What are laws of nature, do they govern the universe or merely summarize it, and what do those answers imply about induction, chance, and time’s arrow?
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1. Guest
Barry Loewer is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and the director of the Rutgers Center for Philosophy and the Sciences. In this interview, we explore philosophical issues related to laws of nature and related topics.
2. Interview Summary
Barry Loewer begins by situating the very idea of “laws of nature” historically: people have long noticed regularities, and often tied them to theology, but the modern notion of simple mathematical laws that describe motion and form the aim of physics really crystallizes in the 17th–18th centuries (especially in Descartes, influenced by Galileo). On that early picture, laws were not just descriptions but part of how God “governed” inert matter, since matter itself was taken to be passive. This historical backdrop sets up the interview’s central contrast between “governing” (non-Humean) and “systematizing” (Humean) conceptions of laws.
Loewer then develops the Humean line through David Lewis’s “best system” idea: take the total distribution of fundamental properties across spacetime, and the laws are whatever axioms best systematize it by balancing simplicity and informativeness. He contrasts this with Maudlin-style governance using a vivid joke: on the governing view, God sets initial conditions + laws and can “go on vacation,” whereas on the Humean view God would have to create the whole history “all at once,” and we later extract the best system from it. The conversation then turns to why many philosophers resist Humeanism: they want something to “hold the universe together,” and they worry that if laws are mere regularities then induction becomes unjustifiable; Loewer replies that Hume shows there’s no guarantee of induction anyway—science is inherently risky—and he brings in Goodman’s “grue” problem to show that even stating the induction problem correctly requires constraints on which predicates/generalizations count as projectible.
In the final stretch, the interview broadens into the metaphysical question behind Loewer’s book-title riff on Hawking: what “breathes fire into the equations,” i.e., why this universe and this lawlike structure at all—and what the world (and knowers like us) must be like for physics to succeed. Loewer suggests physics can’t itself answer “why there is a universe” or “why there are laws,” since any such explanation would already presuppose laws (a theological answer might be possible, but it wouldn’t be a scientific one). He then connects laws to chance and time via the Albert–Loewer “Mentaculus” program: add a “Past Hypothesis” that the universe began in a very low-entropy state, combine it with the dynamical laws and a Boltzmann-style probability measure, and you get a package that yields objective chances and explains time’s arrow—what he calls a “probability map of the universe.”
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:45 - Development of views about laws
15:15 - Two schools
26:37 - Popularity of non-Humean views
30:15 - Induction
38:15 - Further issues with induction
49:28 - What breathes fire into the equations?
1:01:25 - Background to the Mentaculus project
1:04:15 - Time
1:10:20 - Statistical mechanics
1:14:32 - Putting the Mentaculus package together
1:22:52 - Value of philosophy
1:35:57 - Conclusion
