Related papers: Probably a discovery: Bad mathematics means rough …
Reasoning is central to human intelligence. However, fallacious arguments are common, and some exacerbate problems such as spreading misinformation about climate change. In this paper, we propose the task of logical fallacy detection, and…
Science, especially large-scale basic research, is a collaborative endeavor, often drawing on the skills of people from a wide variety of disciplines. These people include not just scientists, but also administrators, engineers, and many…
Scientific breakthroughs typically emerge through the surprising violation of established research ideas, yet quantifying surprise has remained elusive because it requires a coherent model of all contemporary scientific worldviews. Deep…
I'll discuss how Goedel's paradox "This statement is false/unprovable" yields his famous result on the limits of axiomatic reasoning. I'll contrast that with my work, which is based on the paradox of "The first uninteresting positive whole…
Quantum theory has been proved as an outstanding mystery in modern science. The predictions of science have turned out to be probabilistic. The principle of determinism has failed. For systems like weather, earthquakes, rolling dices etc...…
An influential argument for scientific realism posits that, if scientific theories were not true, their empirical success would be a coincidence. Here, I show that the false Drude's theory succeeds in explaining the Wiedemann-Franz law by…
Judging the significance and reproducibility of quantitative research requires a good understanding of relevant uncertainties, but it is often unclear how well these have been evaluated and what they imply. Reported scientific uncertainties…
In the past century many fundamental results on unpredictability, undecidability and uncertainty have compelled scientists to grapple with the idea that some questions may never be resolved within our current theories. While this…
The role of probability appears unchallenged as the key measure of uncertainty, used among other things for practical induction in the empirical sciences. Yet, Popper was emphatic in his rejection of inductive probability and of the logical…
The analyses of the first 1-2/fb of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data are already having significant impacts on a wide range of models. In this talk I give my perspective on why we expect to find new physics at the LHC, and how such a…
This is a short, light spirited account of how some possibly important science actually happened. It very much conflicts with Popper's contention that the key to scientific progress is falsification.
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…
Likelihood functions are ubiquitous in data analyses at the LHC and elsewhere in particle physics. Partly because "probability" and "likelihood" are virtual synonyms in everyday English, but crucially distinct in data analysis, there is…
The cleanest way to discover a new particle is generally the "bump-hunt" methodology: looking for a localised excess in a mass (or related) distribution. However, if the mass of the particle being discovered is not known the procedure of…
We review Fermi's paradox (or the "Great Silence" problem), not only arguably the oldest and crucial problem for the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI), but also a conundrum of profound scientific, philosophical and cultural…
The top quark is by far the most massive fundamental particle observed so far, and the study of its properties is interesting for several reasons ranging from its possible special role in electroweak symmetry breaking to its sensitivity to…
With the rise of social media, it has become easier to disseminate fake news faster and cheaper, compared to traditional news media, such as television and newspapers. Recently this phenomenon has attracted lot of public attention, because…
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…
Stein's (1959) problem highlights the phenomenon called the probability dilution in high dimensional cases, which is known as a fundamental deficiency in probabilistic inference. The satellite conjunction problem also suffers from…
Consider the day when an invariant mass peak, roughly compatible with "the Higgs", begins to emerge, say at the LHC, ... and may you see that day. There will be a difference between discovery and scrutiny. The latter would involve an effort…