Related papers: Heliophysics gleaned from seismology
I explore the possibility that the laws of physics might be laws of inference rather than laws of nature. What sort of dynamics can one derive from well-established rules of inference? Specifically, I ask: Given relevant information…
The strong evidence of new physics coming from atmospheric neutrino experiments has motivated a series of critical studies to test the robustness of the available flux calculations. In view of a more precise determination of the parameters…
The intrinsic difficulties in building realistic climate models and in providing complete, reliable and meaningful observational datasets, and the conceptual impossibility of testing theories against data imply that the usual Galilean…
When modelling spacetime and classical physical fields, one typically assumes smoothness (infinite differentiability). But this assumption and its philosophical implications have not been sufficiently scrutinized. For example, we can appeal…
This is the first of a series of papers that we intend to publish about the epistemology of fundamental physics in its current state. One of the main objectives of these papers is to improve our understanding of fundamental physics (and…
Anthropic models can give testable predictions, which can be confirmed or falsified at a specified confidence level. This is illustrated using the successful prediction of the cosmological constant as an example. The history and the nature…
Learning to create, use, and evaluate models is a central element of becoming a scientist. In physics, we often begin an analysis of a complex system with highly simplified or toy models. In introductory physics classes, we tend to use them…
The suggested approach makes it possible to produce a consistent description of motions of a physical system. It is shown that the concept of force fields defining the systems dynamics is equivalent to the choice of the corresponding metric…
Astrophysics and cosmology can be used to test the standard model of particle physics under conditions and over distance and time scales not accessible to laboratory experiments. Most of the astrophysical observations are in good agreement…
Bayesian statistics is based on the subjective definition of probability as {\it ``degree of belief''} and on Bayes' theorem, the basic tool for assigning probabilities to hypotheses combining {\it a priori} judgements and experimental…
Named after Clio, the Greek goddess of history, cliophysics is a daughter (and in a sense an extension) of econophysics. Like econophysics it relies on the methodology of experimental physics. Its purpose is to conduct a scientific analysis…
Asteroseismology is the determination of the interior structures of stars by using their oscillations as seismic waves. Simple explanations of the astrophysical background and some basic theoretical considerations needed in this rapidly…
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…
Simulations inform all aspects of modern astrophysical research, ranging in scale from 1D and 2D test problems that can run in seconds on an astronomer's laptop all the way to large-scale 3D calculations that run on the largest…
We analyze the notion that physical theories are quantitative and testable by observations in experiments. This leads us to propose a new, Bayesian, interpretation of probabilities in physics that unifies their current use in classical…
Many domains of science have developed complex simulations to describe phenomena of interest. While these simulations provide high-fidelity models, they are poorly suited for inference and lead to challenging inverse problems. We review the…
With the discovery of the Higgs, we have access to a plethora of new physical processes that allow us to further test the SM and beyond. We show a convenient way to parametrize these physics using an effective theory for Higgs couplings,…
Starting from the guiding principles of spacetime locality and operationalism, a general framework for a probabilistic description of nature is proposed. Crucially, no notion of time or metric is assumed, neither any specific physical…
The concept of random dynamical system is a comparatively recent development combining ideas and methods from the well developed areas of probability theory and dynamical systems. Due to our inaccurate knowledge of the particular physical…
A high-school exercise is used to get an insight into planetary motion.