Hawking (1988: 172):
Gradually, however, it must have been noticed that there were certain regularities: the sun always rose in the east and set in the west, whether or not a sacrifice had been made to the sun god. Further, the sun, the moon, and the planets followed precise paths across the sky that could be predicted in advance with considerable accuracy. The sun and the moon might still be gods, but they were gods who obeyed strict laws, apparently without any exceptions, if one discounts stories like that of the sun stopping for Joshua.
At first, these regularities and laws were obvious only in astronomy and a few other situations. However, as civilisation developed, and particularly in the last 300 years, more and more regularities and laws were discovered.
Blogger Comments:
From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, regularities are assessments in terms of modalisation: usuality/probability. Descriptions of regularities are laws in the sense of general laws, not laws in the sense of requiring obedience, which are assessments in terms of modulation: obligation/inclination.
Moreover, phenomena (such as the trajectory of planets) do not obey their metaphenomenal reconstruals ("strict laws") any more than a landscape obeys a map of that landscape.
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