Related papers: Disregarding the 'Hole Argument'
Eugene Wigner famously argued for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" for describing physics and other natural sciences in his 1960 essay. That essay has now led to some 55 years of (sometimes anguished) soul searching ---…
Lorentz [of the Lorentz transforms and Lorentz contractions fame] contended against Einstein that there had to be a medium in which electro-magnetic waves exist and propagate, and that that would of necessity be an absolute frame of…
The aim of this short review is to give an overview to non-specialists of recent arguments from fundamental physics in favor and disfavor of quantum corrections to black hole horizons. I will mainly discuss the black hole information…
We address a recent proposal concerning 'surplus structure' due to Nguyen et al. ['Why Surplus Structure is Not Superfluous.' Br. J. Phi. Sci. Forthcoming.] We argue that the sense of 'surplus structure' captured by their formal criterion…
Bell's theorem cannot be proved if complementary measurements have to be represented by random variables which cannot be added or multiplied. One such case occurs if their domains are not identical. The case more directly related to the…
A panoramic view, preceded by a short background of Newtonian mechanics and Maxwellian electrodynamics, is offered on the extent of how Einstein's space-time geometry, believed to be central to an understanding of the structure of the…
The quantum-Extended Church-Turing thesis is a principle of physics as well as computer science. It asserts that the laws of physics will prevent the construction of a machine that can efficiently determine the results of any calculation…
Black holes play a pivotal role in the foundations of physics, but there is an alarming discrepancy between what is considered to be a black hole in observational astronomy and theoretical studies. Despite claims to the contrary, we argue…
This paper is concerned with the apparent greatest weakness of the Mathematical Theory of Evidence (MTE) of Shafer \cite{Shafer:76}, which has been strongly criticized by Wasserman \cite{Wasserman:92ijar} - the relationship to frequencies.…
We critically revisit Einstein's 1905 heuristic argument for lightquanta, considering its internal coherence and the scope of its applicability. We argue that Einstein's reasoning, often celebrated for its originality, is ambiguous because…
The legendary discussion between Einstein and Bohr concerning the photon box experiment is critically analyzed. It is shown that Einstein's argument is flawed and Bohr's reply is wrong.
In this work, we join the controversial discussion on singular and non-singular black holes using the Gaussian distribution. Our result which uses correct boundary conditions shifts the debate in favour of regular black holes at the centre.…
The support of Copenhagen quantum mechanics in the discussion concerning EPR experiments has been based fundamentally on two mistakes. First, quantum mechanics as well as hidden-variable theory give the same predictions; the statement of…
The impossibility of theories with hidden variables as an alternative and replacement for quantum mechanics was discussed by J. von Neumann in 1932. His proof was criticized as being logically circular, by Grete Hermann soon after, and as…
We present a further argument that typical black holes with field theory duals have firewalls at the horizon. This argument makes no reference to entanglement between the black hole and any distant system, and so is not evaded by…
Some Christian apologists, notably William Lane Craig, have championed something called the kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God. One version of the argument leans heavily on the claim that the existence of an actual…
Feynman famously recommended accepting the basic principles of quantum mechanics without trying to guess the machinery behind the law. One of the corollaries of the Uncertainty Principle is that the knowledge of probability amplitudes does…
A fundamental property in wormhole physics is the flaring-out condition of the throat, which through the Einstein field equation entails the violation of the null energy condition. In the context of modified theories of gravity, it has also…
It is shown in the first part of this paper that a combined model comprising ordinary and quintessential matter can support a traversable wormhole in Einstein-Maxwell gravity. Since the solution allows zero tidal forces, the wormhole is…
The presumption that Hawking radiations are thermally distributed can be considered to result from their entanglement with the internal degrees of freedom for a black hole. This leads to the "firewall" paradox if unitary evolution continues…