Related papers: Rethinking the Experiment
Ours could realistically be the generation to discover evidence of life beyond Earth. With this privileged potential comes responsibility. The magnitude of the question, "are we alone?", and the public interest therein, opens the…
Currently it is widely accepted that the language of science is mathematics. This book explores an alternative idea where the future of science is based on the language of algorithms and programs. How such a language can actually be…
More than a speculative technology, quantum computing seems to challenge our most basic intuitions about how the physical world should behave. In this thesis I show that, while some intuitions from classical computer science must be…
We propose a constructive and dynamical redefinition of spatial structure, grounded in the interplay between mechanical evolution and observational acts. Rather than presupposing space as a static background, we interpret space as an…
The problem of identifying common concepts in the sciences and deciding when new ideas have emerged is an open one. Metascience researchers have sought to formalize principles underlying stages in the life-cycle of scientific research,…
We begin this chapter with the bold claim that it provides a neuroscientific explanation of the magic of creativity. Creativity presents a formidable challenge for neuroscience. Neuroscience generally involves studying what happens in the…
This work is an attempt for a state-of-the-art survey of natural and life sciences with the goal to define the scope and address the central questions of an original research program. It is focused on the phenomena of emergence, adaptive…
Exposure to ideas in domains outside a scientist's own may benefit her in reformulating existing research problems in novel ways and discovering new application domains for existing solution ideas. While improved performance in scholarly…
Social epistemologists have argued that high risk, high reward science has an important role to play in scientific communities. Recently, though, it has also been argued that various scientific fields seem to be trending towards…
Bad statistics make research papers unreproducible and misleading. For the most part, the reasons for such misusage of numerical data have been found and addressed years ago by experts and proper practical solutions have been presented…
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…
Reliable predictions of the behaviour of chemical systems are essential across many industries, from nanoscale engineering over validation of advanced materials to nanotoxicity assessment in health and medicine. For the future we therefore…
In the last years the debate on complexity has been developing and developing in transdisciplinary way to meet the need of explanation for highly organized collective behaviors and sophisticated hierarchical arrangements in physical,…
Academia owes the public a fresh look at its education and research mission. First and foremost, researchers must communicate the results of their latest studies in a truthful and meaningful way. Second, the traditional boundaries among…
Experience shows that disciplinary science cannot describe life without contradictions. We show that one of the fundamental reasons is the disciplinarity itself: the disciplines deal with a limited set of quantities. This way some 'outlaw'…
Quantum theory has been proved as an outstanding mystery in modern science. The predictions of science have turned out to be probabilistic. The principle of determinism has failed. For systems like weather, earthquakes, rolling dices etc...…
The question of "what is life?" has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries, producing an array of definitions that reflect both the mystery of its emergence and the diversity of disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the…
These lectures deal with the problem of inductive inference, that is, the problem of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information. Is there a general method for handling uncertainty? Or, at least, are there rules that could in…
Although many investigators affirm a desire to build reasoning systems that behave consistently with the axiomatic basis defined by probability theory and utility theory, limited resources for engineering and computation can make a complete…
Computation holds great potential for introducing new opportunities for creativity and exploration into the physics curriculum. At the University of Oslo we have begun development of a new class of assignment called computational essays to…