Laws of Nature as Habits

The boldest form of Rupert Sheldrake's hypothesis is also the simplest to state: the laws of nature may not be fixed laws at all, but habits. If memory is inherent in nature, then the regularities we observe are not eternal decrees imposed on the universe from outside, but patterns that have built up through repetition — and that could, in principle, still be evolving.

Habit, not law

Once a new pattern of organisation comes into being, repetition strengthens it. "The more often patterns are repeated, the more probable they become," Sheldrake writes; "even the so-called laws of nature may be more like habits." A zinc atom, a quartz crystal, an insulin molecule have repeated their forms so many countless billions of times that their habits are, for all practical purposes, fixed — which is exactly why they behave as if governed by changeless law. The place to look for the building-up of a habit is therefore not in ancient, well-worn forms but in genuinely new ones.

An evolving universe

The deeper argument is cosmological. "There is no need to suppose that all the laws of nature sprang into being fully formed at the moment of the Big Bang," Sheldrake writes, "like a kind of cosmic Napoleonic code, or that they exist in a metaphysical realm beyond time and space." Eternal, fixed laws made sense when the universe itself was thought eternal and unchanging; but "we now live in a radically evolutionary universe," and an evolving cosmos might just as naturally have evolving regularities. He notes that the physicist Lee Smolin independently proposed that "nature is developing habits" — an idea, Sheldrake observes, "very similar to my own." And "habit," he suggests, is the less presumptuous word: "many kinds of organisms have habits, but only humans have laws."

Are the constants constant?

Here the idea meets hard numbers. Sheldrake points to the published values of the so-called fundamental constants. The measured speed of light, he notes, dropped by about 20 kilometres per second in laboratories around the world between 1928 and 1945, and then settled — until, in 1972, the value was fixed by definition, so that it can no longer be observed to vary at all. The gravitational constant G, the least precisely known of the constants, still scatters between laboratories and across the years by far more than the quoted margins of error.

His point is a careful one: not that he has proved the constants vary, but that defining them as fixed forecloses the question before it can be asked. And he proposes the obvious way to reopen it — measure the constants simultaneously at laboratories around the world, and look for fluctuations that rise and fall together. If the "constants" drift in unison, something real is changing; if they wander independently, it is only measurement error. The experiment has not been done; the question, he argues, remains genuinely open.

This is the same argument that opens his critique of materialism, where the fixity of the laws of nature is the third of his ten dogmas: The Science Delusion & the Ten Dogmas. It rests, in the end, on the idea worked out in Morphic Resonance & Formative Causation — that nature remembers.

Sources & talks

Primary sources: Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past (1988; rev. 2011) · his essay "Most of the So-Called Laws of Nature Are More Like Habits" and his FAQ at sheldrake.org · and his account of the variation in the constants in The Science Delusion / Science Set Free (2012), set out in the talk embedded on the The Science Delusion & the Ten Dogmas page.