Saturday, April 25, 2026

Can A Material Really Break The Laws Of Physics?

There are multiple ways someone could come to wonder about the universality of scientific laws (physics).  They could see trends like the "rising" and "setting" of the sun or the way objects fall to the ground and reflect, whether rationalistically or not, on the nature of these phenomena.  Or, they might encounter publications with titles that claim some discovery reveals exceptions to or the falsity of some familiar scientific idea.  Sometimes, such headlines might really be conveying, albeit in a very "clickbait" manner, that the version of a law of physics assumed to be true by scientists or for which there was evidence actually has previously undiscovered nuances—or that in addition to a given law of physics there is also another one at play in a particular situation.  Neither of these things quite means that a law of physics was literally observed to be violated or turned out to be false to begin with.

However, it should not surprise a thorough rationalist if scientific laws were to not apply to all matter even at the same scale (microscopic versus quantum, etc.).  It is logically possible for differing laws of physics to apply to different regions or objects within the universe, and yet the matter in each region or object would be bound to their respective physics.  Logical facts alone are universal in themselves; it does not follow necessarily that any scientific laws, laws that have no inherent truth anyway and thus could have differed from their exact current manifestation, must be true of the totality of the cosmos.  But as for laws of physics that are in place, though there is no intrinsic necessity to them and they could abruptly change, can any physical substance really "break" them?

For something to truly violate the laws of physics, it would have to involve the manipulation of matter by a non-material cause.  Otherwise, whatever the phenomenon is, it would already have to be outside the scope of physics, meaning it could not violate the laws of physics as opposed to transcending them altogether (like logical necessities or the basic existence of God).  That is, if some matter of truth is not a matter of physics, none of the laws of science are suspended or altered by this fact on its own.  Only an intervention by a supernatural entity can break or violate the laws of physics in the ultimate sense.

So, a material cannot ever actually break the laws of physics by itself, even if the laws of physics governing one region of the cosmos, one universe, or one material differed from the physics governing some other region, universe, or material.  However matter naturally behaves in a specific location or concerning a specific material is what the laws of physics dictate for that applicable area or thing.  It might shock some people, especially non-rationalists, if evidence was to arise that the physics of some other planet or an even more distant corner of the universe function quite differently than those of Earth, but the laws of physics would still not be broken, but simply not universal, which is already logically possible.

All you have access to when it comes to which scientific laws are present, short of being omniscient or much closer to it than to human limitations, is perceptions of how the physical world behaves.  Only logic and introspection and anything illuminated by them can truly be known.  There is no way to know if one's experiences through the senses like sight, hearing, and taste accurately match the real external world, much less how large the universe is or if the laws of physics differ somewhere far removed from your ability to observe with any of the senses.  Since logic does not require that physics must be the same everywhere or that even the physics one immediately perceives must be more than an illusion, there is truly no way to know which possibility is the case.

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