A story today in the NYT describes some of the debates among physicists over the apparent order of the universe.  Is the seeming law-like "order" something that transcends space and time – something timeless and absolute – or is it something that emerged as the universe developed, something perhaps more immanent?

If the laws of physics are to have any sticking power at all, to be
real laws, one could argue, they have to be good anywhere and at any
time, including the Big Bang, the putative Creation. Which gives them a
kind of transcendent status outside of space and time.

On the
other hand, many thinkers — all the way back to Augustine — suspect
that space and time, being attributes of this existence, came into
being along with the universe — in the Big Bang, in modern vernacular.
So why not the laws themselves?

   This gets my Taoist hackles up.  The Platonists, or neo-Platonists, seem to me to have a distinctly non-Taoist attitude:

…As far back as the fifth century B.C. the Greek mathematician and
philosopher Pythagoras and his followers proclaimed that nature was
numbers. Plato envisioned a higher realm of ideal forms, of perfect
chairs, circles or galaxies, of which the phenomena of the sensible
world were just flawed reflections. Plato set a transcendent tone that
has been popular, especially with mathematicians and theoretical
physicists, ever since.

 This seems to be assuming the thing that needs to be explained: order.  It also assumes that we are capable of fully and truly apprehending cosmic order.  How arrogant!  If Taoism teaches us anything it is the limits of human knowledge and language.  I tried to capture this in a previous post; here’s an excerpt:

Way is, of course, the grand totality
of all things at once now. It is the "everything" that string theory
aims at explaining.  But the simplicity of Way comes not from our
effort to impose a singular explanation upon it, which is, for a
Taoist, simply impossible.  Rather, its simplicity comes from its
straightforwardness: it is everything.  And since each thing has a
certain integrity unto itself (Te), the totality of all things (Tao) is simply the numberless summation of everything.  We might say Tao is all Te.
Its unity is simply a matter of coincidence; that is, the simultaneity
of all things at this moment.  It is beyond our description and,
certainly, beyond our explanation.

      Seems to me that a Taoist sensibility would be closer to this description of quantum mechanics, from the same NYT piece:

Plato and the whole idea of an independent reality, moreover, took a
shot to the mouth in the 1920s with the advent of quantum mechanics.
According to that weird theory, which, among other things, explains why
our computers turn on every morning, there is an irreducible randomness
at the microscopic heart of reality that leaves an elementary particle,
an electron, say, in a sort of fog of being everywhere or anywhere, or
being a wave or a particle, until some measurement fixes it in place.

 "Irreducible randomness," that’s almost it…  But there continues to be this impulse, among modern scientists, to find a singular answer:

Dr. Wheeler has suggested that the laws of nature could emerge
“higgledy-piggledy” from primordial chaos, perhaps as a result of
quantum uncertainty. It’s a notion known as “it from bit.” Following
that logic, some physicists have suggested we should be looking not so
much for the ultimate law as for the ultimate program.

 But if randomness is really irreducible, why would we think there is an ultimate anything?  Why not just accept dynamism and change and  uncertainty, at some cosmic level at least?  The author of the article seems – ultimately – to come to this kind of openness:

…Since cosmologists don’t know how the universe came into being, or even
have a convincing theory, they have no way of addressing the conundrum
of where the laws of nature come from or whether those laws are unique
and inevitable or flaky as a leaf in the wind.

 That last image could be something in Chuang Tzu.  And, happily, the writer makes a final apt observation, not lamenting the absence of a singular, universal law of nature but discovering it in its own negation:

The law of no law, of course, is still a law.

 That comes pretty close to the Tao Te Ching…