Related papers: Ontological Categorizations and Selection Biases i…
In this contribution to the proceedings of the 182nd Nobel Symposium, I reflect on the concept of "discovery" as it is used by physicists and astronomers. In particular, I comment on how the scientific community distinguishes discoveries…
Making mock simulated catalogs is an important component of astrophysical data analysis. Selection criteria for observed astronomical objects are often too complicated to be derived from first principles. However the existence of an…
Emergent patterns in complex systems are related to many intriguing phenomena in modern science and philosophy. Several conceptions such as weak, strong and robust emergence have been proposed to emphasize different epistemological and…
Both relativistic mechanics and Newtonian mechanics are based on principles that have ontological implications. We propose a series of formalisms that rigorously define the ontology underlying mechanical theories, in order to clarify and…
Bayesian probability theory is used to analyze the oft-made assumption that humans are typical observers in the universe. Some theoretical calculations make the {\it selection fallacy} that we are randomly chosen from a class of objects by…
Beyond black holes and neutron stars, new hypothetical compact objects have been proposed as potential astrophysical entities. In general, their properties have not yet been fully explored or understood, nor has it been proven whether or…
Strong gravitational lenses are unique cosmological probes. These produce multiple images of a single source. Whether a single galaxy, a group or a cluster, extracting cosmologically relevant information requires an accurate modeling of the…
As ontologies proliferate and automatic reasoners become more powerful, the problem of protecting sensitive information becomes more serious. In particular, as facts can be inferred from other facts, it becomes increasingly likely that…
In extracting predictions from theories that describe a multiverse, we face the difficulty that we must assess probability distributions over possible observations, prescribed not just by an underlying theory, but by a theory together with…
This paper presents a systematic literature review focusing on the application of machine learning techniques for deriving observational constraints in cosmology. The goal is to evaluate and synthesize existing research to identify…
We discuss epistemological and methodological aspects of the Bayesian approach in astrophysics and cosmology. The introduction to the Bayesian framework is given for a further discussion concerning the Bayesian inference in physics. The…
In this paper, we describe an approach to populate an existing ontology with instance information present in the natural language text provided as input. An ontology is defined as an explicit conceptualization of a shared domain. This…
In the modern quantum mechanics of cosmology observers are physical systems within the universe. They have no preferred role in the formulation of the theory nor in its predictions of third person probabilities of what occurs. However,…
A more realistic object detection paradigm, Open-World Object Detection, has arisen increasing research interests in the community recently. A qualified open-world object detector can not only identify objects of known categories, but also…
Every field of Science is undergoing unprecedented changes in the discovery process, and Astronomy has been a main player in this transition since the beginning. The ongoing and future large and complex multi-messenger sky surveys impose a…
Three observational tests of cosmological natural selection, a theory that follows from some hypotheses about quantum gravity, are described. If true, this theory explains the choices of the parameters of the standard model of particle…
Context: The huge and still rapidly growing amount of galaxies in modern sky surveys raises the need of an automated and objective classification method. Unsupervised learning algorithms are of particular interest, since they discover…
In what has become a standard eternal inflation picture of the string landscape there are many problematic consequences and a difficulty defining probabilities for the occurrence of each type of universe. One feature in particular that…
From classical mechanics to quantum field theory, the physical facts at one point in space are held to be independent of those at other points in space. I propose that we can usefully challenge this orthodoxy in order to explain otherwise…
If the parameters defining the physics of our universe departed from their present values, the observed rich structure and complexity would not be supported. This article considers whether similar fine-tuning of parameters applies to…