addition to energy and matter, some basic operating rules emerged from the big bang. Scientists did not begin to understand how fundamental these rules were until the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. Today, we describe these rules as the fundamental laws of physics. They explain why the frantic and chaotic energies of the primeval atom were not completely directionless—the laws of physics steered change down particular pathways and blocked a nearly infinite range of other possibilities. The laws of physics filtered out those states of the universe that were not compatible with
...more
