The Order of Physical Law
Fuente:
arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866908455792541696 |
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| author | Sichelman, Ted |
| author_facet | Sichelman, Ted |
| contents | First-order legal relations specify the duties of legal actors. For instance, the duty not to trespass derives from a first-order law. Second-order legal relations generally concern the intentional, volitional acts of legal actors exercising legal powers to change first-order laws or legal relations. For example, a landowner may exercise a second-order power to change another legal actor's duty not to trespass into a legal permission to enter the landowner's property. This article adapts the notion of legal order to propose a theory of first- and higher-order physical laws, contending that current physical theories implicitly (and wrongly) assume that essentially all physical processes can be modeled using first-order laws. Incorporating second- and higher-order structures from legal models into physical theories provides a novel approach for framing problems in physics, such as the process of quantum measurement. Specifically, quantum measurement is better explained as a fundamentally second-order physical process that alters the underlying first-order physical "microlaws" governing the evolution of the quantum system. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_14145 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | The Order of Physical Law Sichelman, Ted Physics and Society Quantum Physics First-order legal relations specify the duties of legal actors. For instance, the duty not to trespass derives from a first-order law. Second-order legal relations generally concern the intentional, volitional acts of legal actors exercising legal powers to change first-order laws or legal relations. For example, a landowner may exercise a second-order power to change another legal actor's duty not to trespass into a legal permission to enter the landowner's property. This article adapts the notion of legal order to propose a theory of first- and higher-order physical laws, contending that current physical theories implicitly (and wrongly) assume that essentially all physical processes can be modeled using first-order laws. Incorporating second- and higher-order structures from legal models into physical theories provides a novel approach for framing problems in physics, such as the process of quantum measurement. Specifically, quantum measurement is better explained as a fundamentally second-order physical process that alters the underlying first-order physical "microlaws" governing the evolution of the quantum system. |
| title | The Order of Physical Law |
| topic | Physics and Society Quantum Physics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14145 |