I have just been reading an article by the BBC correspondent Jonathan Amos (about neutrinos spontaneously changing their type in-flight).

Yet again, the story refers to the "Laws of Physics". I am very very disappointed. Despite what you may have learned at school, and have seen in movies and TV, there are no laws of physics, and the mission of science is not about the discovery of a set of underlying rules.

Do you really believe that the real physical world follows rules? Don't you always know that, when you hear something like "that can't happen. It is against the laws of physics" it will turn out to be wrong, and that nature is always stranger than any set of man-made rules?

What science is, at its core, is a set of models of the physical world. For those of you who studied some basic physics at school, the concept of a model is easy to illustrate. You learned at one stage that light is a wave, and probably did some experiments to compare the behaviour of waves in water to that of light. Then you learned that there are situations where the wave model of light is not correct, and that light is also, sometimes, a particle. The trick (when it came to passing tests and exams) was to know in which situations to apply which model. Later you might also have learned about quantum mechanics, which is a model which combines both the wave and particle models.

Science is producing ever better (more accurate comprehensive) models; that is the job of science.

Why is the distinction between a model and a law so important? Mainly it is about public expectations, and proper understanding of what scientists are telling us. Models are inherently approximate; they are based on some degree of abstraction, in order to reduce complexity. Models always have limitations of accuracy, and of the scope of their applicability (the situations in which they apply - just like you learned about light, at school). If you think of science as the constant improvement of models of the physical world, it is easy to accept that scientific opinion may be inaccurate, or downright wrong, and that scientific opinion may evolve over time. It is much harder to accept that scientific opinion may change, if that change is presented as a change of the "laws of physics".

So please, Mr. Amos (and indeed all of you), try to use more accurate and meaningful terminology in future; then maybe science won't be seen as such a disappointment by so many.

If you want to read a little more on this subject, try the first few paragraphs of "Modern Physics", "Our Models & Physics Laws Are Not Absolute", and "How the Laws of Physics Lie" (an excellent review and overview here).

Quite some time ago (July 2013) I wrote about how there are no such things as the laws of science (here). I explained that science provides us with a set of models which approximately describe how the physical world will behave in various circumstances. I was very disparaging about the author of the article in question.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I read this report on the Mother Nature Network, which contains a quote by Albert Einstein, in a letter to German physicist Max Born: "I am quite convinced that someone will eventually come up with a theory whose objects, connected by laws, are not probabilities but considered facts, as used to be taken for granted until quite recently".

Einstein is considered to be one of the greatest scientists in history, and it was a real shock to me to discover that he, apparently, did not properly understand something so fundamental about the nature of science, his career and area of expertise.

It seems that even our heroes are flawed.