Meanwhile, everybody expects the law to break at some point (relatively soon, if not already). So what is it then? The observation formerly known as Moore’s law? Seems a bit of a silly way to chronicle contemporary, short lived phenomena.
It was clear not long after Moore's law that it likely wouldn't continue indefinitely unless we could work at the quantum scale somehow, there was no path for scaling beyond that. We could extend that to Planck scale if we wanted to reach absolute limits of understanding but you can only double density so many times unless we don't understand space and matter that well.
Unlike the “laws of nature” or “laws of society” there is no such clear expectation of a governance in this case. Moore’s law is a rate observation. If it’s governed by anything, it represents our global investment in technological advancement.
When it comes to laws of nature I would argue there's no clear governance in the laws of nature either. Why is the speed of light casualty? Why does space and time behave according to general relativity? Heck, I don't even know why my software behaves the way it does sometimes and it is well defined but it's so complex and behaviors become emergent that even that struggles to find a definite cause.
Laws are often just observational trends, pretty much always in science. Science itself isn't definitive and is structured under that assumption of change. All laws are is a culmination of defining a pattern our best understanding of observations and prodding at the universe. What governs the law of conservation of mass (hint it was taught as a "law" when I was in school but clearly isn't after nuclear physics and GR discoveries). Even Newton's "laws" are flawed as we know now and were just very amazing pattern approximations that apply to most but not all cases--what governs these are really GR/SR, but we don't know what governs them. Take black holes at the event horizon and deeper--we really don't know what's going on, we're just taking our well defined and studied sets of known patterns and trying to imagine and extrapolate what goes on. I wouldn't fault Moore's law too much, it may lack some of the deep rigor we expect in smaller sgstems but it was a pretty good and useful observation for quite some time.
We need to shed the idea that science will always give us the deepest underlying why, because philosophically it may not. It may get us very close and is a useful endeavor but we may never understand the causes of the most core relationships we discover. We like to think of laws like axioms in mathematics but they simply aren't in pretty much every case I can think of.
Because “Moore’s contemporary short lived phenomena” isn’t as catchy? Words can be used in all sorts of non-literal ways.
So it'd still be Moore 's law, just not true and relevant anymore.
I think it had more to do with 'Moore' rhyming with the word 'law'.
There hasn't been a radical shift in the use of the word 'law' over time.