Characters:
Professor Quillibrace — precise, unflappable
Mr Blottisham — juridical, indignant, fond of authority
Miss Elowen Stray — attentive, thoughtful, increasingly clear-sighted
Blottisham:
I’m sorry, Professor, but this is where I must draw the line.
Physics has laws. Laws are obeyed. That is what makes them laws.
Quillibrace:
No, Blottisham. That is what makes them metaphors.
Elowen:
I think I see the problem already. We speak as though the universe were… under orders.
Blottisham:
Well of course it is! Otherwise anything could happen! Apples might fall upwards! Light might dawdle!
Quillibrace:
Nothing is being restrained. Nothing is being compelled.
What you are calling “obedience” is simply the persistence of a system under repeated instantiation.
Blottisham:
That sounds suspiciously evasive.
Quillibrace:
It is evasive only of mythology.
Elowen:
So when we say “no signal travels faster than c,” we’re not describing enforcement?
Quillibrace:
Correct. We are describing a condition of intelligibility.
Descriptions that violate that condition do not depict rebellious phenomena — they fail to cohere as descriptions within that system.
Blottisham:
But surely something stops them!
Quillibrace:
Nothing stops them.
They simply cannot be integrated.
Elowen:
So the failure is descriptive, not physical?
Quillibrace:
Precisely. The system dissolves before the phenomenon ever arrives.
Blottisham:
Then what are laws, if not commands?
Quillibrace:
They are summaries of stable constraints.
They compress what remains invariant across successful instantiations of a system.
They do not cause events.
They do not govern behaviour.
They record coherence.
Elowen:
That would explain why laws change when theories change — without imagining that nature revised its rulebook.
Quillibrace:
Exactly. Newtonian laws did not fail to command the universe properly.
They ceased to define a system capable of holding the phenomena together.
Blottisham:
But laws feel necessary. Surely that necessity means something!
Quillibrace:
It does. But not what you think.
The necessity is internal, not imposed.
Once a system is defined, certain relations cannot be altered without destroying the system itself.
That is not governance.
That is structure.
Elowen:
So necessity is not force — it’s non-negotiability.
Quillibrace:
Well put.
Blottisham (after a pause):
Then all this talk of nature “obeying laws”…
Quillibrace:
…is a flattering projection.
It mirrors courts, kings, and commandments.
The universe requires none of them.
Elowen:
And once we drop the metaphor, nothing is lost?
Quillibrace:
Nothing of physics.
Only the mythology.
Blottisham:
I must admit… the universe sounds less dramatic without laws barking orders.
Quillibrace:
On the contrary.
It becomes quieter — and far more exacting.
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