Abstract:
The last 2,500 years have been dominated by the belief, expressed in different forms, that
the Universe is lawful, that is, the Universe is a knowable system governed by rules which
determine the future uniquely and completely. An extreme way to express this belief is to
claim overconfidently that the study of some branches of science will soon be completed, will
soon attend an end. Our aim is to challenge this apocryphal hypothesis by arguing, with
complexity-theoretic arguments, that the Universe is lawless, that is, the Universe is lacking
any kind of general ordered structure implied by the term “law".