Related papers: Unity, Disunity and Pluralism in Science
We give a short, critical review of the issue of decoherence. We establish the most general framework in which decoherence can be discussed, how it can be quantified and how it can be measured. We focus on environment induced decoherence…
In 2007 an international conference engaged a reflection on the present conditions for sciences and scientific practice, to initiate a dialogue between science, philosophy, epistemology and sociology. Starting from many examples taken from…
We explore the unique and fascinating structure of neutron stars. Although neutron stars are of interest in many areas of Physics, our aim is to provide an intellectual bridge between Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics. We argue against the…
Measuring interdisciplinarity is a pertinent but challenging issue in quantitative studies of science. There seems to be a consensus in the literature that the concept of interdisciplinarity is multifaceted and ambiguous. Unsurprisingly,…
It goes without saying that we are stuck with the universe we have. Nevertheless, we would like to go beyond simply describing our observed universe, and try to understand why it is that way rather than some other way. Physicists and…
Prior work finds a diversity paradox: diversity breeds innovation, and yet, underrepresented groups that diversify organizations have less successful careers within them. Does the diversity paradox hold for scientists as well? We study this…
The current debate about a possible change of paradigm from a single universe to a multiverse scenario could have deep implications on our view of cosmology and of science in general. These implications therefore deserve to be analyzed from…
The theory of regularity is a philosophical perspective in which laws of nature are just descriptions, that is to say, laws of nature do not govern the world. Moreover, according to the theory of regularity, the number of laws of nature…
The arise of disagreement is an emergent phenomenon that can be observed within a growing social group and, beyond a certain threshold, can lead to group fragmentation. To better understand how disagreement emerges, we introduce an…
A generalized view of Duality is offered as a bridge between physical sciences and the more abstract philosophical dimensions bordering on mysticism. To that end several examples of duality are first cited from from conventional physics…
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…
Certain results of observational cosmology cast critical doubt on the foundations of standard cosmology but leave most cosmologists untroubled. Alternative cosmological models that differ from the Big Bang have been published and defended…
In this essay, I argue that mathematics is a natural science---just like physics, chemistry, or biology---and that this can explain the alleged "unreasonable" effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. The main challenge for…
A new mathematics, the constructive one, characterizes a singular limit as undecidable. Hence, a singular limit between two theories actually represents a difference between two different kinds of mathematics. This particular situation…
We critically analyze the rationale of arguments from finetuning and naturalness in particle physics and cosmology. Some other numerological coincidences are also discussed.
The tension between qualitative theorizing and quantitative methods is pervasive in the social sciences, and poses a constant challenge to empirical research. But in science studies as an interdisciplinary specialty, there are additional…
Multiverse scenarios in cosmology assume that other universes exist "beyond" our own universe. They are an exciting challenge both for empirical and theoretical research as well as for philosophy of science. They could be necessary to…
We briefly review the various contexts within which one might address the issue of ``why'' the dimensionless constants of Nature have the particular values that they are observed to have. Both the general historical trend, in physics, of…
A large number of published studies have examined the properties of either networks of citation among scientific papers or networks of coauthorship among scientists. Here, using an extensive data set covering more than a century of physics…
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are fueling a new paradigm of discoveries in natural sciences. Today, AI has started to advance natural sciences by improving, accelerating, and enabling our understanding of natural phenomena at a…