Hello, everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

I'm your host, John Carroll.

Very often here on the podcast, we talk about the laws of physics, right?

Both what they are and what they might be, you know?

We don't have all of the laws of physics completely settled yet,

so one of the ongoing things that physicists try to do

is suggest different kinds of laws of physics.

But there's different kinds and different kinds.

There are specific laws of physics,

like the standard model of particle physics,

which is a very, very specific set of laws, or Einstein's theory of general relativity

is a specific set of laws.

But then there are broader frameworks within which we can think about proposing laws.

The obvious ones would be quantum mechanics is a broad framework.

Classical mechanics is also a broad framework.

But even those two broad frameworks of classical and quantum mechanics,

they share a certain underlying paradigm,

what in other contexts I've called a Laplacian paradigm,

for doing physics.

And the Laplacian paradigm is basically,

you give me the state of a system, either now or in the far past as initial conditions.

There's something we call the state of the system that has all the information you need.

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