Related papers: Are there Boltzmann brains in the vacuum
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
We develop a simple model to study classical fields on the background of a fluctuating spacetime volume. It is applied to formulate the stochastic Einstein equations with a perfect-fluid source. We investigate the particular case of a…
This article explores the constraints of perception and cognition in relativistic physics. Describing reality as a cognitive representation of our sensory inputs, the article shows how the limitations in perception translate to the…
The theory of cosmological fluctuations assumes that the pre-inflationary state of the universe was the quantum vacuum of a scalar field(s) coupled to gravity. The observed cosmic microwave background fluctuations are then interpreted as…
We discuss the possible role of quantum horizon fluctuations on black hole radiance, especially whether they can invalidate Hawking's analysis based upon transplanckian modes. We are particularly concerned with ``enhanced'' fluctuations…
Pain is among the most salient of experiences while also, curiously, being among the most malleable. A large body of research has revealed that a multitude of explicit strategies can be used to effectively alter the attention-demanding…
The machinery of the human brain -- analog, probabilistic, embodied -- can be characterized computationally, but what machinery confers what computational powers? Any such system can be abstractly cast in terms of two computational…
A semiclassical kinetic theory is presented for the fluctuating photon flux emitted by a disordered medium in thermal equilibrium. The kinetic equation is the optical analog of the Boltzmann-Langevin equation for electrons. Vacuum…
The vector perturbations induced on the brane by gravitational waves propagating in the bulk are studied in a cosmological framework. Cosmic expansion arises from the brane motion in a non-compact five-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime.…
A possibility to describe quantum gravitational fluctuations of the spacetime background is provided by virtual $D$-branes. These effects may induce a tiny violation of the Lorentz invariance (as well as a possible violation of the…
LLMorphism is the biased belief that human cognition works like a large language model. I argue that the rise of conversational LLMs may make this bias increasingly psychologically available. When artificial systems produce human-like…
Vacuum fluctuations have observable consequences, like the Casimir force appearing between two mirrors in vacuum. This force is now measured with good accuracy and agreement with theory. We discuss the meaning and consequences of these…
We investigate the thermodynamical properties of quantum fields in curved spacetime. Our approach is to consider quantum fields in curved spacetime as a quantum system undergoing an out-of-equilibrium transformation. The non-equilibrium…
In brane-worlds, our universe is assumed to be a submanifold, or brane, embedded in a higher-dimensional bulk spacetime. Focusing on scenarios with a curved five-dimensional bulk spacetime, I discuss their gravitational and cosmological…
The cosmological perturbations on a bouncing brane are studied. The brane is moving inside a Klebanov-Strassler throat where the infra-red region of the geometry is smoothly cut off. For an observer confined to the world-volume of the…
The promise of quantum neural nets, which utilize quantum effects to model complex data sets, has made their development an aspirational goal for quantum machine learning and quantum computing in general. Here we provide new methods of…
It has been proposed that there is a wave excitation in animal brains, whose role is to represent three dimensional local space in a working memory. Evidence for the wave comes from the mammalian thalamus, the central body of the insect…
Boltzmann showed that in spite of momentum and energy redistribution through collisions, a rarefied gas confined in a isotropic harmonic trapping potential does not reach equilibrium; it evolves instead into a breathing mode where density,…
Massive gravity is a modified theory of general relativity. In this paper, we study, using a method in which the scale factor changes as a particle in a "potential", all possible cosmic evolutions in a ghost-free massive gravity. We find…
In recent years, researchers have been exploring ways to generalize Boltzmann machines (BMs) to quantum systems, leading to the development of variations such as fully-visible and restricted quantum Boltzmann machines (QBMs). Due to the…