> “It leads to a new philosophy of physics that rejects the idea that the universe is a machine governed by unconditional laws with a prior existence, and replaces it with a view of the universe as a kind of self-organising entity in which all sorts of emergent patterns appear, the most general of which we call the laws of physics.”

Is this distinction as meaningful as it first seems; my assumption was that all 'laws of physics' are in essence only ever an expression of our current best understanding of these observed 'generalised patterns'?

By talking about the 'laws', it's easy to start treating these as though they are firm, a-priori rules, but my assumption was that - to physicists - these were always simply a short-cut way of describing a set of common, repeated and testable observations about the universe. Iow they were never 'rules' in the sense that they existed independent of the phenomena they were describing? I'm not a scientist, btw.