Related papers: Cardano v Tartaglia: The Great Feud Goes Supernatu…
Zeno's ancient paradox depicts a race between swift Achilles and a slow tortoise with a head start. Zeno argued that Achilles could never overtake the tortoise, as at each step Achilles arrived at the tortoise's former position, the…
In various situations, decision makers face experts that may provide conflicting advice. This advice may be in the form of probabilistic forecasts over critical future events. We consider a setting where the two forecasters provide their…
Gray (2015) argued that the Fermi paradox (FP) is a misnomer, and it is not a valid paradox. Gray also speculated that the argument was misattributed to Fermi, whose lunchtime remarks did not pertain to the existence of extraterrestrial…
This purely recreational paper is about one of the most colorful characters of the Italian Renaissance, Girolamo Cardano, and the discovery of two basic ingredients of quantum theory, probability and complex numbers. The paper is dedicated…
We study methods to obtain the consistency of forcing axioms, and particularly higher forcing axioms. We first force over a model with a supercompact cardinal $\theta>\kappa$ to get the consistency of the forcing axiom for $\kappa$-strongly…
In recent years, different types of adversarial examples from different fields have emerged endlessly, including purely natural ones without perturbations. A variety of defenses are proposed and then broken quickly. Two fundamental…
In 1615 Paolo A. Foscarini, a Carmelite monk lived in a monastery of south Italy near Cosenza (Calabria), published a Trattato which, at variance to what was common at the time, has not been written in Latin, but in volgare, the ancient…
A recent article claims the Lorentz force law is incompatible with special relativity. The claim is false, and the "paradox" on which it is based was resolved many years ago.
The Legendre conjecture has resisted analysis over a century, even under assumption of the Riemann Hypothesis. We present, a significant improvement on previous results by greatly reducing the assumption to a more modest statement called…
What can physics students learn about science from those scientists who got the answers wrong? Students encounter little science history, and what they have encountered typically portrays scientists as The People with the Right Answers. But…
We introduce the strongly uplifting cardinals, which are equivalently characterized, we prove, as the superstrongly unfoldable cardinals and also as the almost hugely unfoldable cardinals, and we show that their existence is equiconsistent…
In his Chronology, Newton uses astronomical "evidence" to support its extreme rejuvenation of ancient times. These elements, having a scientific varnish, provide some credibility to the work. They have been fiercely debated for a century,…
Several scholars have accorded the Tychonic System a prominent place, considering it a credible alternative to the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. In recent years, there have even been some enthusiastic contributions in support of Brahe,…
This paper argues that Tycho Brahe's "principal argument against Copernicus" (as the astronomer Christiaan Huygens called it) likely derived from a much older argument regarding the sizes of the "two great lights" described in the first…
The question of annual stellar parallax is usually viewed as having been a "win-win situation" for seventeenth-century astronomers who subscribed to the Copernican view of universe in which the Earth orbits the Sun and the Sun is one of…
The recapture relationship is an important element to any understanding of the connexion between different systems of logic. Loosely speaking, one system of logic recaptures another if it is possible to specify a subsystem of the former…
In this short note,we correct a well-known counter example of the famous book of Dacorogna[2].
``No one has ever touched Zeno without refuting him''. We will not refute Zeno in this paper. Instead we review some unexpected encounters of Zeno with modern science. The paper begins with a brief biography of Zeno of Elea followed by his…
The evolution of Physics between the second half of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century is presented coupling art and science, in the framework of Ferrara. The main characters are Giuseppe Bongiovanni, Professor of…
In this paper we look at popular fairness methods that use causal counterfactuals. These methods capture the intuitive notion that a prediction is fair if it coincides with the prediction that would have been made if someone's race, gender…