Related papers: On the world cognizability
Although cosmic expansion at very small distances is usually dismissed as entirely inconsequential, these extraordinarily small effects may in fact have a real and significant influence on our world. A calculation suggests that the minute…
The establishment of extremely strong bounds on the magnitude of the electric dipole moment of the neutron, a quantity that is of great importance for determining the level of time reversal symmetry respected by the strong interactions,…
Suppose the usual description of spacetime as a 4-dimensional manifold with a Lorentzian metric breaks down at Planck energies. Can we still construct sensible theoretical models of the universe? Are they testable? Do they lead to a…
Epistemological consequences of quantum nonlocality (entanglement) are discussed under the assumption of a universally valid Schr\"odinger equation in the absence of hidden variables. This leads inevitably to a {\it many-minds…
One of the basic assumptions implicit in the way physics is usually done is that all causation flows in a bottom up fashion, from micro to macro scales. However this is wrong in many cases in biology, and in particular in the way the brain…
The question of what ontological message (if any) is encoded in the formalism of contemporary physics is, to say the least, controversial. The reasons for this state of affairs are psychological and neurobiological. The processes by which…
Curiously overlooked in physics is its dependence on the transmission of numbers. For example the transmission of numerical clock readings is implicit in the concept of a coordinate system. The transmission of numbers and other logical…
In three spacetime dimensions, general relativity drastically simplifies, becoming a ``topological'' theory with no propagating local degrees of freedom. Nevertheless, many of the difficult conceptual problems of quantizing gravity are…
The human mind is constituted by inner, subjective, private, first-person conscious experiences that cannot be measured with physical devices or observed from an external, objective, public, third-person perspective. The qualitative,…
We point out that some questions in quantum field theory are undecidable in a precise mathematical sense. More concretely, it will be demonstrated that there is no algorithm answering whether a given 2d supersymmetric Lagrangian theory…
Some principles underpinning the running of the Universe are discussed. The most important, the machine principle, states that the Universe is a fully autonomous, self-organizing and self-testing quantum automaton. Continuous space and…
Quantum mechanics---the theory describing the fundamental workings of nature---is famously counterintuitive: it predicts that a particle can be in two places at the same time, and that two remote particles can be inextricably and…
Several philosophical problems arising from the physics of consciousness, including identity, duplication, teleportation, simulation, self-location, and the Boltzmann Brain problem, hinge on one of the most deeply held but unnecessary…
I show that probabilities in quantum mechanics are a measure of belief in the presence of human ignorance, just like all other probabilities. The Born interpretation of the square of modulus of the wave function arises from the interaction…
In this first of two papers, strong limits on the accuracy of physical computation are established. First it is proven that there cannot be a physical computer C to which one can pose any and all computational tasks concerning the physical…
At a fundamental level, the classical picture of the world is dead, and has been dead now for almost a century. Pinning down exactly which quantum phenomena are responsible for this has proved to be a tricky and controversial question, but…
Determining the initial state of the universe is a challenging problem in quantum cosmology and we argue that the issue is intractable if the basic postulates of quantum mechanics are not modified in a nontrivial way. Namely a "standard"…
The physical limits to computation have been under active scrutiny over the past decade or two, as theoretical investigations of the possible impact of quantum mechanical processes on computing have begun to make contact with realizable…
This short review is addressed to cosmologists. General relativity predicts that space-time comes to an end and physics comes to a halt at the big-bang. Recent developments in loop quantum cosmology have shown that these predictions cannot…
Recently some hidden inconsistencies in high energy physics and cosmology have been articulated by several scholars. If we follow the usual description we get an unacceptably high cosmological constant as was noticed by Weinberg and others…