ABSTRACT
The word 'law' is ambiguous, and anyone who talks of a natural or scientific law being 'broken' is confusing the two main uses of the word. A law of society prescribes what we may or may not do. It can be broken-indeed, if we could not break it there would be no need to have it: society does not legislate against a citizen's being in two places at once. A law of nature, on the other hand, is not prescriptive but descriptive. It tells us what happens - for instance that water boils at I00° Centigrade. As such it purports to be nothing more than a statement of what - given certain initial conditions, such as that there is a body of water and that it is heated - occurs. It may be true or false, but it cannot be 'broken', for it is not a command : water is not being ordered to boil at I00° Centigrade. The pre-scientific belief that it was (by some god) is the reason for the unfortunate ambiguity: the laws of nature were thought to be commands of the gods. But nowadays no one would dispute that they are not prescriptions of any kind, to be 'kept' or 'obeyed' or 'broken', but explanatory statements of a general character which purport to be factual and must therefore be modified or abandoned if found to be inaccurate.
