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Modified gravity theories are a popular alternative to dark energy as a possible explanation for the observed accelerating cosmic expansion, and their cosmological tests are currently an active research field. Studies in recent years have…
Contextuality is regarded as a non-classical feature, challenging our everyday intuition; quantum contextuality is currently seen as a resource for many applications in quantum computation, being responsible for quantum advantage over…
Hartle and Srednicki have argued that there is no observational evidence favoring our typicality. Here it is shown that such evidence does arise from including the `normalization principle' requirement that the sum of the likelihoods for…
[Abridged] Some cosmological theories propose that the observable universe is a small part of a much larger universe in which parameters describing the low-energy laws of physics vary from region to region. How can we reasonably assess a…
A central focus of data science is the transformation of empirical evidence into knowledge. As such, the key insights and scientific attitudes of deep thinkers like Fisher, Popper, and Tukey are expected to inspire exciting new advances in…
The best motivated alternatives to general relativity are scalar-tensor theories, in which the gravitational interaction is mediated by one or several scalar fields together with the usual graviton. The analysis of their various…
Some conceptual issues concerning general invariant theories, with special emphasis on general relativity, are analyzed. The common assertion that observables must be required to be gauge invariant is examined in the light of the role…
Witnessing non-classicality in the gravitational field has been claimed to be practically impossible. This constitutes a deep problem, which has even lead some researchers to question whether gravity should be quantised, due to the weakness…
For obtaining causal inferences that are objective, and therefore have the best chance of revealing scientific truths, carefully designed and executed randomized experiments are generally considered to be the gold standard. Observational…
Case-oriented physics education research - which seeks to refine and develop theory by linking that theory to cases - incorporates distinct practices for selecting data for analysis, generalizing results, and making causal claims.…
This thesis concerns the compatibility of inhomogeneous cosmologies with our present understanding of the universe. It is a problem of some interest to find the class of all relativistic cosmological models which are capable of providing a…
Inferring causal models from observed correlations is a challenging task, crucial to many areas of science. In order to alleviate the computational effort when sifting through possible causal explanations for some given observations, it is…
We discuss the possibility that the inflationary paradigm, undoubtfully today's best framework to understand all the present cosmological data, may still have some viable challengers. The underlying idea for such discussions is that…
The theory of measurement is employed to elucidate the physical basis of general relativity. For measurements involving phenomena with intrinsic length or time scales, such scales must in general be negligible compared to the (translational…
Due to the absence of an external, classical time variable, the probabilistic predictions of covariant quantum theory are ambiguous when multiple measurements are considered. Here, we introduce an information theoretic framework to the…
We propose a set of simple quantum optics experiments that test for an entirely new domain of physical laws that govern how an individual's conscious experience traverses the multiverse within Everett's many worlds interpretation of quantum…
We challenge the widely held belief that the cosmological principle is an obvious consequence of the observed isotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation, combined with the Copernican principle. We perform a detailed analysis of a…
The central focus is on clarifying the distinction between sets and proper classes. To this end we identify several categories of concepts (surveyable, definite, indefinite), and we attribute the classical set theoretic paradoxes to a…
The universality of quantum theory has been questioned ever since it was proposed. Key to this long-unsolved question is to test whether a given physical system has non-classical features. Here we connect recently proposed witnesses of…
The fundamental laws and constants of our universe seem to be finely tuned for life. The various multiverse hypotheses are popular explanations for the fine tuning. This paper reviews the four main suggestions on inference in the presence…