Related papers: Astrophysical Paradoxes, long version
Our knowledge of the Universe remains discovery-led: in the absence of adequate physics-based theory, interpretation of new results requires a scientific methodology. Commonly, scientific progress in astrophysics is motivated by the…
Arising out of an attempt at a new foundations of mathematics, in which relations are more primitive than sets, and out of the theoretical physicists' concept of underlying causes of empirical phenomena, the idea of a purely mathematical…
Two paradoxical aspects of the prevailing kinetic equations are presented. One is related to the usual understanding of distribution function and the other to the usual understanding of the phase space. With help of simple counterexamples…
The special theory of relativity is the foundation of modern physics, but its unusual postulate of invariant vacuum speed of light results in a number of plausible paradoxes. This situation leads to radical criticisms and suspicions against…
We generalize the quantum "pigeonhole paradox" to quantum paradoxes involving arbitrary types of particle relations, including orderings, functions and graphs.
In this chapter I focus on asking and answering the following questions: (1) What is a black hole? Answer: There are three types of black holes, namely mathematical black holes, physical black holes and astrophysical black holes. An…
What do we do when cosmology raises questions it cannot answer? These include the existence of a multiverse and the universality of the laws of physics. We cannot settle any of these issues by experiment, and this is where philosophers…
Well known Simpson's paradox is puzzling and surprising for many, especially for the empirical researchers and users of statistics. However there is no surprise as far as mathematical details are concerned. A lot more is written about the…
Wormholes are hypothetical topologically-non-trivial structures of the spacetime. From the theoretical point of view, the possibility of their existence is challenging but cannot be ruled out. This article is a compact and non-exhaustive…
It is proposed that the physical universe is an instance of a mathematical structure which possesses a dual structure, and that this dual structure is the collection of all possible knowledge of the physical universe. In turn, the physical…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
The `star paradox' in phylogenetics is the tendency for a particular resolved tree to be sometimes strongly supported even when the data is generated by an unresolved (`star') tree. There have been contrary claims as to whether this…
The purpose of this paper is to expound and clarify the mathematics and explanations commonly employed in certain notable areas of astronomy and astrophysics. The first section concentrates upon the mathematics employed to represent and…
We describe how cosmology has converged towards a beautiful model of the Universe: the Big Bang Universe. We praise this model, but show there is a dark side to it. This dark side is usually called ``the cosmological problems'': a set of…
Scientific discovery is mediated by ideas that, after being formulated in hypotheses, can be tested, validated, and quantified before they eventually lead to accepted concepts. Computer-mediated discovery in astrophysics is no exception,…
The past few years have seen dramatic breakthroughs and spectacular and puzzling discoveries in astrophysics and cosmology. In many cases, the new observations can only be explained with the introduction of new fundamental physics. Here we…
Many particle physics models of matter admit solutions corresponding to stable or long-lived topological defects. In the context of standard cosmology it is then unavoidable that such defects will form during phase transitions in the very…
Nuclear astrophysics is that branch of astrophysics which helps understanding some of the many facets of the Universe through the knowledge of the microcosm of the atomic nucleus. In the last decades much advance has been made in nuclear…
The paradoxes of the double-slit and the EPR experiments with particles are shown to originate in the implicit assumption that the particles are always located in the classical space. It is demonstrated that there exists a natural…
If time travel is possible, it seems to inevitably lead to paradoxes. These include consistency paradoxes, such as the famous grandfather paradox, and bootstrap paradoxes, where something is created out of nothing. One proposed class of…