Laws (Scientific)

Laws of nature are central to science, but what is a law of nature? It is quite easy to give some examples: Coulomb’s Law of electrostatic attraction, Snell’s law of refraction, the Schrödinger equation for the evolution of a quantum-mechanical system. But what do these things have in common in virtue of which they get to count as laws of nature? What is it to be a law of nature? For short, and from now on: what is a law of nature? While this is primarily a philosophical question, it should be no less interesting to scientists and students of science than, say, the foundations of quantum mechanics. Of course, there are many scientists to whom the latter is of no interest: the “shut up and calculate” types. But if one is not content with merely using science as a tool and would like to go further and investigate what science says the world is really like, then one should find something of interest in our philosophical question: “what is a law of nature?”.