Related papers: Influence from Future, Arguments
Magnetic fields are everywhere in the Universe and in our everyday life and many processes are affected by their presence, generating a rich phenomenology that depends also on other possible external agents. We review here some results,…
Although quintessence cosmologies seem to explain the amount of cosmological constant today, the required conditions are severe. For example, an extremely slowly varying and light scalar field that rolls toward the vanishing vacuum energy…
A single panel of a comic book can say a lot: it can depict not only where the characters currently are, but also their motions, their motivations, their emotions, and what they might do next. More generally, humans routinely infer complex…
We propose a simple model of quantum void where the flow of time is deduced directly from quantum fluctuations and the consequent particle-antiparticle creations. Given a certain number of space-like separated pair creation events, assumed…
Cosmic acceleration may be due to modifications of cosmic gravity and to test this we need robust connections between theory and observations. However, in a model independent approach like effective field theory or a broad class like…
The traditional formulation of the ultimate goal of physics (in the narrower sense of axiomatic theory) involves the derivation of physical laws from first principles. Though, such option doesn't make things easier since the task of the…
We consider the cosmological application of a (variant of) relatively newly proposed model \cite{1609.06915} unifying inflation, dark energy, dark matter, and the Higgs mechanism. The model was originally defined using additional…
We make an estimate of the likelihood function for the Higgs vacuum expectation value by imposing anthropic constraints on the existence of atoms while allowing the other parameters of the Standard Model to also be variable. We argue that…
Cosmological probes pose an inverse problem where the measurement result is obtained through observations, and the objective is to infer values of model parameters which characterize the underlying physical system -- our Universe. Modern…
We consider different deductions of the mysterious Weinberg formula and show that this leads us back to the model of fluctuational cosmology which correctly predicted in advance, dark energy driven, accelerating universe with a small…
We consider an alternative formula for time delay in gravitational lensing. Imposing a smoothness condition on the gravitationally deformed paths followed by the photons from the source to the observer, we show that our formula displays the…
Using a temporal version of the Copernican principle, Gott has proposed a statistical predictor of future longevity based on present age [J. R. Gott III, Nature 363, 315 (1993)] and applied the predictor to a variety of examples, including…
Scalar weak gravity conjectures (SWGCs) attempt to pinpoint the ranges of couplings consistent with a fundamental theory of all interactions. We identify a generic dynamical consequence of these conjectures for cosmology and show that SWGCs…
In this essay, we discuss the fine-tuning problems of the Higgs mass and the cosmological constant. We argue that these are indeed legitimate problems, as opposed to some other "problems" that are sometimes described using similar…
The effective evolution of an inhomogeneous universe model in Einstein's theory of gravitation may be described in terms of spatially averaged scalar variables. This evolution can be modeled by solutions of a set of Friedmann equations for…
The causal entropic principle has been proposed as a superior alternative to the anthropic principle for understanding the magnitude of the cosmological constant. In this approach, the probability to create observers is assumed to be…
Modeling the purposeful behavior of imperfect agents from a small number of observations is a challenging task. When restricted to the single-agent decision-theoretic setting, inverse optimal control techniques assume that observed behavior…
We present a novel variant of decision making based on the mathematical theory of separable Hilbert spaces. This mathematical structure captures the effect of superposition of composite prospects, including many incorporated intentions,…
This thesis addresses two major problems in the philosophy of physics. The first is how to identify the minimal physical content of a theory; that is, what features of a theory are truly needed to make predictions, and what can be removed…
Empowerment quantifies the influence an agent has on its environment. This is formally achieved by the maximum of the expected KL-divergence between the distribution of the successor state conditioned on a specific action and a distribution…