Related papers: Problems with Popper
Cem Tezer was a fastidious, meticulous, highly idiosyncratic and versatile scientist. Without him Turkish community of mathematics would be incomplete. Our sense of gratitude for his work in various areas of mathematics, history of…
Observational cosmology of the first decades of the Twentieth Century was dominated by two giants: Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley. Hubble's major contributions were to the study and classification of individual galaxies with large…
I offer a revisionist interpretation of Galileo's role in the history of science. My overarching thesis is that Galileo lacked technical ability in mathematics, and that this can be seen as directly explaining numerous aspects of his life's…
Aristotle was the first to declare himself in the class of natural philosophers ({\em physiologoi}) and he was the first physicist because he spelled out the first definitions of some basic physical concepts. Moreover, he was the first…
Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics has been criticized as incoherent and opportunistic, and based on doubtful philosophical premises. If so Bohr's influence, in the pre-war period of 1927-1939, is the harder to explain, and the…
One of the greatest experimental mathematicians of all time was also one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, the great Leonhard Euler. Usually he had an uncanny intuition on how many "special cases" one needs before one can…
This talk is dedicated to Alberto Sirlin in celebration of his seventieth birthday. I wish to convey my deep appreciation of his many important contributions to particle physics over 40 years and look forward to many more years of…
Abner Shimony was an exceptional human being and a remarkably lucid and penetrating thinker whose work centered on some of the most significant physical and philosophical questions of his era at their nexus. He approached these questions…
Al-Biruni (973-1048) was one of the greatest scientists of all times. He was an astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, and studied physics and natural sciences. In this paper, we will discuss some of his experimental methods and some…
In this article, I discuss the relationship of mathematics to the physical world, and to other spheres of human knowledge. In particular, I argue that Mathematics is created by human beings, and the number $\pi$ can not be said to have…
Popper's original thought experiment probed some fundamental and subtle rules of quantum mechanics. Two experiments have directly and indirectly tested Popper's hypothesis, but they seem to give contrasting results. The equations governing…
It is mostly agreed that Popper's criterion of falsifiability fails to provide a useful demarcation between science and pseudo-science, because ad-hoc assumptions are always able to save any theory that conflicts with the empirical data…
This obituary is devoted to M. I. Polikarpov (28.12.1952 - 18.07.2013), our teacher, our colleague, our friend. We recollect some facts of his biography and stages of his scientific career, and make a brief review of some of his most known…
This book covers the history of probability up to Kolmogorov with essential additional coverage of statistics up to Fisher. Based on my work of ca. 50 years, it is the only suchlike book. Gorrochurn (2016) is similar but his study of events…
The history of computability theory and and the history of analysis are surprisingly intertwined since the beginning of the twentieth century. For one, \'Emil Borel discussed his ideas on computable real number functions in his introduction…
The purpose of this text is twofold. First we discuss some divisor problems involving Paul Erd\H os (1913-1996), whose centenary of birth is this year. In the second part some recent results on divisor problems are discussed, and their…
The sciences of complexity present some recurrent themes: the emergence of qualitatively new behaviors in dissipative systems out of equilibrium, the aparent tendency of complex system to lie at the border of phase transitions and…
An experiment proposed by Karl Popper to test the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics was realized by Kim and Shih. We use a quantum mechanical calculation to analyze Popper's proposal, and find a surprising result for the location…
According to Karl Popper assumptions are statements used to construct theories. During the construction of a theory whether the assumptions are either true or false turn out to be irrelevant in view of the fact that, actually, they gain…
I am presenting a first-ever scientific collection of short sayings on probability and statistics expressed by most various men of science, many classics included, from antiquity to Kepler to our time. Quite understandably, the reader will…