Until the arrival of the French philosopher Rene Descartes, there was nothing conceptually similar to a universal law of nature, a set of instructions that are always the same under all conditions and serve to predict what is going to happen.

The modern idea of the laws of nature, then, was not only a byproduct of Descartes' philosophy, but it constituted an impressive undertaking that It started during the Scientific Revolution and that allowed us to unravel the Matrix-type code that underlay nature.

The laws of the Revolution

The ancients had known, according to estimates, only four physical laws: the law of the lever, the optical law of reflection, the law of buoyancy and the parallelogram law of velocities. That is, rather, four principles that we call laws had been discovered.

While they referred to these "laws" as evidence that nature was sometimes regular and predictable, They never identified any specific scientific principle as law.

But, for example, the Romans talked a lot about the law of nature (lex naturae), but they generally meant moral law. And, although Galileo, Harriot and Beeckman had each independently discovered the so-called "law of the fall", none of them had used the term "law" in this context. The identification of laws in its strict sense was born with the Scientific Revolution, among which the following were deciphered:

• Stevin's law of hydrostatics.
• Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
• Snell's law of refraction.
• Boyle's gas law.
• Hooke's law of elasticity.
• Huygens's pendulum law.
• Torricelli's law of flow.
• Pascal's law of fluid dynamics.
• Newton's law of gravitation.

Only a minority of these laws had already acquired eponymous labels: the rest had yet to be named after their discoverers. Just as he wrote Isaac Newton to define his aims when, in 1703, he became president of the Royal Society:

Natural philosophy consists in discovering the structure and operations of nature, and reducing them, as far as possible, to general rules or laws, establishing these rules by observations and experiments, and from thence deducing the causes and effects of things. .

The physicist-mathematician Henri Poincare (provides a similar definition: "What is a law? It is a constant link between an antecedent and a consequent, between the current state of the world and its immediately subsequent state."

Given this, the certainty began to emerge that, if everything is governed by laws, everything can be predictable (even if it were not computable) and therefore We lived in a deterministic universe where free will was only a cognitive illusion. You can delve deeper into this difficult topic in the following video:

Nowadays it is known that there are scientific laws that are both causal and probabilistic or stochastic. Hence, in the concept of scientific law, both types of law (deterministic and stochastic) must be considered. but it is based on four principles:

1. Everything that exists is governed by natural laws
2. These laws are invariant in time and space.
3. The scientist's activity consists of describing them
4. The existence of these laws is independent of whether the human being describes them or not.
5. It is possible, in principle, to know all the laws

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The news

The discoverers of the first laws of nature

was originally published in

Xataka Science

by
Sergio Parra

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