What are Laws of Nature?

[dga471 (Daniel)]

@vjtorley

Aquinas wants to dig deeper: evidently he thinks that there is some kind of property-less “I-know-not-what” (i.e. prime matter) which underlies even fields. But to quote Laplace out of context, “I have no need for that hypothesis.”

Well, as I commented here, I’m not so sure whether particle physics tells us about what the fields actually are, rather than just how they behave:

@dga471

But that’s surely not to be taken literally, right? It’s not that there are literal ball-on-a-spring objects which collectively constitute a field whose oscillations are particles, even if the behavior of these “things” are similar to that of a ball-on-a-spring. What is a field really, then? It surely must be something physical and tangible, not mere Platonic mathematical objects, because particles (and atoms and molecules) are physical and tangible. I don’t think we think about this much in QFT - at some point we just write down an equation (analogous to the plots of oscillations that you drew) and proceed with calculations.

Now if you are a strict empiricist or verificationist, you might hold that the behavior of the fields that is verifiable by experiment is all that could ever matter in a meaningful sense. But as I understand it, the point of thinking about a philosophy of nature (like Thomism) is that it seeks to give a deeper metaphysical understanding of what’s actually happening, instead of the “shut up and calculate” approach.

@vjtorley

And it seems wildly implausible to claim (as Thomas does) that whenever substance A changes into substance B, it is prime matter alone that survives the change, when the fields appear to be intact.

I don’t think this is clear-cut either. When neutrino oscillation happens (as parameterized by the PMNS matrix), do the fields underlying them go through a substantial or accidental change? It’s unclear, because the concept of substantial vs. accidental change hasn’t been defined precisely enough in the context of its application to modern particle physics (AFAIK).

Based on my limited interactions with Thomists, they would probably say that a change is substantial (as opposed to accidental) if there is some sort of discontinuity in the change (like a phase transition). But we don’t have clear-cut analogues to phase transitions in particle physics (again, AFAIK). There definitely is a scholarly gap here that needs to be filled.