 / Published online: 10 February 2022
© Crown 2022
Abstract
The laws of nature have come a long way since the time of Newton: quantum
mechanics and relativity have given us good reasons to take seriously the possibil-
ity of laws which may be non-local, atemporal, ‘all-at-once,’ retrocausal, or in some
other way not well-suited to the standard dynamical time evolution paradigm. Laws
of this kind can be accommodated within a Humean approach to lawhood, but many
extant non-Humean approaches face significant challenges when we try to apply
them to laws outside the time evolution picture. Thus for proponents of non-Humean
approaches to lawhood there is a clear need for a novel non-Humean account which
is capable of accommodating these sorts of laws. In this paper we propose such an
account, characterizing lawhood in terms of constraints, which are understood as
a form of modal structure. We demonstrate that our proposed realist account can
indeed accommodate a large variety of laws outside the time evolution paradigm,
and describe some possible applications to important philosophical problems.
Keywords Laws of nature· Philosophy of physics· Retrocausality
1 Introduction
The laws of nature have come a long way since the time of Newton: quantum
mechanics and relativity have given us good reasons to take seriously the possibil-
ity of laws which may be non-local, atemporal, ‘all-at-once,’ retrocausal, or in some
other way not well-suited to the standard dynamical time evolution paradigm. Laws
of this kind can be accommodated within a Humean approach to lawhood, but many
extant non-Humean approaches face significant challenges when we try to apply
them to laws outside the time evolution picture. Thus for proponents of non-Humean
approaches to lawhood there is a clear need for a novel realist (i.e. non-Humean)
account which is capable of accommodating these sorts of laws. In this paper we
propose such an account, characterizing lawhood in terms of constraints, which are
* Emily Adlam
eadlam90@gmail.com
1 University ofWestern Ontario, London, Canada
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... The proposition 'the weight of the book I have in front of me now is 2 kg' is contingently true since it expresses a contingent sate of affairs which is consistent with the laws of nature, but could nonetheless have been different. 1 The above definitions and examples are usually more than sufficient for fruitful discussions of physical modality, however, as we shall see in what follows, upon further scrutinization of certain examples things start to become a bit more complicated. Before we delve into these intriguing examples however, let as add some clarificatory remarks. ...
... [20]). However, 1 Here we sidestep the thorny question of what makes a proposition true and focus on the distinction between necessarily true propositions and contingently true propositions. Whatever theory of truth one holds, and whatever the truth conditions for a certain proposition, p, are, the proposition can be regarded-from a physical point of view-either as a necessarily true proposition or as a contingently true proposition as indicated above. ...
... As will become evident in the next section, as long as one operates within the scope of Friedmann cosmology, the cosmological principle-i.e. the assumption of homogeneous and isotropic distribution of matter in spacetime-can be seen as a lawlike assumption which places certain constraints on the structure of spacetime, even though from the broader scope of view of general relativity, the cosmological principle is merely an idealization. 10 9 For further views of physical laws as constraints see also Adlam [1] and Ross [37]. 10 A few further clarificatory remarks might be helpful here. ...
Laws, Initial Conditions and Physical Modality: Lessons from Cosmology
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Certain considerations from cosmology (Ellis, in: arXiv preprint, 2006. arXiv:astro-ph/0602280; Stud Hist Philos Mod Phys 46:5–23, 2014) and other areas of physics (Sklar, in: PSA Proceedings of the biennial meeting of the philosophy of science association, pp. 551–564, 1990; Frisch, in: Philos Sci 71:696–706, 2004) pose challenges to the traditional distinction between laws and initial conditions, indicating the need for a more nuanced understanding of physical modality. A solution to these challenges is provided by presenting a conceptual framework according to which laws and fundamental lawlike assumptions within a theory’s nomic structure determine what is physically necessary and what is physically contingent from a physical theory’s point of view. Initial conditions are defined within this framework in terms of the possible configurations of a physical system allowed by the laws and other lawlike assumptions of a theory. The proposed deflationary framework of physical modality offers an alternative way of understanding the distinction between laws and initial conditions and allows the question of the modal status of the initial conditions of the Universe to be asked in a meaningful way.
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... The first is the Humean Mill-Ramsey-Lewis best systems account, according to which the laws do not truly govern what happens in nature, but instead merely offer concise and informative descriptions of all the things that happen throughout the entire history of the universe (including its full past and future). 2 Put poetically, the laws are patterns in the mosaic that is our universe. The second is a recent alternative, put forward by Adlam (2022a), Chen and Goldstein (2022), and Meacham (2022;, according to which the laws govern without dynamic production by placing constraints on possible histories for the universe (constraints that may or may not look like laws of time evolution). ...
... It is difficult to say what it takes in general for something to be a law, but you might say that at a minimum it must constrain what is physically possible. Here the dynamic production account can make peace with constraint accounts (Adlam 2022a;Chen and Goldstein 2022;Meacham 2022, forthcoming). Proponents of constraint accounts prefer the flexibility of their picture, arguing that the laws of our world may well turn out not to include dynamical laws (or to otherwise violate the time evolution paradigm) and that our philosophical theorizing should not preclude this possibility. ...
... See Wharton (2014), Adlam (2018;2022a,b, 2023; Friederich and Evans (2023); Barandes (2023). that we live in a world where the present moment is enough to produce the future (the arbitrarily-short past is not needed as input)-in their words, "our universe is Markovian." ...
