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We point out that the functional form describing the frequency of sizes of events in complex systems (e.g. earthquakes, forest fires, bursts of neuronal activity) can be obtained from maximal likelihood inference, which, remarkably, only…
This brief overview stresses the importance of laboratory data and theory in analyzing astronomical observations and understanding the physical and chemical processes that drive the astrophysical phenomena in our Universe. This includes…
The discovery of a Higgs boson at the electroweak scale appears to point toward supersymmetry, as the most likely mechanism for protecting a scalar boson mass from enormous radiative corrections. The earlier discovery of neutrino masses…
Mass media afford researchers critical opportunities to disseminate research findings and trends to the general public. Yet researchers also perceive that their work can be miscommunicated in mass media, thus generating unintended…
How should social scientists understand and communicate the uncertainty of statistically estimated causal effects? I propose we utilize the posterior distribution of a causal effect and present the probability of the effect being greater…
It is a widespread belief that results like G\"odel's incompleteness theorems or the intrinsic randomness of quantum mechanics represent fundamental limitations to humanity's strive for scientific knowledge. As the argument goes, there are…
The title, a headline, and a typical one, from a newspaper's "Health & Wellness" section, usually written by a reporter who has just read a medical journal, can only be the result of an inductive argument, which is an argument from known…
The Fermi Paradox is the apparent contradiction between the high probability extraterrestrial civilizations' existence and the lack of contact with such civilizations. In general, solutions to Fermi's paradox come down to either estimation…
Publication bias arises whenever the probability that a study is published depends on the statistical significance of its results. This bias, often called the file-drawer effect since the unpublished results are imagined to be tucked away…
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…
We propose a method to estimate the probability of new physics discovery in future high energy physics experiments. Physics simulation gives both the average numbers <Nb> of background and <Ns> of signal events. We find that the proper…
Fake news emerged as an apparent global problem during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Addressing it requires a multidisciplinary effort to define the nature and extent of the problem, detect fake news in real time, and mitigate its…
The big bang hypothesis is widely accepted despite numerous physics conflicts. It rests upon two experimental supports, galactic red shift and the cosmic microwave background. Both are produced by dark matter, shown here to be hydrogen…
This paper proposes and studies new quantum version of $f$-divergences, a class of convex functionals of a pair of probability distributions including Kullback-Leibler divergence, Rnyi-type relative entropy and so on. There are several…
I present a concise review of the Higgs problem which plays a central role in particle physics today. The Higgs of the minimal Standard Model is so far just a conjecture that needs to be verified or discarded at the LHC. Probably the…
Health-related misinformation on social networks can lead to poor decision-making and real-world dangers. Such misinformation often misrepresents scientific publications and cites them as "proof" to gain perceived credibility. To…
Although we accept that Physics is, as a last resort, an experimental science, the relationship between theory and experiment is far away from being trivial. Any experiment is always explained within a determinate theoretical context and,…
The influential claim that most published results are false raised concerns about the trustworthiness and integrity of science. Since then, there have been numerous attempts to examine the rate of false-positive results that have failed to…
Recent late-Universe observations suggest an open Universe. If confirmed, such a departure from spatial flatness would carry profound implications for our understanding of cosmic inflation and the ultimate fate of the Universe. Motivated by…
With the growing importance of detecting misinformation, many studies have focused on verifying factual claims by retrieving evidence. However, canonical fact verification tasks do not apply to catching subtle differences in factually…