Related papers: 'Bose minus Einstein' and other examples of misatt…
What can we discover? As the discussion in this paper is limited to ontological considerations, it does not deal with the discovery of new concepts. It raises the following question: What are the entities or existents that we can discover?…
Data based judgments go into artificial intelligence applications but they undergo paradoxical reversal when seemingly unnecessary additional data is provided. Examples of this are Simpson's reversal and the disjunction effect where the…
Multiparticle effects in Bose-Einstein correlations are reviewed. It is shown that for a broad class of models they can be ignored in the low density limit, but often are significant (typically at the 10% level) for realistic denisties.
We address the issue of the fallacy of the gauge concept in electromagnetism. The role of groupthink in the perpetuation of this concept in the physics literature is also discussed. Brief, elementary arguments suffice to demonstrate the…
We comment on a recent paper announcing the discovery of a previously unknown publication of Ettore Majorana on the Thomas-Fermi atomic model. In pointing out that such a publication was not written by Majorana, we correct some…
In this paper it is shown that the real cause of the apparent electrodynamic paradox discussed by Jackson [J. D. Jackson, Am. J. Phys. 72, 1484 (2004)] is the use of three-dimensional (3D) quantities E, B, F, L, N, .. . When 4D geometric…
There has been a long history of women innovators producing outstanding contributions to society and public benefit yet having their work passed over or sidelined or attributed to male colleagues. This phenomenon has been coined the Matilda…
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…
The high fraction of published results that turn out to be incorrect is a major concern of today's science. This paper contributes to the understanding of this problem in two independent directions. First, Johnson's recent claim that…
The twentieth century has thrown up exotic concepts -- dark matter, gravity waves, Higgs Bosons, Magnetic Monopoles and so on. The sad truth is that even after several decades, these remain elusive to observation and experiment. Some are…
A common flaw of astronomers is to believe that they know the truth even when data is scarce. I provide ten examples where this approach led to wrong strategic decisions in research plans, causing unnecessary delays in finding the truth. In…
This comment on the recently published article "Why Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen did not prove that quantum mechanics is 'incomplete'" (arXiv:0805.0217) by J.H.Field shows that some conclusions, made in the referred-to article, result from…
Most physics textbooks at college and university level introduce quantum physics in a historical context. However, the textbook version of this history does not match the actual history. In this article, the first in a series of articles…
Park et al. [1] reported a decline in the disruptiveness of scientific and technological knowledge over time. Their main finding is based on the computation of CD indices, a measure of disruption in citation networks [2], across almost 45…
We comment on the purported violation of local realism, by a single photon induced correlations between homodyne detectors, which one can find in: New J. Phys. 10, 113024 (2008), [arXiv:0807.0109]. The claim is erroneous, due to a…
In this study the amount of informal citations (i.e. those mentioning only author names or their initials instead of the complete references) in comparison to the formal (full reference based) citations is analyzed using some pioneers of…
We correct a common (but mistaken) attribution of the evaluation of the probability integral, usually attributed to Poisson, Gauss, or Laplace.
Serendipity plays an important role in scientific discovery. Indeed, many of the most important breakthroughs, ranging from penicillin to the electric battery, have been made by scientists who were stimulated by a chance exposure to…
I point out three ways in which the perspective of quantum information may lead to distorted claims about physics: forgetting that light does not need to be quantised to show coherence; ignoring the generators of unitary evolutions; and…
In the last two decades, the field of neutrino physics has made enormous progress in measuring the strength and frequency of neutrino and antineutrino oscillations. Along the way, there have been many instances of misunderstanding which led…