Related papers: The Moon Illusion explained by the Projective Cons…
Any representational enterprise must omit variation in order to function. NASA still uses Newtonian mechanics, though Einstein superseded Newton, and the standard picture of scientific progress cannot explain how. A description that omitted…
Almost all meteorite impacts occur at oblique incidence angles, but the effect of impact angle on crater size is not well understood, especially for large craters. To improve oblique impact crater scaling, we present a suite of simulations…
The uniform image of the full moon is well known from the beginning of history. In the last decades, there are photos with a similar configuration of the earth observed from the moon and from space, as well as of all the planets and their…
Objects falling into an overdensity appear larger on its near side and smaller on its far side than other objects at the same redshift. This produces a dipolar pattern of magnification, primarily as a consequence of the Doppler effect. At…
Valid ideas that physical reality is vastly larger than human perception of it, and that the perceived part may not be representative of the whole, exist on many levels and have a long history. After a brief general inventory of those ideas…
Our brain can effortlessly recognize objects even when partially hidden from view. Seeing the visible of the hidden is called amodal completion; however, this task remains a challenge for generative AI despite rapid progress. We propose to…
Metric magnitude is a measure of the "size" of point clouds with many desirable geometric properties. It has been adapted to various mathematical contexts and recent work suggests that it can enhance machine learning and optimization…
Many surface cues support three-dimensional shape perception, but people can sometimes still see shape when these features are missing -- in extreme cases, even when an object is completely occluded, as when covered with a draped cloth. We…
The ability to model the underlying dynamics of visual scenes and reason about the future is central to human intelligence. Many attempts have been made to empower intelligent systems with such physical understanding and prediction…
Quantum mechanics predicts an exponentially small probability that a particle with energy greater than the height of a potential barrier will nevertheless reflect from the barrier in violation of classical expectations. This process can be…
Large-scale vision-language pre-trained (VLP) models are prone to hallucinate non-existent visual objects when generating text based on visual information. In this paper, we systematically study the object hallucination problem from three…
The ability to discover abstract physical concepts and understand how they work in the world through observing lies at the core of human intelligence. The acquisition of this ability is based on compositionally perceiving the environment in…
Increasingly large parameter spaces, used to more accurately model precision observables in physics, can paradoxically lead to large deviations in the inferred parameters of interest -- a bias known as volume projection effects -- when…
Geometrical illusions are a subclass of optical illusions in which the geometrical characteristics of patterns such as orientations and angles are distorted and misperceived as the result of low- to high-level retinal/cortical processing.…
The frequency and the characteristics of lunar impacting meteorites are reconsidered under the general assumption of belonging to the sporadic meteoroids. We develop the model for evaluating the luminous energy detected in the visual band…
Explanation methods aim to make neural networks more trustworthy and interpretable. In this paper, we demonstrate a property of explanation methods which is disconcerting for both of these purposes. Namely, we show that explanations can be…
The origin and development of consciousness is poorly understood. Although it is clearly a naturalistic phenomenon evolved through Darwinian evolution, explaining it in terms of physicochemical, neural, or symbolic mechanisms remains…
The widespread adoption of large language and vision models in real-world applications has made urgent the need to address hallucinations -- instances where models produce incorrect or nonsensical outputs. These errors can propagate…
The Moon is our future. It may seem like a chimera with a projected cost in excess of 100 billion\$, and counting, dispensed on ARTEMIS with little to show to date. However it is the ideal site for the largest telescopes that we can dream…
The concept of transparent and opaque horizons is defined. One example of opaqueness is the presence of a firewall. Two apparently contradictory statements are reconciled: The overwhelming number of black hole states have opaque horizons;…