Related papers: Warum Astrologie nicht funktionieren kann
In cell biology, statistical analysis means testing the hypothesis that there was no effect. This weak form of hypothesis testing neglects effect size, is universally misinterpreted, and is disastrously prone to error when combined with…
Earthquakes occur because of abrupt slips on faults due to accumulated stress in the Earth's crust. Because most of these faults and their mechanisms are not readily apparent, deterministic earthquake prediction is difficult. For effective…
Astronomy has a distinguished tradition of using technology to accelerate the quality and effectiveness of science, and data-intensive initiatives such as the Virtual Observatory lead the way amongst other fields of science. However,…
The theory of measurement is employed to elucidate the physical basis of general relativity. For measurements involving phenomena with intrinsic length or time scales, such scales must in general be negligible compared to the (translational…
Infrastructures are not inherently durable or fragile, yet all are fragile over the long term. Durability requires care and maintenance of individual components and the links between them. Astronomy is an ideal domain in which to study…
The Astropy Project (http://astropy.org) is, in its own words, "a community effort to develop a single core package for Astronomy in Python and foster interoperability between Python astronomy packages." For five years this project has been…
Modern astronomy has been rapidly increasing our ability to see deeper into the universe, acquiring enormous samples of cosmic populations. Gaining astrophysical insights from these datasets requires a wide range of sophisticated…
Stellar occultations and transits occur when a planetary body passes in front of a star (including our Sun). For objects with an atmosphere, refraction plays an essential role to explain the drops of flux and the aureoles observed during…
A common method of making a theory more understandable, is by comparing it to another theory which has been better developed. Radical interpretation is a theory which attempts to explain how communication has meaning. Radical interpretation…
In a multiverse context, determining the probability of being in our particular universe depends on estimating its overall habitability compared to other universes with different values of the fundamental constants. One of the most…
The current literature on AI-advised decision making -- involving explainable AI systems advising human decision makers -- presents a series of inconclusive and confounding results. To synthesize these findings, we propose a simple theory…
Using ultra-precise data from space instrumentation we found that the underlying functions of stellar light curves from some AF pul- sating stars are non-analytic, and consequently their Fourier expansion is not guaranteed. This result…
Usually creative telescoping is used to derive recurrences for sums. In this article we show that the non-existence of a creative telescoping solution, and more generally, of a parameterized telescoping solution, proves algebraic…
In the literature different approaches have been proposed to compute the anisotropies of the astrophysical gravitational wave background. The different expressions derived, although starting from our work Cusin, Pitrou, Uzan, Phys.Rev.D96,…
This paper is a discussion of the physics of magnification in telescopes. Special attention is given to the question of whether telescopes magnify stars. Telescopes do magnify star images, although opinions to the contrary abound.
The work of astronomers is getting more complex and advanced as the progress of computer development occurs. With improved computing capabilities and increased data flow, more sophisticated software is required in order to interpret, and…
The paper discusses the problem of demarcation between the dimensions of natural and the human sciences in contemporary cosmology. In spite of a common presumption that cosmology is a natural science, the specificity of its alleged subject…
The practical distinctions between asteroids and comets, viewed as products of accretion on either side of the snow line, are less clear-cut than previously understood. In this chapter, we discuss the numerous solar system populations which…
The Universe contains everything that exists, including life. And all that exists, including life, obeys universal physical laws. Do those laws then give adequate foundations for a complete explanation of biological phenomena? We discuss…
An overview of the experimental and observational status in gravitational physics is given, both for the known tests of general relativity and Newtonian gravity, but also for the increasing number of results where these theories run into…