Are the Laws of Physics constant in space and time?

We assume that the laws of Nature that scientists discover operate not only at the time and place where the scientists perform the experiments, but everywhere and at all times. This is by no means self-evident and it is something which cannot be proved by science.

Based on experiments done on Earth by a number of scientists over a minuscule amount of time compared with the lifetime of the Universe, Laws of Nature are proposed which are assumed to be true for all space and all time. There is no way to know if this is true.

The only way we could find out such things is if a Creator communicated it to us. The information channel has to be opened from the outside.

In particular, this assumption implicitly excludes what could be called the “miraculous” in which there is an influence from outside of Nature. While such a situation is usually considered to be impossible, there is no way of proving it. Consider again the analogy of a virtual Universe where the “Laws of Nature” are set by the programmer who is fully able to intervene in special cases.

In addition, our models derived from sense data can never be exact. They are approximations which can be made to agree more closely with what we observe but they remain models. Moreover, there is always the possibility of new data being received which the model does not take account of.

Bertrand Russell illustrated this problem in a story of the Inductivist Turkey.

The turkey found that, on his first morning at the turkey farm, he was fed at 9 a.m. Being a good inductivist turkey he did not jump to conclusions. He waited until he collected a large number of observations that he was fed at 9 a.m. and made these observations under a wide range of circumstances, on Wednesdays, on Thursdays, on cold days, on warm days. Each day he added another observation statement to his list. Finally he was satisfied that he had collected a number of observation statements to inductively infer that “I am always fed at 9 a.m.”.

However on the morning of Christmas eve he was not fed but instead had his throat cut.

It doesn’t matter how many cases we list during our inductivist reasoning, nothing guarantees that the next case will comply with this inference we deduced from our observations, as the possible experiments and observations are infinite by number and type.