Related papers: A Farewell to Falsifiability
The development of science and technology has progressively demonstrated the ability of humankind to understand and manipulate the physical world, and it has also shown some fundamental limitations to predictability of physical events. This…
The tremendous popular success of Chaos Theory shares some common points with the not less fortunate Relativity: they both rely on a misunderstanding. Indeed, ironically , the scientific meaning of these terms for mathematicians and…
We analyze the notion that physical theories are quantitative and testable by observations in experiments. This leads us to propose a new, Bayesian, interpretation of probabilities in physics that unifies their current use in classical…
A brief review of the status of duality symmetries in string theory is presented. The evidence is accumulating rapidly that an enormous group of duality symmetries, including perturbative T dualities and non-perturbative S-dualities,…
I wish to discuss a large, interwoven set of topics pointed at in the title above. Much of what I say is highly speculative, some is testable, some is, at present, surely not. It is, I hope, useful, to set these ideas forth for our…
Defeasible statements are statements that are likely, or probable, or usually true, but may occasionally be false. Plausible reasoning makes conclusions from statements that are either facts or defeasible statements without using numbers.…
A tradition handed down among physicists maintains that classical physics is a perfectly deterministic theory capable of predicting the future with absolute certainty, independently of any interpretations. It also tells that it was quantum…
Despite the extraordinary successes the two great bastions of $20^{th}$ century science (Quantum Theory and General Relativity) are troubled with serious conceptual and mathematical difficulties. As a result, further growth of fundamental…
It is an unfortunate convention of science that research should pretend to be reproducible; our top tips will help you mitigate this fussy conventionality, enabling you to enthusiastically showcase your irreproducible work.
We argue that string theory should have a formulation for which stability and causality are evident. Rather than regard strings as fundamental objects, we suggest they should be regarded as composite systems of more fundamental point-like…
Most physics theories are deterministic, with the notable exception of quantum mechanics which, however, comes plagued by the so-called measurement problem. This state of affairs might well be due to the inability of standard mathematics to…
A variety of physical unknowables are discussed. Provable lack of physical omniscience, omnipredictability and omnipotence is derived by reduction to problems which are known to be recursively unsolvable. "Chaotic" symbolic dynamical…
The idea of fully accepting statements when the evidence has rendered them probable enough faces a number of difficulties. We leave the interpretation of probability largely open, but attempt to suggest a contextual approach to full belief.…
I describe our understanding of physics near the planck length, in particular the great progress of the last four years in string theory. Superstring theory, and a recent extension called M theory, are leading candidates for a quantum…
Here, by introducing a version of "Unexpected hanging paradox" we try to open a new way and a new explanation for paradoxes, similar to liar paradox. Also, we will show that we have a semantic situation which no syntactical logical system…
In this brief note, we argue that contrarily to what is still often stated, the Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is not in principle impossible to test. It is actually not more difficult (but not easier either) to…
The interplay between string theory and cosmology is very promising. Since string theory will yield a quantum theory of space-time and unify all forces of nature, it has the potential of addressing many of the conceptual problems of the…
Statistics has made tremendous advances since the times of Fisher, Neyman, Jeffreys, and others, but the fundamental and practically relevant questions about probability and inference that puzzled our founding fathers remain unanswered. To…
Time can be defined as the duration between events. It is irreversible. When used as a variable in quantifying the changing properties of matter, this irreversibility of time is incompatible with Newton's deterministic mechanics and with…
"Physical theories of fundamental significance tend to be gauge theories. These are theories in which the physical system being dealt with is described by more variables than there are physically independent degree of freedom. The…