The words we have used so far — "control" and "should" — hint at something else too: the idea that the laws actually govern, or dictate, how nature should behave. "In this view the laws are active," explains Barry Loewer, a philosopher at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "They take the state of the Universe at a time and produce subsequent states."
This, in a nutshell, describes what Loewer calls the governing view of the laws of nature. The idea that those laws are fundamental elements of our reality, separate from all the material "stuff" out there, and that they dictate natural processes. This raises an immediate question. Where do those laws come from? Who made them? "When this notion of governing law was originally introduced in the 17th and 18th century, it went along with the idea that there are god's laws," says Loewer. "That god [made] the laws, and that the laws are god's way of making or controlling the motions of material bodies in the Universe. By conceiving of the Universe as governed by god's laws physicists could see themselves as involved in the task of discovering the laws that god chose."
Today the idea of god sits uncomfortably with many of us, which leaves the governing view of the laws with some explaining to do. "Once god drops out of the picture this does become very puzzling," says Loewer. "What does it really amount to, to talk about the laws governing the evolution of the state of the Universe? But that language is still part of physics. You can even find it in ordinary physics textbooks where physicists will talk of Schrödinger's equation 'governing the evolution of the wave function', for example.