The old saying is that the only constant is change.
Most people don't think that line applies to the rules of the universe. Researchers at Microsoft, scientists at Brown University and an expert who worked on Disney's "Wrinkle in Time" think the laws of physics might be changing, complicating our quest to understand the universe.
The team at Popular Mechanics argued for the mind-bending hypothesis in a paper titled "The Autodidactic Universe" that was published earlier this year. An autodidact is someone who learns without a mentor or teacher, and these researchers say that the universe may be one.
The authors of the paper asked if there was a mechanism woven into the fabric of the natural world that could allow the universe to learn its laws.
The theory says that the universe has sought stability over time. PopMech draws parallels to animal evolution. Cats and dogs have survived because they adapted to the environment around them, even though there are no trilobites anymore.
In an early version of the universe, the laws of gravity that all matter in the universe attracts other matter with a force directly proportional to the product of their mass and square of their center might not have been true.
The system will teach itself, and some fundamental laws will arise, and that is what Janna Levin, a professor of physics and astronomy, said. If the universe can compute with a set of algorithms, then maybe it can do the same kind of thing we see in artificial intelligence, where you have self-learning systems that teach themselves new rules. We mean laws of physics by rules.
The paper's authors acknowledge their own skepticism and wrote their conclusions with caution, cautioning that their work is only a baby step in the formation of a new theory.
The authors say that this is just a first step. There are different spin-offs from our approach.
The laws of physics might learn and adapt over time. It reminds us that the universe is not the same as we thought.
Here's everything you wanted to know about the universe.
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