From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Jan 08 2003 - 10:15:06 MST
Frederick Mann wrote:
> ...
> My Martian friend concluded by saying
> that Hawking probably hadn't read what
> Nietzsche wrote about "laws" being
> human descriptions of regularities they
> think they observe in the universe.
>
> Frederick Mann
I believe that if you asked Hawking what a natural law was, he'd come to
a description rather like that of Nietzsche. This is the common
interpretation among physical scientists. They don't always come right
out an say it. Some of them probably haven't even explicitly formulated
it. But "Maxwell's Demon" was not intended to represent a real entity,
and he felt this so obvious that I don't believe that he ever even
explicitly stated that. (It was clearly implied, however: "Imagine, if
you will, a demon...." (Well, it's been a few years, and the original
was in German, so don't take the quotes literally.)
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