Researchers State That the Laws of Physics Might Be Changing

The cosmos is weirder than we know

You are acquainted with the old saying: the only thing constant is change. However, we would certainly bet many people do not believe that line applies to the real rules of the universe itself. As it appears, however, researchers at Microsoft, along with scientists at Brown University and also one expert who consulted for Disney’s “Wrinkle in Time,” think the laws of physics could be slowly transforming, complicating our mission to understand the cosmos.

The magazine Popular Mechanics published a lengthy explainer this week concerning a paper titled “The Autodidactic Universe” and published previously this year, in which the team argued for that specific mind-bending hypothesis. An autodidact, of course, is somebody that learns without a mentor or teacher– and, these researchers say, the universe itself might be one.

” We ask whether there could be a mechanism woven right into the fabric of the natural world, using which the universe might learn its laws,” the writers wrote in the paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.

In time, the theory goes, the universe has looked for stability. PopMech draws parallels to animal evolution, too. There are no trilobites or dinosaurs any longer. However, cats and dogs have survived because they adapted to the environment around them– and the cosmos might have done the exact same.

Changing laws of physics?

In a very early version of the universe, for example, Newton’s laws of gravity– that all matter in the universe attracts other matter with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance in between their centers– might not have actually been true yet.

” With time, that system will teach itself, and some fundamental laws will occur, and that is truly what they are discussing [in the paper],” Janna Levin, a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University who was not involved in the research, informed PopMech.

“If the universe can compute with a given collection of algorithms after that maybe it can do the same sort of thing we see in artificial intelligence, where you have self-learning systems that teach themselves brand-new rules. Moreover, by rules, in cosmology, we mean laws of physics.”

The paper’s authors likewise recognize their own skepticism and wrote their verdicts with caution, advising that their work is just a baby step in the development of a brand-new theory and needs extra research.

” Naturally, this is just an initial step,” the authors write. “There are varying possible spin-offs from our approach.”

It is mind-bending to visualize that the laws of physics may learn and adapt with time. However, it reminds us that the universe is stranger than we will ever realize.

Read the original article on Futurism.

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