Materialism Vs Naturalism

could locate the ultimate source of physical law, as we shall attempt to do here, one might hope to find there not only the known laws, but also new or augmented ones with bearing on at least some of the unsolved mysteries of mind, matter and spacetime geometry. One might then have in hand at last the beginnings of a connected account of the workings of the natural world. That, in brief, is the motivation for the present work.
If discovering the source of physical law seems a task for philosophy as much as for physical science, that is because it is. Before modern times—that is, before the advent of the seventeenth-century Baconian idea that physical theories should be empirically tested[16]—the study of the natural world was considered

He will counter that the laws of physics are not actually real; that they are just names given to regularities of the world discovered and documented by conscious beings (nominalism); or that they are mere concepts in the (material) mind—like the Pythagorean Theorem or the cardinal numbers—concepts that facilitate our talking about the world (conceptualism).[20] One understands the materialist’s argument, of course, but it misses the point. Yes, of course we hold laws in the mind, and of course they do facilitate discussion amongst us. But unlike the Pythagorean Theorem or the cardinal numbers, the laws of nature very obviously have been here from the beginning, and will not go away when we do. They remain with the world, and the world continues under their control with or without us. That, in the author’s view, guarantees the reality of the laws as well as anything could. Of course it is one thing to say that the laws are real and quite another to show that it is so. To do this we shall have to appeal to a higher principle, one going beyond materialism that reveals the transcendent (and mind-independent) source of the laws. This, as was said above, is the main aim of the present volume. If we are successful, the nominalist and conceptualist arguments against the reality of the laws can be considered refuted once and for

This means that the laws of physics take the same form in all frames of reference in four-space, whatever their relative states of motion. The principle applies to all laws, not just those of mechanics. If this were not so, then the laws would undergo changes in form from frame to frame—a hopeless state of affairs for anyone trying to make sense of the regularities of nature. The power of this principle lies (among other things) in its critical function: if one thinks he has discovered a law of nature, but its form varies depending on the motion of the observer’s frame of reference, then it must be judged wrong and without physical significance. Invariance with respect to frame of reference is a necessary condition for the truth of any proposed law of nature (though of course it is not sufficient).
Now suppose that, for simplicity, we restrict ourselves to so-called inertial frames of reference—frames moving at constant velocity relative to each other. Taking account of the three known spatial dimensions we can see that there exists a three-fold infinite set of inertial frames in four-space.[26] According to the Principle of Relativity, all such frames are equivalent and suitable for the formulation of the laws of physics in four-space.