Related papers: Shut up and calculate
Recent contributions address the problem of language coexistence as that of two species competing to aggregate speakers, thus focusing on the dynamics of linguistic traits across populations. They draw inspiration from physics and biology…
The author recalls general tendencies of the "mathematization" of the sciences and derives challenges and tentative obstructions for a successful merger of mathematics and physics on fancied steps towards "Quantum Gravity". This is an…
I will propose that the reality to which the quantum formalism implicitly refers is a kind of generalized history, the word history having here the same meaning as in the phrase sum-over-histories. This proposal confers a certain…
Mermin's "shut up and calculate!" somehow summarizes the most widely accepted view on quantum mechanics. This conception has led to a rather constraining way to think and understand the quantum world. Nonetheless, a closer look at the…
This article has one single purpose: introduce a new and simple, yet highly insightful approach to capture, fully and quantitatively, the dynamics of the circular flow of income in economies. The proposed approach relies mostly on basic…
A non-technical argument is presented that there is a link between the mind and the physical world in modern physics. Special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and other areas of physics are explored.…
The physical meaning of the operators is not reducible to the intrinsic relations of the quantum system, since unitary transformations can find other operators satisfying the exact same relations. The physical meaning is determined…
The intuitive reasoning of physicists in conditions of uncertainty is closer to the Bayesian approach than to the frequentist ideas taught at University and which are considered the reference framework for handling statistical problems. The…
Quantum theory (QT) has been confirmed by numerous experiments, yet we still cannot fully grasp the meaning of the theory. As a consequence, the quantum world appears to us paradoxical. Here we shed new light on QT by having it follow from…
I bring forward some arguments to support the thesis that nature is fundamentally discrete, and present my own thoughts about the direction in which one could look for a possible, consistent "theory of everything" describing gravitation and…
In this paper I propose a new principle in physics: the principle of "finiteness". It stems from the definition of physics as a science that deals (among other things) with measurable dimensional physical quantities. Since measurement…
In this paper, we discuss the question whether a physical "simplification" of a model makes it always easier to study, at least from a mathematical and numerical point of view. To this end, we give different examples showing that these…
In this short report the first attempt of a new approach to the still mysterious phenomenon of the life, and its peak, the human being, is presented from the view point of the natural sciences, i.e. of the physics in the broad sense of the…
Practicing mathematicians often assume that mathematical claims, when they are true, have good reasons to be true. Such a state of affairs is "unreasonable", in Wigner's sense, because basic results in computational complexity suggest that…
The unique and beautiful character of certain mathematical results and proofs is often considered one of the most gratifying aspects of engaging with mathematics. We study whether this perception of mathematical arguments having an…
Three recent arguments seek to show that the universal applicability of unitary quantum theory is inconsistent with the assumption that a well-conducted measurement always has a definite physical outcome. In this paper I restate and analyze…
Ever since its foundations were laid nearly a century ago, quantum theory has provoked questions about the very nature of reality. We address these questions by considering the universe, and the multiverse, fundamentally as complex…
I give a compact, pedagogical review of our present understanding of the universe as based on general relativity. This includes the uniform models, with special reference to the cosmological 'constant'; and the equations for…
A theoretical framework based on a simple quasi-number algebra is investigated in a treatment of space-time and gravity.
This is an explanation and defense of "mathematical conceptualism" for a general mathematical and philosophical audience. I make a case that it is cogent, rigorous, attractive, and better suited to ordinary mathematical practice than all…