Related papers: Resolving the observer reference class problem in …
The Cosmic Defect theory has been confronted with four observational constraints: primordial nuclear species abundances emerging from the big bang nucleosynthesis; large scale structure formation in the universe; cosmic microwave background…
The comparison of the Standard Cosmological Model (SCM) with astronomical observations, i.e. theory versus experiment, and with the Minimal Standard Model (MSM) in particle physics, i.e. theory versus theory, is discussed. The main issue of…
Modern scientific cosmology pushes the boundaries of knowledge and the knowable. This is prompting questions on the nature of scientific knowledge. A central issue is what defines a 'good' model. When addressing global properties of the…
Identifying an appropriate set of ``observables'' is a nontrivial task for most approaches to quantum gravity. We describe how it may be accomplished in the context of a recently proposed family of stochastic (but classical) dynamical laws…
The standard model of cosmology has provided a good phenomenological description of a wide range of observations both at astrophysical and cosmological scales for several decades. This concordance model is constructed by a universal…
Since the appearance of General Relativity, its intrinsec general covariance has been very often misinterpreted as implying that physically meaningful quantitities (and conclusions extracted from the theory) have to be absolutely…
The recent discovery of apparent cosmic acceleration has highlighted the depth of our ignorance of the fundamental properties of nature. It is commonly assumed that the explanation for acceleration must come from a new form of energy…
Physical systems are characterized by their structure and dynamics. But the physical laws only express relations, and their symmetries allow any possible relational structure to be also possible in a different parametrization or basis of…
Observer dependence is central to Quantum Mechanics; in particular if we associate consistent sets with observer worldviews we can think of the Consistent Histories (CH) interpretation as a formalisation of observer dependence. However we…
This paper is an exploration of the nuanced realm of reference frames within the framework of General Relativity. Our analysis exposes a violation of Earman's SP1 principle in scenarios involving fields that are dynamically uncoupled, a…
In a binary classification problem the feature vector (predictor) is the input to a scoring function that produces a decision value (score), which is compared to a particular chosen threshold to provide a final class prediction (output).…
Universal outlier hypothesis testing is studied in a sequential setting. Multiple observation sequences are collected, a small subset of which are outliers. A sequence is considered an outlier if the observations in that sequence are…
The common cause principle for two random variables $A$ and $B$ is examined in the case of causal insufficiency, when their common cause $C$ is known to exist, but only the joint probability of $A$ and $B$ is observed. As a result, $C$…
Testing hypotheses is an issue of primary importance in the scientific research, as well as in many other human activities. Much clarification about it can be achieved if the process of learning from data is framed in a stochastic model of…
To make precise the sense in which nature fails to respect classical physics, one requires a formal notion of classicality. Ideally, such a notion should be defined operationally, so that it can be subjected to a direct experimental test,…
We comment on the fact that certain mathematical models that have been proposed in the quantum gravity literature, may not be subject to experimental checks, even if they turn out to be mathematically well defined. This means that they…
A central question in causal inference with observational studies is the sensitivity of conclusions to unmeasured confounding. The classical Cornfield condition allows us to assess whether an unmeasured binary confounder can explain away…
One of the innovative approaches in contemporary philosophical ontology consists in the assumption of a plurality of ontologies based on different metaphysical presuppositions. Such presuppositions involve, among others, the identification…
We investigate observational tests that can be used to distinguish between broad classes of cosmological models. This is achieved using curvature-consistency tests of the Friedmann-Lema\^{i}tre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) models, which we…
The concepts of the Coriolis and the centrifugal force are essential in various scientific fields and they are standard components of introductory physics lectures. In this paper we explore how students understand and apply concepts of…