The job of a chemist is not particularly fancy. Before I switched to the philosophy of chemistry, I spent many hours in a lab mixing solutions and waiting for reactions to happen. I saw how often chemists had to get their hands dirty trying out new things, combining materials with unpredictable reactions, and sometimes even risking their wellbeing. For sure, this messy work has improved our lives in many ways: from the food we eat to life-saving drugs. Yet when it comes to questions about the beginning of the Universe, the ultimate constituents of matter or the evolution of life, no one really goes to a chemist for answers. It is physics that discovers the fundamental laws of nature.
However, it would be wrong to dismiss chemistry as the poor cousin of the sciences. The knowledge produced in chemistry is essential to form a complete and accurate picture of nature, of how it works and of our place in it. To state it more boldly, there are chemical laws, too. These laws can be found hidden within the periodic table, or in the behaviour of chemical reactions. They may not be recognised as laws in the same way as the laws of motion, thermodynamics or general relativity, but they underpin our understanding of the world. Spanning the small to the big, they can help explain everything from why a gold wedding ring does not rust to the emergence of life on Earth.
The idea of ‘laws of nature’ has a long and intriguing history. Some scholars believe that René Descartes established the existence of natural laws in their modern sense. Others trace the idea to Johannes Kepler’s astronomical writings, while it is also mentioned by Seneca, Ovid and William Shakespeare. For example, in The Tragedy of Cymbeline, Shakespeare calls it a natural law that a fetus stays in a mother’s womb for nine months, insinuating the existence of a biological law. The difference in opinion about origins lies in their usage outside scientific enquiry. Apart from their role in the judiciary, laws have also been strongly associated with the divine rule of God, as in the Ten Commandments. These legal and theological definitions led philosophers and scientists to understand the term metaphorically as prescriptions or commandments set by nature. This was, for example, Kepler’s attitude towards his astronomical laws.
Today, philosophers agree that laws serve a special function in science. They describe phenomena or events that always happen in a certain way, under specific conditions. They recur regularly; hence, they are sometimes called ‘regularities’. Of course, there are many things that happen regularly. Bodies with masses attract each other, with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance. This regularity is non-accidental, and science is in the business of understanding such regularities in terms of laws. The law of gravity explains not just the fall of alarm clocks, but also the orbits of the planets, the eclipses that occurred 2,000 years ago and the tidal forces in the seas. It offers more than an explanation for all these events; it unifies them.
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