Related papers: Why determinism in physics has no implications for…
Even if never elucidated, the question of determinism is a standing question along the history of human thinking. A physical system evolves in a deterministic way if its future is completely determined once we have fixed some present…
The human mind is endowed with innate primordial perceptions such as space, distance, motion, change, flow of time, matter. The field of cognitive science argues that the abstract concepts of mathematics are not Platonic, but are built in…
We are used to the fact that most if not all physical theories are based on the set of real numbers (or another associative division algebra). These all have a cardinality larger than that of the natural numbers, i.e. form a continuum. It…
In the absence of empirical confirmation, scientists may judge a theory's chances of being viable based on a wide range of arguments. The paper argues that such arguments can differ substantially with regard to their structural similarly to…
Difficulties over probability have often been considered fatal to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. Here I argue that the Everettian can have everything she needs from `probability' without recourse to indeterminism,…
Wigner's famous and influential claim that mathematics is "unreasonably effective" in physics is founded on unreasonable assumptions about the nature of mathematics and its independence of physics. Here I argue that what is surprising is…
The problematic relationship between science and philosophy has, since the beginning of modernity, divided the world into two separate domains: nature and human. Some of today's schools of philosophy and epistemological inquiry have…
This is a general description of a probabilistic formalism of mechanics, i.e., an extension of the Newtonian mechanics principles to the systems undergoing random motion. From an analysis of the induction procedure from experimental data to…
Theoretical physicists have been fascinated by the phenomena of life for more than a century. As we engage with more realistic descriptions of living systems, however, things get complicated. After reviewing different reactions to this…
Physical laws are a set of rules in the relationship between observations made by the experimenter. All these observations are made through a mechanism that links the external world to the experimenter's awareness, a mechanism which is not…
Mathematics and its relation to the physical universe have been the topic of speculation since the days of Pythagoras. Several different views of the nature of mathematics have been considered: Realism - mathematics exists and is…
Since the particles such as molecules, atoms and nuclei are composite particles, it is important to recognize that physics must be invariant for the composite particles and their constituent particles, this requirement is called particle…
We describe the fundamental difference between the nature of problems in traditional physics and that of many problems arising today in systems biology and other complex settings. The difference hinges on the much larger number of a priori…
We give a counter example to show that determinism as such is in contradiction to quantum mechanics. More precisely, we consider a simple quantum system and its environment, including the measurement device, and make the assumption that the…
In deterministic theories, one can start from a set of ontological states to formulate the dynamical laws, but these may not be directly observable. Observable are only equivalence classes of states, and these will span a basis of…
Observing the violation of Bell's inequality tells us something about all possible future theories: they must all predict nonlocal correlations. Hence Nature is nonlocal. After an elementary introduction to nonlocality and a brief review of…
A succinct statement and justification of all the principles necessary to understand and evaluate interpretations of quantum mechanics is given. These principles provide strong constraints on interpretations. They imply the particle-like…
Black holes are extremely relativistic objects. Physical processes around them occur in a regime where the gravitational field is extremely intense. Under such conditions, our representations of space, time, gravity, and thermodynamics are…
The dynamics of physical theories is usually described by differential equations. Difference equations then appear mainly as an approximation which can be used for a numerical analysis. As such, they have to fulfill certain conditions to…
Einstein initially objected to the probabilistic aspect of quantum mechanics - the idea that God is playing at dice. Later he changed his ground, and focussed instead on the point that the Copenhagen Interpretation leads to what Einstein…