Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From?

by Dr Victor Stenger (UHM Physics Emeritus, U. Colorado, Philosophy)

Thursday Dec 6, 2007, 3:30 PM → 4:30 PM Pacific/Honolulu

Rm 112 (UHM - Watanabe Hall)

The laws of physics were not handed down from above. Nor are they somehow built into the logical structure of the universe. They are human inventions, though not arbitrary ones. They are not restrictions on the behavior of matter. They are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behavior. In order to describe an objective reality, those descriptions cannot depend on the point of view of observers. They must be "point-of-view-invariant." When point-of-view invariance is implemented, the laws of physics follow with few additional assumptions. We live in a comprehensible cosmos.
<bf>Prof. Stenger will also be giving the Waterhouse Lecture in the UH Campus Center Ballroom, on Weds 5 December 2007 at 7:00PM, sponsored by the Youth for Christ University Fellowship, with title "Has Science Disproven God?" </bf>
A Short Biography of Victor J. Stenger:
Victor Stenger is emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a research fellow of the Center for Inquiry. Stenger has also held visiting positions on the faculties of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, Oxford in England (twice), and has been a visiting researcher at Rutherford Laboratory in England, the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, Italy, and the University of Florence in Italy.
Stenger spent forty years doing research in elementary particle physics and astrophysics during the golden age of those subjects. In his last project before retiring, Stenger collaborated on the underground experiment in Japan that showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass. The Japanese leader of this experiment shared the 2002 Nobel Prize.
Victor Stenger has had a parallel career as an author of critically well-received popular-level books that interface between physics and cosmology and philosophy, religion, and pseudoscience. These include: Not By Design: The Origin of the Universe (1988); Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses 1990); The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (1995); Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes (2000); Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (2003); The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come from? (2006); and God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (2007). The latest book made the New York Times bestseller list in March, 2007.
Stenger maintains a popular Web site (a thousand hits per month), where much of his writing and the slideshow for this talk can be found, at http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/.