Related papers: Fine-Tuning in the Context of Bayesian Theory Test…
A basic requirement for a mathematical model is often that its solution (output) shouldn't change much if the model's parameters (input) are perturbed. This is important because the exact values of parameters may not be known and one would…
One of the challenges in testing gravity with cosmology is the vast freedom opened when extending General Relativity. For linear perturbations, one solution consists in using the Effective Field Theory of Dark Energy (EFT of DE). Even then,…
The dramatic confrontation between new observations and theories of the early and recent universe makes cosmology one of the most rapidly advancing fields in the physical sciences. The universe is a unique laboratory in which to probe…
Quantum theory is incredibly successful, explaining the microscopic world with great accuracy, from the behaviour of subatomic particles to chemical reactions to solid-state electronics. There is not a single experimental finding…
Experiments are once again under way at the LHC. This time around, however, the mood in the high-energy physics community is pessimistic. There is a growing suspicion that naturalness arguments that predict new physics near the weak scale…
We argue that models in which an observable variation of the fine structure constant is explained by motion of a cosmic scalar field, are not stable under renormalization, and require massive fine tuning that cannot be explained by any…
There are four reasons why our present knowledge and understanding of quantum mechanics could be regarded as incomplete. Firstly, the principle of linear superposition has not been experimentally tested for position eigenstates of objects…
The aim of this article is to promote the use of probabilistic methods in the study of problems in mathematical general relativity. Two new and simple singularity theorems, whose features are different from the classical singularity…
By introducing Crossing functions and hyper-parameters I show that the Bayesian interpretation of the Crossing Statistics [1] can be used trivially for the purpose of model selection among cosmological models. In this approach to falsify a…
In typical applications of Bayesian optimization, minimal assumptions are made about the objective function being optimized. This is true even when researchers have prior information about the shape of the function with respect to one or…
The Standard Model of Particle Physics cannot explain the observed baryon asymmetry of the Universe. This observation is a clear sign of new physics beyond the Standard Model. There have been many recent theoretical developments to address…
An explicit retrocausal model is used to analyze the general Wood-Spekkens argument [1] that any causal explanation of Bell-inequality violations must be unnaturally fine-tuned to avoid signaling. The no-signaling aspects of the model turn…
This article attempts to summarize the effort by the particle physics community in addressing the tedious work of determining the parameter spaces of beyond-the-standard-model (BSM) scenarios, allowed by data. These spaces, typically…
The job of a physicist is to describe Nature. General features, hypotheses and theories help to describe physics phenomena at a more abstract, fundamental level, and are sometimes tacitly assigned some sort of real existence; doing so…
Tuning parameters are parameters involved in an estimating procedure for the purpose of reducing the risk of some other estimator. Examples include the degree of penalization in penalized regression and likelihood problems, as well as the…
In almost every scientific field, an experiment involves collecting data and then analysing it. The analysis stage will often consist in trying to extract some physical parameter and estimating its uncertainty; this is known as Parameter…
Time-symmetric cosmological theories, in which the initial and final states are arranged to have similar features or are independently fixed, have been quite extensively discussed in the literature. However, a more general and perhaps more…
The naturalness principle has long guided efforts to understand physics beyond the Standard Model, with the hierarchy problem as the central issue. We revisit the role of quantum corrections in the fine-tuning of the low-energy effective…
Quantum mechanics, one of the most successful theories in the history of science, was created to account for physical systems not describable by classical physics. Though it is consistent with all experiments conducted thus far, many of its…
A theory of measurement uncertainty is presented, which, since it is based exclusively on the Bayesian approach and on the subjective concept of conditional probability, is applicable in the most general cases. The recent International…