This statement is, of course, backed by a wealth of experimental (rung-two) evidence, derived from hundreds of springs, in dozens of laboratories, on thousands of different occasions. However, once anointed as a “law,” physicists interpret it as a functional relationship that governs this very spring, at this very moment, under hypothetical values of the weight. All of these different worlds, where the weight is x pounds and the length of the spring is Lx inches, are treated as objectively knowable and simultaneously active, even though only one of them actually exists.
