What Are the Laws of the Universe? | Laura Mersini-Houghton, Gerard ’t Hooft, and Helen Beebee

Since Newton, we have assumed that the universe is governed by unchanging laws, and Stephen Hawking once even argued that we were close to uncovering them in their entirety. But are these laws really eternal features of the universe? If so, how do they emerge and how do they act? Or are they merely human ways of codifying the world, which remains somehow unknowable and inexplicable?

Helen Beebee: Manchester Professor of Philosophy, Beebee is President of the Aristotelian Society as well as the British Society for the Philosophy of Science. She is the author of Hume on Causation and Metaphysics: The Key Concepts. Beebee is also an advocate for better representation of women in philosophy.

Gerard ‘t Hooft: Nobel prize winning physicist, t' Hooft is the author of Time in Powers of Ten and In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks. He now has a website dedicated to helping young people achieve their own Nobel Prize with the help of his teaching.

Laura Mersini-Houghton: Cosmologist and Professor of Physics, Mersini-Houghton's work focuses on the multiverse, and has been covered by the New Scientist, the Discovery Channel and the BBC. She supports the multiverse hypothesis, the idea that multiple universes exist, and our own is just one amongst many.