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I have a conceptual question.

There is a law in science for every phenomenon in nature, like gravity or electric field.

But also there are laws for springs or capacitors etc... I mean the engineering materials that are produced by engineering processes, not can be found in the nature itself. Is there a name for those types of laws, the name that indicates the difference from other scientific laws?

user50322
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    Named laws (e.g., Hooke's law for springs) are scientific laws, so it's not clear to me what you mean. – Kyle Kanos Mar 04 '15 at 04:12
  • You could argue that purely descriptive laws like Hooke's which just describe an observation but don't offer any explanation are different from some fundamental theory which predicts effects. But I don't know what you would call them other . – Martin Beckett Mar 04 '15 at 04:44
  • @Kyle yes Hooke's law is a scientific law. But you can't find a spring in nature or a capacitor. You must make them in a factory. Right? I am asking about those types of laws. – user50322 Mar 04 '15 at 11:37
  • People used bent branches as springs for ages before anyone built a helical piece of wire, and Hooke's law describes their behavior pretty well, too. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Mar 04 '15 at 16:26

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There are very few "fundamental" laws - everything else is ultimately derived from them.

But let's look at Maxwell's equations just to see how tricky your question really is.

Maxwell's equations are usually considered "fundamental" but they arrived after Ampère's law and Faraday's law - both of which describe "engineering principles" (magnetic field due to a current, induction due to changes in magnetic field). Taking these, and some mathematical theorems (like Gauss's theorem on the divergence of a vector field), Maxwell described some pretty fundamental aspects of the behavior of electromagnetism. But are his equations really more fundamental than Ampère's and Faraday's - or are they just more elegant?

Ampère's law describes the behavior of electromagnets - this is an "engineering" equation. But it is also fundamental - it describes the ability of moving charges to create a magnetic field.

I think that attempting to neatly categorize "laws" into different boxes will quickly become a difficult and fruitless task - for every categorization you are liable to find exceptions.

If you wanted a name for them, I think that "fundamental" and "derived" might be as good a name as any - but be prepared to have to fight people about which category a particular law belongs to. Because in the end they all describe "how science works", and in that sense they are all fundamental.

Floris
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