Scientists Says, the laws of physics may be changing.

The universe is stranger than we think.

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The only thing that remains constant is change, as the old adage goes.

However, we're willing to bet that most individuals don't believe that line relates to the universe's true rules. However, Microsoft experts, along with academics at Brown University and even a consultant for Disney's "Wrinkle in Time," believe that the laws of physics are slowly changing, confounding our effort to explain the universe.

This week, Popular Mechanics released a comprehensive summary about the team's work, "The Autodidactic Universe," which was published earlier this year and argued for that very mind-bending notion. Of course, an autodidact is someone who learns without the help of a mentor or teacher — and, according to these academics, the cosmos itself may be one.

"We wonder whether there might be a mechanism woven into the fabric of the natural world by which the cosmos could learn its laws," the authors stated in the unpublished paper.

According to the hypothesis, the universe has sought stability over time. PopMech also draws connections between human and animal evolution. There are no longer any trilobites or dinosaurs, but cats and dogs have thrived by adapting to their surroundings — and the cosmos may have done the same.

Newton's equations of gravity, which state that all stuff in the universe attracts other matter with a force precisely proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centres, may not have been true in an earlier form of the universe.

"That system will train itself through time, and some fundamental rules will emerge, and that's really what they're talking about [in the paper]," Janna Levin, a professor of physics and astronomy at Columbia University's Barnard College who wasn't involved in the research, told PopMech. "If the universe can compute with a set of algorithms, then it might be able to do something similar to what we see in artificial intelligence, where self-learning systems teach itself new rules." And by rules, we mean physical laws in cosmology."

The authors of the report recognise their own scepticism and caution in their results, stating that their work is merely a first step toward developing a novel hypothesis and that more research is needed.

"Of course, this is only the beginning," the authors note. "Our technique has a lot of possible side effects."

It's mind-boggling to consider that physical rules could learn and change over time. But it serves as a reminder that the universe is stranger than we can possibly imagine.

 References:

The Autodidactic Universe Stephon Alexander, William J. Cunningham, Jaron Lanier, Lee Smolin, Stefan Stanojevic, Michael W. Toomey, Dave Wecker  https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03902