Physics presents itself as the most rigorous, disenchanted of sciences. Yet one of its most basic assumptions rests on a metaphor imported wholesale from politics and theology: the idea of laws of nature.
The metaphor comes from a very particular historical moment. Early modern natural philosophers, working in a Christian Europe, construed the cosmos as the orderly creation of a rational lawgiver. Just as a sovereign issues decrees binding their subjects, so too were the motions of stars and stones taken to obey divine command. The language of “law” carried this theological-political scaffolding forward, long after physics styled itself as secular.
To call dynamics a “law” is not a neutral description. It smuggles in an image of authority, decree, and inevitability. Natural processes are not just regularities — they are obediences. This grants physics the rhetorical aura of a legal code: prescriptive, universal, inviolable. The metaphor collapses possibility into necessity, disguising the fact that “laws” are humanly construed patterns of relation.
Once we see the metaphor, alternatives come into view. We might speak of habits of nature, tendencies, or possibilities. Each shifts the construal away from authoritarian decree and toward patterned potential. To move beyond “laws” is not to deny regularity — it is to reframe how regularity is understood.
Physics prides itself on purging anthropocentrism, yet here, in its very core vocabulary, it clings to the most anthropocentric of metaphors. To see the frame is to notice that what we call “laws of nature” are not decrees from on high, but the sediment of construal, dressed in the robes of authority.
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