Why We Exist: 7 Reality-Breaking Theories
Oct 21, 2026 · 23 min · 25 segments
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Oct 21, 2026 · 23 min · 25 segments
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Why should the universe obey neat mathematical laws at all? There's no obvious reason that reality couldn't have been a chaotic mess of unrelated rules.
In a hypothetical reality like a video game world, a character analyzing their universe might find a jumble of arbitrary quirky rules put in by a programmer.
They display symmetries, patterns that remain unchanged under various transformations.
As I showed in a prior video, this is why certain quantities like energy and momentum are always conserved.
Emmy Noether showed that if you want the laws of the universe to remain the same over time, then the law of energy conservation has to be true.
And if you want the laws to be the same here as on the moon, or as on a different galaxy, then the law of momentum conservation has to be true.
I have a video on why these laws must be true under those symmetries here if you want to know the details.
The idea that all the different forces and particles we see might be aspects of one single fundamental principle.
Isaac Newton realized that the gravity holding us here on earth and the gravity guiding planets are one and the same law.
In the 19th century, James Clark Maxwell discovered that electricity, magnetism, and light are all unified in a single theory of electromagnetism.
In the 1960s, physicists showed that electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, which is responsible for certain kinds of radioactive decay, are actually two facets of one electroweak force.
These triumphs encourage the idea that the four fundamental forces we know of, that is, electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force, and gravity, might all merge into one force at high energies, or early moments of the Big Bang.
The laws of the universe could exist as they do because at the deepest level, there is only one law, which may even be an elegant and simple one.
This is one of the reasons why so many physicists are working on the elusive theory of everything.
Another answer regarding why our laws exist could be found if we look at the universe from an anthropic point of view.
There are fundamental constants in physics, fixed numbers like the strength of gravity, the charge of an electron, and the mass of a proton, etc.
Why should the universe obey neat mathematical laws at all? There's no obvious reason that reality couldn't have been a chaotic mess of unrelated rules.
In a hypothetical reality like a video game world, a character analyzing their universe might find a jumble of arbitrary quirky rules put in by a programmer.
They display symmetries, patterns that remain unchanged under various transformations.
As I showed in a prior video, this is why certain quantities like energy and momentum are always conserved.
Emmy Noether showed that if you want the laws of the universe to remain the same over time, then the law of energy conservation has to be true.
And if you want the laws to be the same here as on the moon, or as on a different galaxy, then the law of momentum conservation has to be true.
I have a video on why these laws must be true under those symmetries here if you want to know the details.
The idea that all the different forces and particles we see might be aspects of one single fundamental principle.
Isaac Newton realized that the gravity holding us here on earth and the gravity guiding planets are one and the same law.
In the 19th century, James Clark Maxwell discovered that electricity, magnetism, and light are all unified in a single theory of electromagnetism.
In the 1960s, physicists showed that electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, which is responsible for certain kinds of radioactive decay, are actually two facets of one electroweak force.
These triumphs encourage the idea that the four fundamental forces we know of, that is, electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force, and gravity, might all merge into one force at high energies, or early moments of the Big Bang.
The laws of the universe could exist as they do because at the deepest level, there is only one law, which may even be an elegant and simple one.
This is one of the reasons why so many physicists are working on the elusive theory of everything.
Another answer regarding why our laws exist could be found if we look at the universe from an anthropic point of view.
There are fundamental constants in physics, fixed numbers like the strength of gravity, the charge of an electron, and the mass of a proton, etc.
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