Related papers: The Rubber band and the Ruler
Although its practical efficiency is unquestionable, it is well known that thermodynamics presents conceptual difficulties from the theoretical point of view. It is shown that the problem comes from an imperfect compatibility between the…
Within classical optics, one may add microscopic "roughness" to a macroscopically flat mirror so that parallel rays of a given angle are reflected at different outgoing angles. Taking the limit (as the roughness becomes increasingly…
In real-life statistical data, it seems that conditional probabilities for the effect given their causes tend to be less complex and smoother than conditionals for causes, given their effects. We have recently proposed and tested methods…
The nRules are empirical regularities that were discovered in macroscopic situations where the outcome is known. When they are projected theoretically into the microscopic domain they predict a novel ontology including the frequent collapse…
Fractal behavior and long-range dependence have been observed in an astonishing number of physical systems. Either phenomenon has been modeled by self-similar random functions, thereby implying a linear relationship between fractal…
I discuss gauge and global symmetries in particle physics, condensed matter physics, and quantum gravity. In a modern understanding, global symmetries are approximate and gauge symmetries may be emergent. (Based on a lecture at the April,…
Measurements play a crucial role in doing physics: Their results provide the basis on which we adopt or reject physical theories. In this note, we examine the effect of subjecting measurements themselves to our experience. We require that…
The relational interpretation (or RQM, for Relational Quantum Mechanics) solves the measurement problem by considering an ontology of sparse relative events, or "facts". Facts are realized in interactions between any two physical systems…
We consider the possibility that the basic space of physics is not spacetime, but configuration space. We illustrate this on the example with a system of gravitationally interacting point particles. It turns out that such system can be…
In these lectures I describe some of the open questions in the standard model relating to the nature and origin of mass, forces and matter and discuss some of the speculative theoretical ideas put forth in this regard. Some of the topics…
This paper has been withdrawn by the author. In this short paper I present a new approach to the problem of measurement, based on the difference between language (reality) and meta-language (meta-reality). This way, it will be shown as the…
This is an invited article for the Discussion and Debate special issue of The European Physical Journal Special Topics on the subject "Can Economics Be a Physical Science?" The first part of the paper traces the personal path of the author…
A new mathematics, the constructive one, characterizes a singular limit as undecidable. Hence, a singular limit between two theories actually represents a difference between two different kinds of mathematics. This particular situation…
Since the advent of quantum mechanics we have mainly been concerned with its predictions from the perspective of an external observer. This is in strong contrast to the theory of general relativity, where the physics is governed by the…
In the first part of this contribution, we review the development of the theory of scale relativity and its geometric framework constructed in terms of a fractal and nondifferentiable continuous space-time. This theory leads (i) to a…
It has been suggested, on the one hand, that quantum states are just states of knowledge; and, on the other, that quantum theory is merely a theory of correlations. These suggestions are confronted with problems about the nature of…
Scientists have long aimed to discover meaningful formulae which accurately describe experimental data. A common approach is to manually create mathematical models of natural phenomena using domain knowledge, and then fit these models to…
We explore the possibility of using machine learning to identify interesting mathematical structures by using certain quantities that serve as fingerprints. In particular, we extract features from integer sequences using two empirical laws:…
Simple methods permit to generalize the concepts of iteration and of recursive processes. We shall see briefly on several examples what these methods generate. In additive sequences, we shall encounter not only the golden or the silver…
We consider a class of theories containing power-law terms in both the Ricci scalar and a scalar field, including their non-minimal couplings. As a first step, we systematically classify all non-trivial cases with a propagating scalar field…