Legal Commentary

I don't want to gloat but I just finished submitting the grades for my second class (102 exams total in both classes), so other than two, count 'em, two, make-up exams, I'm done.  I'm sitting here with a class of Sancerre, and just fished out of my backpack the copy of Discover magazine I "borrowed" from the gym the other day.  Is Discover the equivalent of People for nerds like me?  (People can't get me through thirty minutes on the StairMaster.  I don't recognize anybody any more.  Who are Jon and Kate and why should I care?)

The April 2010 issue of Discover has an article that posing the question whether the supposedly immutable physical laws of the universe themselves "evolve."  According to the article, one physicist critic of "timeless laws" is Lee Smolin (left), of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, who "rejects hidden dimensions in physics and multiverse approaches in cosmology for technical reasons. . . .  These technical objections have given Smolin the uneasy feeling that there is something rotten at the core of physics."  All fine and dandy, but the next paragraph describes Smolin's collaboration with Harvard Law School professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger (right) on a new book The Reality of Time and the Nature of Cosmological Laws.  The gist of the Smolin-Unger argument (again, according to this article) is "to shift the emphasis in physics away from these possible [multiverse] worlds and back to the real one - our world, which is saturated with time.  They urge their colleagues to abandon the search for timeless truths like string theory."

This sounds like an unholy alliance that follows on the uncomfortable metaphors post-modernists have previously proposed from so-called "quantum indeterminacy."  The book has not, as far as I can tell, been published, but materials on the Smolin-Unger thesis are available from the Perimeter Institute here and here.