On seeing the laws of nature as a recipe or a news report | Aeon Essays

We live in a world in which objects behave the same given the same circumstances.

We assume that, thanks to science, there is a recipe of sorts for how the laws of nature work.

The layer-cake model of the Universe dates back to the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes .

It has helped to unify whole fields of physics, including mechanics, gravitation and electromagnetism.

But there are many aspects of modern physics that seem to provide counterexamples to the model.

The layer-cake model of the Universe has been defended by the philosopher Tim Maudlin , a professor at New York University .

The newspaper model is probably the most popular theory of laws of nature among professional philosophers and it attracts a lot of active research right now.

It is metaphysically thin: there are mysterious, unexplained relations of production as demanded in the production in nature.

The past determines the present, and the present determines the future.

All scientific laws are compatible with the newspaper model, including Newton ’s laws that tell us that the future state of the world can be calculated and deduced from the present state.