Two parables from The Three-Body Problem about what an observed regularity is worth. In the shooter, a marksman puts a hole in a paper target every ten centimetres, and the two-dimensional creatures living on the target deduce a great law of their universe. In the farmer, a turkey on a farm notices that food arrives at eleven every morning and formulates it as a law, which holds until Thanksgiving morning.
What they separate
The two failure modes are not the same. The shooter’s law is real, repeatable and entirely an artefact of an intention outside the system, invisible from inside it and indifferent to it. The farmer’s law is real, repeatable and correct right up to the moment it is cancelled by an intention that was always aimed at the observer. Neither is refuted by more observations of the same kind, which is the point: a regularity observed from inside a system cannot by itself distinguish a law of nature from a schedule. The farmer is a retelling of Bertrand Russell’s chicken, the standard illustration of the problem of induction.
Why they belong on this shelf
Because the usual defence of a strange record is that it replicates, and these two say replication is necessary and not sufficient. They are also the novel’s own account of what is being done to its physicists: the Sophon attack works by making a regularity fail, and the characters who survive it intellectually are the ones who ask what is generating the regularity rather than what the regularity is. The same question is the one worth asking of any long clean run of anomalous data.
What it is not
Fiction, and offered as parable rather than argument. Neither hypothesis is testable as stated, and in the novel both come true, which is a novelist’s privilege and not a result.
Connections
The Three-Body Problem · Sophon · Simulation Argument · Fermi Paradox · When Prophecy Fails