Related papers: Why Our Universe is Comprehensible
The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…
Nearly 4 years ago, two teams of observational astronomers reported that high-redshift Type Ia supernovae are fainter than expected in a decelerating or freely coasting universe. The radical conclusion that the universe has been…
This essay discusses the idea that a Theory of Everything would not be complete without a theory of consciousness as one of its parts, and the suggestion that new physics may be needed to describe consciousness. I argue that the motivations…
Theoretical approaches to explaining the observed acceleration of the universe are reviewed. We briefly discuss the evidence for cosmic acceleration, and the implications for standard General Relativity coupled to conventional sources of…
The essay argues that the standard cosmological model is one sided and incomplete. Its recognition of the primacy of radiant energy has no rational justification and empirical verification and, therefore, is arbitrary and subjective. The…
What can we know about the universe? I outline a few of the fundamental limitations that are posed to our understanding of the cosmos, such as the existence of horizons, the fact that we occupy a specific place in space and time, the…
The physics of matter in the condensed state is concerned with problems in which the number of constituent particles is vastly greater than can be easily comprehended. The inherent physical limitations of the human mind are fundamental and…
The apparent fine-tuning of several fundamental parameters that determine the properties of our Universe and make it hospitable to life is sometimes used as an argument for God from design. I review the concept of cosmic fine-tuning and…
Epistemic interpretations of quantum mechanics fail to address the puzzle posed by the occurrence of probabilities in a fundamental physical theory. This is a puzzle about the physical world, not a puzzle about our relation to the physical…
We are at a stage in our evolution where we do not yet know if we will ever communicate with intelligent beings that have evolved on other planets, yet we are intelligent and curious enough to wonder about this. We find ourselves wondering…
In creating his gravitational field equations Einstein unjustifiedly assumed that inertial mass, and its energy equivalent, is a source of gravity. Denying this assumption allows modifying the field equations to a form in which a positive…
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…
To what extent can our limited set of observations be used to pin down the specifics of a ``Theory of Everything''? In the limit where the links are arbitrarily tenuous, a ``Theory of Everything'' might become a ``Theory of Anything''. A…
Certain aspects of the explainability of AI systems will be critically discussed. This especially with focus on the feasibility of the task of making every AI system explainable. Emphasis will be given to difficulties related to the…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Despite the obvious utility of the concept, it has often been argued that time does not exist. I take the opposite perspective: let's imagine that time does exist, and the universe is described by a quantum state obeying ordinary…
Supervised machine learning models boast remarkable predictive capabilities. But can you trust your model? Will it work in deployment? What else can it tell you about the world? We want models to be not only good, but interpretable. And yet…
It is generally argued that the present cosmological observations support the accelerating models of the universe, as driven by the cosmological constant or `dark energy'. We argue here that an alternative model of the universe is possible…
Space and time are central concepts for understanding our World. They are important ingredients at the core of every scientific theory and subject of intense debate in philosophy. Albert Einstein's Special and General theories of Relativity…
Increasing astronomical evidence indicates that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. By simply solving Einstein equations we show in this letter that a wide class of generic quintessence models leading to eternal acceleration is…