Related papers: Blueberry Earth
The study of planets outside our solar system may lead to major advances in our understanding of the Earth, and provide insight into the universal set of rules by which planets form and evolve. To achieve these goals requires applying…
Super-Earths, a class of planetary bodies with masses ranging from a few Earth-masses to slightly smaller than Uranus, have recently found a special place in the exoplanetary science. Being slightly larger than a typical terrestrial planet,…
Since its discovery, quantum theory has proven to be one of the most precise theories ever made. Measurement processes, however, do not seem to be governed by the unitary law of quantum mechanics, and one can ask if the theory is complete.…
Many advocates of the Everettian interpretation consider that theirs is the only approach to take quantum mechanics really seriously, and that this approach allows to deduce a fantastic scenario for our reality, one that consists of an…
We prove that if we fill without gaps a bag with infinitely many potatoes, in such a way that they touch each other in few points, then the total surface area of the potatoes must be infinite. In this context potatoes are measurable subsets…
According to the Big Bang Theory as we go back in time the Universe becomes progressively hotter and denser. This leads us to believe that the early Universe was filled with hot plasma of elementary particles. Among many questions…
Among the billions of planetary systems that fill the Universe, we would like to know how ours fits in. Exoplanet data can already be used to address the question: How common are Jupiters? Here we discuss a simple analysis of recent…
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time…
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…
The emphasis in the developmet of theories with more than three spatial dimensions has recently shifted towards ``brane world'' picture, which assumes that ordinary matter (with possible exceptions of gravitons and other, hypothetic,…
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…
Without a doubt many problems in physics arise as a consequence of our philosophical conception of the world. In this contribution however we endeavor to alleviate this scenario by putting forward a philosophical approach under which some…
We consider the possibility that all particles in the world are fundamentally identical, i.e., belong to the same species. Different masses, charges, spins, flavors, or colors then merely correspond to different quantum states of the same…
This recreational paper investigates what happens if we change quantum mechanics in several ways. The main results are as follows. First, if we replace the 2-norm by some other p-norm, then there are no nontrivial norm-preserving linear…
The interpretative principle proposed by Bub in 1211.3062v1 [quant-ph] is justified only for all practical purposes (Bell's "FAPP trap"). An alternative interpretative principle is proposed. It brings to light those features of the quantum…
General Relativity resembles a very elegant crystal glass: If we touch its principles, that is, its Lagrangian, there is a risk of breaking everything. Or, if we will, it is like a short blanket: Curing some problems creates new problems.…
Super-Earths, objects slightly larger than Earth and slightly smaller than Uranus, have found a special place in exoplanetary science. As a new class of planetary bodies, these objects have challenged models of planet formation at both ends…
Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered and the search for life outside Earth is at the forefront of astrophysical research. The planets we observe show a mind-blowing diversity that current theories strive to explain as part of the…
Quantum foundations are still unsettled, with mixed effects on science and society. By now it should be possible to obtain consensus on at least one issue: Are the fundamental constituents fields or particles? As this paper shows,…
A quantum theory of the universe consists of a theory of its quantum dynamics and a theory of its quantum state The theory predicts quantum multiverses in the form of decoherent sets of alternative histories describing the evolution of the…