PhysOrg.com) -- For a brief instant,
it appears, scientists at
Brook*haven National Laboratory on Long Island
recently discovered a law of nature had been broken.

Remember the argument asserts that law-like physics would be better explained if it were the product of a mind, since the universe has to come to be as result of physics, not as a means of creating physics. Therefore, since laws can't be disembodied things just floating about with nothing to describe or make happen there has to be some higher organizing principle that contains them and makes them work and a mind works best for that description. Even though the experiment at Brookhaven (see image link above) seems to imply that laws were broken the fact that laws are broken implies that they do exist.

Physorg.com
March 19, 2010 By Suzanne Taylor Muzzin


"Parity was long thought to be a fundamental law of nature. It essentially states that the universe is neither right- nor left-handed — that the laws of physics remain unchanged when expressed in inverted coordinates. In the early 1950s it was found that the so-called weak force, which is responsible for nuclear radioactivity, breaks the parity law. However, the strong force, which holds together subatomic particles, was thought to adhere to the law of parity, at least under normal circumstances.

Now this law appears to have been broken by a team of about a dozen particle physicists, including Jack Sandweiss, Yale's Donner Professor of Physics. Since 2000, Sandweiss has been smashing the nuclei of gold atoms together as part of the STAR experiment at RHIC, a 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator, to study the law of parity under the resulting extreme conditions."




Mat argues:

Mat Hunt, the laws of physics.
carm, 2/15/11
The "Laws of physics"(no 1 in thread)

I see this term thrown about with no regard to what it means and I thought I would do an OP to clarify what it really means. In order to to this I must first explain how things are done in physics. The first point to address is how do physicists find anything out in the first place and the answer to that is experimentation, this can be measuring something, seeing how something interacts with something else, a whole myriad of possible techniques.

Once the data has been gathered than the next task it to see what information can be obtained from the data, as well as if it possible possible to codify the data in the form of an equation, such equations are usually known as laws. The more experiments performed more laws are obtained and then the physicist can start incorporating the laws to make more general laws that explain more of the experimental onservation. These new more general laws will in general have the ability to predict the outcome of experiments that have yet to be performed and can be used to test the robustness of the laws themselves.

These general laws can sometimes be made into more general laws which can describe a whole range of phenomena, these more general laws are known as a theory in physics.

What most people refer to as the "laws of physics" are these sets of equations that have been discovered by physicists which describe (in the majority of cases to a very high degree of accuracy) what appears in nature.

It is not that nature appears to be inherently mathematical in nature but that it can be approximated by mathematical laws to an incredibly high degree.


HRG: responds to Hunt

Beg to differ on this point - slightly. IMHO the process is not so straightforward as you described it. Equations are not always just a mathematical summary of the data; often they are conjectured or extrapolated, and confirmed afterwards on the basis of their predictions.

I'm thinking particularly of three examples, which were jumps into the unknown, as it were.:

Maxwell's introduction of the "displacement current" (the time derivative of the electric field), confirmed afterwards by Hertz'