Laws of nature are aspects of reality which humans can use in order to determine if their endeavors will be successful or beneficial. Laws of nature are so powerful that, once known, they not only allow you to predict the future, they allow you to predict future knowledge.
URL: https://www.loc.gov/free-to-use/scientists-and-inventors/
Imagine overhearing this conversation:
Le Verrier: Hey Mr. Galle, can I ask a favor of you?
Galle: Sure thing, Mr. Le Verrier.
Le Verrier: Will you discover a planet for me?
Galle: What do you mean?
Le Verrier: If you look through your fancy telescope, in the night sky, on 23 Sep 1846, at this particular location, then you are going to see a planet.
Galle: Have you seen this planet?
Le Verrier: No, I don’t have access to a powerful telescope like you do.
Galle: Then how do you know that it even exists, let alone where it is going to be found on the night of 23 Sep 1846?
Le Verrier: Math.
Galle: What?! You can’t discover new knowledge with “math” — math is just an abstraction.
Le Verrier: But this math applies to a law of nature: gravitational law. You see, the planet Uranus was discovered about 70 years ago and it’s completing its first revolution around the Sun since its discovery, but it’s been acting funny — indicating that something lies beyond it, something with gravitational pull.
Galle: Are you telling me that it hasn’t even gone around the Sun more than once and you — with just a little “math” — already “know” that a planet lies beyond it?
Le Verrier: Yes.
Galle: Alright, if I agree to look for it, what’s in it for me?
Le Verrier: You will be the first human being to actually see it as a new planet.
Galle did look on the night of 23 Sep 1846, and he did find Neptune where Le Verrier said it would be found (but just 1 degree off). A law of nature, once known, allowed Le Verrier to predict knowledge that humans would come to have about planets. It was something that he already knew was true, but for others, they needed to see it first.
He knew of the planet’s existence without having any direct evidence of it.
Imagine this conversation approximately 25 years later:
Mendeleev: While human beings only have knowledge of 70 elements, there are more of them.
Interlocutor: What are you talking about? You can’t predict things about which nothing is currently known!
Mendeleev: Oh yes I can. I can even tell you about the chemical properties of these “not-yet-discovered” elements.
Interlocutor: That’s “crazy talk.” You ought to be commited to an insane asylum. How can you know — not just that undiscovered chemical elements exist — but also know the properties which they will be found to have once they are examined empirically?
Mendeleev: I discovered a law of nature. I call it the Periodic Law.
Interlocutor: C’mon, man! You can’t just go from discovering some “law of nature” to then knowing about the existence of things which have not ever been discovered!
Mendeleev: Wanna’ bet?
Interlocutor: Alright, tell me about one of these undiscovered elements, along with the chemical properties that it will be discovered to have once the chemists have performed enough experiments on it.
Mendeleev: Do you see this empty space right here in my Periodic Table of Elements?
Interlocutor: Yes, but you have to be pretty cocky to create a table of elements with holes in it which you say will, in the future, be filled with brand new elements which humanity has yet to discover.
Mendeleev: Alright, the element which will be put there will be found to have an atomic weight of 72 and specific gravity (ratio of density as compared to water) of 5.5. This new element, once discovered by humankind, will be found to form compounds with oxygen and chlorine, and when it does, the resulting density will be …
Interlocutor: This is poppycock! How in the Sam Hell can you be getting so specific about something which has not even been discovered yet?!
Mendeleev: Are you taking the bet or not?
The element in question, germanium, would be found to have a true atomic weight of 72.3 and a specific gravity of 5.469 — each value less than 1% different from what Mendeleev said it would be discovered to have.
The moral of these two ‘adapted-from-real-life’ stories is that knowing the laws of nature can be of big help to humanity.
For instance, if you know that a typical gap between a facemask and the skin is 45-to-90 microns, but also that culturable (potentially-infective) viral particles are almost always below 5 microns (from 9-to-18 times smaller than the gap between mask and face) then it tells you if masks are likely to “work” or not — before you even try them.
An ambitious Real-life Application
Another potential law of nature has to do with how human beings respond to attempted government reform. When you need better government, you can ask if you should use “gradualism” — i.e., slowly change the government for the better — or if you should instead use “shock therapy” (dramatically change the government, quickly).
Here is a quote about how fast you should remove price controls, after you have put them in place:
A less benign argument also lends support to a link between low supply response and opposition to relaxing controls. Shortages create rents, and rents will attract lobbyists in favor of continuation of those policies that create the rents.
Because a slow removal of price controls incentivizes people who individually benefit from maintaining them, slow removals are almost guaranteed to at least partially backfire. In the same vein, a complete-but-slow overhaul of government will incentivize those individuals who benefit from big government to work against you.
It’s like being on a tug-of-war team against another team that grows larger the more you are winning. It is better to just yank the other team across-the-line abruptly, before others have been incentivized to join-in on the other side to thwart you.
President Trump once said that 70% of government regulations are not justified. He ordered that two regulations must be repealed for each new regulation formed. That is a method known as “gradualism” — i.e., slowly change the government for the better. But when you examine the number of pages of federal regulations, they didn’t shrink.
Gradual reform failed.
After a proper warning that gives people a lead-time of 1-3 years, a “shock therapy” plan would “burn” 70% of the pages in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Similarly, after a 1-3 year warning-window, the Federal Reserve could be dismantled, returning the USA to a monetary standard based on precious metals like gold.
Entire government departments and agencies can be given a similar 1-3 year sunset. Environment and education and “health” agencies/departments — for example — would all be returned to the states. Restoring liberty will open opportunity for struggling Americans.
That perverse incentives exist and that they maintain coercive governments over people is an axiom, a truism that you have to learn to live with. But knowledge about how it is that things and people respond to change can help guide us to better days.
Our Founders knew about basic laws of nature and human interaction, but we’ve lost our way now.
Let’s return to the humility of acting in accordance with the nature of things, rather than pressing forward toward some fanatical plan of a Great Reset with even more authoritarian technocratic tyranny baked into it, such as surveillance and CBDCs.
Reference
[Planet discovered abstractly (with just math and a law of nature)] — https://www.nasa.gov/history/175-years-ago-astronomers-discover-neptune-the-eighth-planet/
[weights and properties of undiscovered elements to within 1 percent] — https://www.sciencenews.org/article/periodic-table-history-chemical-elements-150-anniversary
[argument against gradual reform] — Should Price Reform Proceed Gradually or in a "Big Bang?" https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/128881468742459670/pdf/multi0page.pdf