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CONNECTIONS

CONNECTIONS; Finding the Universal Laws That Are There, Waiting . . .

Nature abhors a vacuum. Gravitational force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between two objects. Over the course of evolution, each species develops larger body sizes. If something can go wrong, it will.

Such are some of nature's laws as handed down by Aristotle, Newton, Edward Cope and Murphy. And regardless of their varying accuracy (and seriousness), it takes an enormous amount of daring to posit them in the first place. Think of it: asserting that what you observe here and now is true for all times and places, that a pattern you perceive is not just a coincidence but reveals a deep principle about how the world is ordered.

If you say, for example, that whenever you have tried to create a vacuum, matter has rushed in to fill it, you are making an observation. But say that ''nature abhors a vacuum'' and you are asserting something about the essence of things. Similarly, when Newton discovered his law of gravitation, he was not simply accounting for his observations. It has been shown that his crude instruments and approximate measurements could never have justified the precise and elegant conclusions. That is the power of natural law: the evidence does not make the law plausible; the law makes the evidence plausible.

But what kind of natural laws can now be so confidently formulated, disclosing a hidden order and forever bearing their creator's names? We no longer even hold Newton's laws sacred; 20th-century physics turned them into approximations. Cope, the 19th-century paleontologist, created his law about growing species size based on dinosaurs; the idea has now become somewhat quaint. Someday even an heir to Capt. Edward Aloysius Murphy might have to modify the law he based on his experience about things going awry in the United States Air Force in the 1940's.

So now, into the breach comes John Brockman, the literary agent and gadfly, whose online scientific salon, Edge.org, has become one of the most interesting stopping places on the Web. He begins every year by posing a question to his distinguished roster of authors and invited guests. Last year he asked what sort of counsel each would offer George W. Bush as the nation's top science adviser. This time the question is ''What's your law?''

''There is some bit of wisdom,'' Mr. Brockman proposes, ''some rule of nature, some lawlike pattern, either grand or small, that you've noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you.'' What, he asks, is your law, one that's ready to take a place near Kepler's and Faraday's and Murphy's.

More than 150 responses totaling more than 20,000 words have been posted so far at www.edge.org/q2004/q04_print.html. The respondents form an international gathering of what Mr. Brockman has called the ''third culture'' -- scientists and science-oriented intellectuals who are, he believes, displacing traditional literary intellectuals in importance. They include figures like the scientists Freeman Dyson and Richard Dawkins, innovators and entrepreneurs like Ray Kurzweil and W. Daniel Hillis, younger mavericks like Douglas Rushkoff and senior mavericks like Stewart Brand, mathematicians, theoretical physicists, computer scientists, psychologists, linguists and journalists.

But curiously, an aura of modesty, tentativeness and skepticism hovers over the submissions -- this from a group not renowned for self-abnegation. This may, perhaps, be an admission that fundamental insights are not now to be had. But it may also be an uncertainty about science itself.

Clifford Pickover, an I.B.M. researcher and popular science writer, offers the Pickover Law of Mutating Conjectures, which posits that every law ever made ''has been broken or will crumble after a time.'' Paul Steinhardt, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, offers Steinhardt's Law: ''Good science creates two challenging puzzles for each puzzle it solves.'' The physicist Anton Zeilinger's Fundamental Law is, ''There is no Fundamental Law.'' The computer scientist David Gelernter's Third Law is: ''Scientists know all the right answers and none of the right questions.''

The contribution from the actor Alan Alda, who interviews scientists for PBS (and played one on Broadway), is in keeping with the pervasive spirit of legislative uncertainty. Alda's First Law of Laws is ''All laws are local,'' meaning they are only valid in small arenas and are subject to change as the context grows along with understanding.

The software entrepreneur and designer Kai Krause offers not Laws but Dilemmas, including this verse, with its hints of insomniac grogginess and confusion: ''I think. . . /there. . . /4 a.m.''

Is one problem, perhaps, that in fields like computer science and theoretical physics, which are so rapidly changing, there is so little yet settled? One of Mr. Kurzweil's laws, after all, is the Law of Accelerating Returns, which posits that the evolution of technology is exponentially accelerating and will take human evolution along with it. Where, in such a rush of sensation, are first principles to be found?

Strangely, the contributions from which one learns the most come not from the ''hard'' sciences, but from psychology, sociology, the humanities or the brain sciences. Maddox's Second Law, for example, based on Sir John Maddox's 23 years as editor of the journal Nature, seems to have identified a true universal: ''Reviewers who are best placed to understand an author's work are the least likely to draw attention to its achievements, but are prolific sources of minor criticism, especially the identification of typos.''

But Ernst Pöppel, a brain researcher at the University of Munich, may have found something even more profound in Pöppel's Universal: ''We take life three seconds at a time.'' A handshake lasts about three seconds. So does the preparation for a golf swing. And short-term memory. The timing of phrases in spontaneous speech. And the pauses when channel surfing for television fare. There is something uncanny here, a sense that some principle governing perception and cognition is at work.

As for the lack of cosmological laws, maybe they remain elusive because of John D. Barrow's First Law: ''Any Universe simple enough to be understood,'' proposes this mathematical physicist, ''is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it.''

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 11 of the National edition with the headline: CONNECTIONS; Finding the Universal Laws That Are There, Waiting . . .. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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