Are Possible Impossible Transformations Compatible With Newton's Laws?

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In the standard picture, when we have newton's laws, we can derive the fact that energy is conserved and momentum is conserved. But they seem a little bit parasitic on the underlying dynamical laws. And in general, once you have derived a confession manergy within a specific law of motion,. Er, that isn't very explanatory about possible other laws of motion. So i think it would be better to consider them as at least on an equal footing, if not a more fundamental footing, than those dynamical laws for reasons of explanatory power. Is that fair? Yes.

Traditional physics works within the “Laplacian paradigm”: you give me the state of the universe (or some closed system), some equations of motion, then I use those equations to evolve the system through time. Constructor theory proposes an alternative paradigm: to think of physical systems in terms of counterfactuals — the set of rules governing what can and cannot happen. Originally proposed by David Deutsch, constructor theory has been developed by today’s guest, Chiara Marletto, and others. It might shed new light on quantum gravity and fundamental physics, as well as having applications to higher-level processes of thermodynamics and biology.

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Chiara Marletto received her DPhil in physics from the University of Oxford. She is currently a research fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Her new book is The Science of Can and Can’t: A Physicist’s Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals.

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