Related papers: Two Kinds of Discovery: An Ontological Account

Philosophers have spilled much ink over the discovery of ideas in the classical 'context of discovery'. However, there has been little engagement with the question of what constitutes a discovery of 'things in the world'. A much-overlooked…

The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern…

Presently about 3000 different nuclei are known with about another 3000-4000 predicted to exist. A review of the discovery of the nuclei, the present status and the possibilities for future discoveries are presented.

We investigate indeterminism in physical observations. For this, we introduce a distinction between genuinely indeterministic (creation-1 and discovery-1) observational processes, and fully deterministic (creation-2 and discovery-2)…

Google and other search engines feature the entity search by representing a knowledge card summarizing related facts about the user-supplied entity. However, the knowledge card is limited to certain entities that have a Wiki page or an…

Using the Hilbert-Bernays account as a spring-board, we first define four ways in which two objects can be discerned from one another, using the non-logical vocabulary of the language concerned. (These definitions are based on definitions…

We will focus on the Quantum theory and starting from simple philosophical conjectures, we infer possible different physical realities. Also we argue of possible wavefunction emerging under specific conditions of the physical reality.…

We suggest that the question of why is there something rather than nothing can be answered by the existence of two types of nothing. We propose that matter occurs at the boundaries of intersection of both nothings. This accords with the…

This essay is a two-step reflection on the question 'Which events (can be said to) occur in quantum phenomena?' The first step regiments the ontological category of "statistical phenomena" and studies the adequacy of "probabilistic event…

This work aims to formalize some of the ways scientific concepts are formed in the process of theoretical physics discovery. Since this may at first seem like a task beyond the scope of the exact sciences (natural and formal sciences), we…

In this contribution to the proceedings of the 182nd Nobel Symposium, I reflect on the concept of "discovery" as it is used by physicists and astronomers. In particular, I comment on how the scientific community distinguishes discoveries…

Can scientific discovery be made arbitrarily easy by choosing the right representation, collecting enough data, and deploying sufficiently powerful algorithms? This paper argues that the answer is fundamentally negative. We introduce the…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the various types of physical universe which could exist according to modern mathematical physics. The paper begins with an introduction that approaches the question from the viewpoint of ontic…

Consider the day when an invariant mass peak, roughly compatible with "the Higgs", begins to emerge, say at the LHC, ... and may you see that day. There will be a difference between discovery and scrutiny. The latter would involve an effort…

We show how to systematically analyze what may be inferred should a new scalar particle be discovered in collider experiments. Our approach is systematic in the sense that we perform the analysis in a manner which minimizes apriori…

We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…

We formulate a paradox in relation to the description of a joint entity consisting of two subentities by standard quantum mechanics. We put forward a proposal for a possible solution, entailing the interpretation of density states as pure…

This paper discusses experiments with single-particle systems, some of whose states appear to be entangled. It shows that the interpretation of the experiments in terms of entanglement is ill-defined. Three forms of ambiguity are discussed.…

Two different conceptions of emergence are reconciled as two instances of the phenomenon of detection. In the process of comparing these two conceptions, we find that the notions of complexity and detection allow us to form a unified…

I show that with the discovery of the Higgs boson we have entered a new phase of our understanding of nature. This leads us towards a paradigm shift in the search for possible new physics, away from major extensions like supersymmetry…