Related papers: Law without law or "just" limit theorems?
This communication is devoted to a brief historical framework and to a comprehensive critical discussion concerning foundational issues of Electrodynamics. Attention is especially focused on the events which, about the end of XIX century,…
There has been great interest in applying the results of statistical mechanics to single molecule experiements. Recent work has highlighted so-called non-equilibrium work-energy relations and Fluctuation Theorems which take on an…
There is a striking relationship between a three hundred years old Political Science theorem named "Condorcet's jury theorem" (1785), which states that majorities are more likely to choose correctly when individual votes are often correct…
Wheeler's {\it observer-participancy} and the related {\it it from bit} credo refer to quantum non-locality and contextuality. The mystery of these concepts slightly starts unveiling if one encodes the (in)compatibilities between qubit…
That the speed of light is a universal constant is a logical consequence of Maxwell's equations. Here we show the converse is also true. Electromagnetism (EM) and electrodynamics (ED), in all details, can be derived from two simple…
The tremendous popular success of Chaos Theory shares some common points with the not less fortunate Relativity: they both rely on a misunderstanding. Indeed, ironically , the scientific meaning of these terms for mathematicians and…
In the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, " 'I' is not the name of a person, nor 'here' of a place, .... But they are connected with names. ... [And] it is characteristic of physics not to use these words." This…
Ever since the work of von Ignatowsky circa 1910 it has been known (if not always widely appreciated) that the relativity principle, combined with the basic and fundamental physical assumptions of locality, linearity, and isotropy, leads…
A new axiomatic characterization with a minimum of conditions for entropy as a function on the set of states in quantum mechanics is presented. Traditionally unspoken assumptions are unveiled and replaced by proven consequences of the…
Entropy is the distinguishing and most important concept of our efforts to understand and regularize our observations of a very large class of natural phenomena, and yet, it is one of the most contentious concepts of physics. In this…
It has been repeatedly stated that maximum likelihood (ML) estimates of exponents of power-law distributions can only be reliably obtained for exponents smaller than minus one. The main argument that power laws are otherwise not…
The probability distribution of a function of a subsystem conditioned on the value of the function of the whole, in the limit when the ratio of their values goes to zero, has a limit law: It equals the unconditioned marginal probability…
We are in the middle of a remarkable paradigm shift in particle physics, a shift of opinion that occurred so slowly that some even try to deny that they changed their minds at all. It concerns a very basic question: can we expect to derive…
In various subjects, there exist compact and consistent relationships between input and output parameters. Discovering the relationships, or namely compact laws, in a data set is of great interest in many fields, such as physics, chemistry,…
We present the theory of special relativity here through the lens of differential geometry. In particular, we explicitly avoid any reference to hypotheses of the form "The laws of physics take the same form in all inertial reference frames"…
The example of the calculus is used to explain how simple, practical math was made enormously complex by imposing on it the Western religiously-colored notion of mathematics as "perfect". We describe a pedagogical experiment to make math…
In this work, we develop a formal system of inductive logic. It uses an infinitary language that allows for countable conjunctions and disjunctions. It is based on a set of nine syntactic rules of inductive inference, and contains classical…
We deduce the Born rule. No use is required of quantum postulates. One exploits only rudimentary quantum mathematics--a linear, not Hilbert', vector space--and empirical notion of the statistical length of a state. Its statistical nature…
We prove a general ergodic-theoretic result concerning the return time statistic, which, properly understood, sheds some new light on the common sense phenomenon known as {\it the law of series}. Let \proc be an ergodic process on finitely…
Here we show how spacetime transformations consistent with the principle of relativity can be derived without an explicit assumption of the constancy of the speed of light, without gedanken experiments involving light rays, and without an…