Related papers: Ontological Categorizations and Selection Biases i…
In this paper, the theoretical terms of contemporary cosmology are examined as intellectual artefacts. An ontology and methodology are introduced for this purpose, which includes defining the concept of a hypothetical object. Introducing a…
There are investigated the generalized methods of cognition of the Existing, i.e. everything that is able to influence to the cognizer, and everything differed from the Existing is postulated as indistinguishable from the non-existing and…
In cosmology, we would like to explain our observations and predict future observations from theories of the entire universe. Such cosmological theories make ontological assumptions of what entities exist and what their properties and…
Anomalies drive scientific discovery -- they are associated with the cutting edge of the research frontier, and thus typically exploit data in the low signal-to-noise regime. In astronomy, the prevalence of systematics --- both "known…
Even when completely and consistently formulated, a fundamental theory of physics and cosmological boundary conditions may not give unambiguous and unique predictions for the universe we observe; indeed inflation, string/M theory, and…
Extracting predictions from cosmological theories that describe a multiverse, for what we are likely to observe in our domain, is crucial to establishing the validity of these theories. One way to extract such predictions is from…
The construction of an ontology of scientific knowledge objects, presented here, is part of the development of an approach oriented towards the visualization of scientific knowledge. It is motivated by the fact that the concepts that are…
In the absence of a fundamental theory that precisely predicts values for observable parameters, anthropic reasoning attempts to constrain probability distributions over those parameters in order to facilitate the extraction of testable…
The problem of making predictions from theories that have landscapes of possible low energy parameters is reviewed. Conditions for such a theory to yield falsifiable predictions for doable experiments are given. It is shown that the…
Selection effects in cosmology are often invoked to "explain" why some of the fundamental constant of Nature, and in particular the cosmological constant, take on the value they do in our Universe. We briefly review this probabilistic…
The fundamental laws and constants of our universe seem to be finely tuned for life. The various multiverse hypotheses are popular explanations for the fine tuning. This paper reviews the four main suggestions on inference in the presence…
The observation of the nature and world represents the main source of human knowledge on the basis of our reason. At the present it is also the use of precise measurement approaches, which may contribute significantly to the knowledge of…
Model selection aims to determine which theoretical models are most plausible given some data, without necessarily asking about the preferred values of the model parameters. A common model selection question is to ask when new data require…
Observational astronomy is plagued with selection effects that must be taken into account when interpreting data from astronomical surveys. Because of the physical limitations of observing time and instrument sensitivity, datasets are…
Over the past decade advancements in the understanding of several astrophysical phenomena have allowed us to infer a concordance cosmological model that successfully accounts for most of the observations of our universe. This has opened up…
We present a Bayesian method for the identification and classification of objects from sets of astronomical catalogs, given a predefined classification scheme. Identification refers here to the association of entries in different catalogs…
Astrophysics and cosmology can be used to test the standard model of particle physics under conditions and over distance and time scales not accessible to laboratory experiments. Most of the astrophysical observations are in good agreement…
Cosmology has come a long way from being based on a small number of observations to being a data-driven precision science. We discuss the questions "What is observable?", "What in the Universe is knowable?" and "What are the fundamental…
The SemanticWeb emerged as an extension to the traditional Web, towards adding meaning to a distributed Web of structured and linked data. At its core, the concept of ontology provides the means to semantically describe and structure…
The dramatic confrontation between new observations and theories of the early and recent universe makes cosmology one of the most rapidly advancing fields in the physical sciences. The universe is a unique laboratory in which to probe…