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... However, this can easily be avoided if we adopt a picture which does not start from any moment of time. As detailed in ref [39], one could simply specify a set of 'dynamically possible histories,' and then rather than choosing an initial condition one could simply sample from the set of possible histories. This kind of 'all-at-once' model, which simply assigns probabilities over entire histories, transparently obeys event symmetry. ...
... But it has long been argued that our experience of temporal progression may not reflect any objective process of temporal becoming [44,45], so we should beware of fallacies that arise from inappropriately generalising the temporal nature of our experience. Now, it is important to note that re-interpreting a deterministic and reversible time-evolution model is not the only possible way of arriving at a representational model obeying event symmetry-as noted by [39], once we move from a time-evolution picture to an all-at-once picture there are a variety of new possibilities open to us, since we can also contemplate possible all-at-once models which cannot be written in a time-evolution form. In particular, one would naturally expect to find representational models which exhibit some kind of nontrivial dependence of the future on the past, something which would look like retrocausality if one attempts to understand it within a timeevolution picture. ...
... 3. On the other hand, all-at-once retrocausality is quite straightforward to implement, by means of laws of nature which specify constraints on what is physically possible. Laws of this form have been taken seriously in physics for some time [50,51] and have recently attracted philosophical attention [39,52]. Therefore, even aside from event symmetry, there are good reasons to prefer all-at-once retrocausal models over dynamical retrocausal models. ...
Time and event symmetry in quantum mechanics
Article
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  • Dec 2024
We investigate two types of temporal symmetry in quantum mechanics. The first type, time symmetry, refers to the inclusion of opposite time orientations on an equivalent physical footing. The second, event symmetry, refers to the inclusion of all time instants in a history sequence on an equivalent physical footing. We find that recent time symmetric interpretations of quantum mechanics fail to respect event symmetry. Building on the recent fixed-point formulation (FPF) of quantum theory, we formulate the notion of an event precisely as a fixed point constraint on the Keldysh time contour. Then, considering a sequence of measurement events in time, we show that both time and event symmetry can be retained in this multiple-time formulation of quantum theory. We then use this model to resolve conceptual paradoxes with time symmetric quantum mechanics within an 'all-at-once', atemporal picture.
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... In this perspective, proposals have been recently put forward to understand laws in terms of constraints. According to Chen and Goldstein (2022), laws are taken as ontological primitives, as in Maudlin (2007), but "govern by constraining the physical possibilities" (see also Adlam, 2022 for a related view), where this constraining is considered to be "a primitive relation between fundamental laws and the actual world". Interestingly, this conception of nomic constraining does not explicitly require any spatio-temporal notions; however, it seems difficult to specify concretely what this primitive relation actually amounts to and what explanatory role it can really achieve. ...
... The recently proposed constraint-based view on laws (Adlam, 2022;Chen & Goldstein, 2022) does not rely on any notion of nomic production, and thus does not face the above challenges raised by non-trivial topologies (and closed timelike curves in particular) as well as by the symmetry features of the QG transition amplitudes; these topological and symmetry features can indeed be easily accounted for in terms of constraints. In this sense, the constraint-base view is rather appealing in the QG context considered here, although it can be argued that the notion of constraint is very general and thus the understanding and explanatory power this conception of laws provides are actually very thin (indeed Chen and Goldstein, 2022 label their view "Minimal Primitivism"). ...
The quantum gravity seeds for laws of nature
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We discuss the challenges that the standard (Humean and non-Humean) accounts of laws face within the framework of quantum gravity where space and time may not be fundamental. This paper identifies core (meta)physical features that cut across a number of quantum gravity approaches and formalisms and that provide seeds for articulating updated conceptions that could account for QG laws not involving any spatio-temporal notions. To this aim, we will in particular highlight the constitutive roles of quantum entanglement, quantum transition amplitudes and quantum causal histories. These features also stress the fruitful overlap between quantum gravity and quantum information theory.
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... This proposal is inspired by what has been suggested in (Adlam [2019], p. 6). Accounts of laws as 'global constraints' have been suggested in the recent literature (Adlam [2022]; Chen and Goldstein [2022]; Meacham [2023]). causal structure between spatiotemporal events. ...
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A temporal counterpart to Bell nonlocality would intuitively refer to the presence of non-classical correlations between timelike-separated events. The hypothesis of temporal nonlocality has received recent support in the literature, and its existence would likely influence the future development of physical theories. This paper shows how Adlam's principle of temporal locality can be violated within a protocol involving indefinite causal orders. While the derivations of Leggett-Garg inequalities or the temporal CHSH inequality are said to involve problematic assumptions preventing a targeted probing of a well-defined notion of temporal nonlocality, the present test is free from such worries. However, it is shown that the test, in its current formulation, fails to be fully model-independent. We provide several considerations regarding the physicality of ICOs that could help alleviate this drawback. In the present work, a specific physical interpretation of ICOs in terms of retrocausal influences would explain the presence of temporally nonlocal correlations. It is argued that, as the physical underpinnings of temporal nonlocality might also account for standard Bell nonlocality, focusing on the former as a consequence of ICOs might support under-explored strategies to make sense of the latter.
View
... But for most physicists, at least, it is not difficult to shift into an all-at-once mindset where explanations do not have to come in this form [15][16][17][18]. Action principles, in both classical and quantum theory, are analyzed "all at once" in exactly this manner, using both initial and final boundary constraints. Much of general relativity also falls in this category. ...
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