Related papers: What does it mean to "make sense" of physics?
Mass is an important concept in classical mechanics, which regards a particle as a corpuscular object. But according to wave-particle duality, we know a free particle can behave like a wave. Is there a wave property that corresponds to the…
Speech-acts can have literal meaning as well as pragmatic meaning, but these both involve consequences typically intended by a speaker. Speech-acts can also have unintentional meaning, in which what is conveyed goes above and beyond what…
Since the beginning, quantum mechanics has raised major foundational and interpretative problems. Foundational research has been an important factor in the development of quantum cryptography, quantum information theory and, perhaps one…
When a physicist says that a theory is fine-tuned, they mean that it must make a suspiciously precise assumption in order to explain a certain observation. This is evidence that the theory is deficient or incomplete. One particular case of…
I list several strong requirements for what I would consider a sensible interpretation of quantum mechanics and I discuss two simple theorems. One, as far as I know, is new; the other was only noted a few years ago. Both have important…
Social physics is the application of ideas, concepts and tools from physics to study social phenomena. In this article, we present a mechanical theory underlying a mathematical treatment of social physics. We explore the possibility of…
Numerous observations and studies suggest that the universe has some sort of overall rotation. We consider this matter and provide a new angle.
Quantum mechanics, one of the most successful theories in the history of science, was created to account for physical systems not describable by classical physics. Though it is consistent with all experiments conducted thus far, many of its…
This article proposes a set of categories, each one representing a particular distillation of important statistical ideas. Each category is labeled a "sense" because we think of these as essential in helping every statistical mind connect…
We consider a definition of mathematics as the art of thinking in terms of formalized systems, and the science of relations, structures and algorithms. We also touch upon the relation of mathematics to other sciences, in particular through…
This paper re-centres the discussion of student learning in physics to focus on context. In order to do so, a theoretically-motivated understanding of context is developed. Given a well-defined notion of context, data from a novel…
A perplexing problem in understanding physical reality is why the universe seems comprehensible, and correspondingly why there should exist physical systems capable of comprehending it. In this essay I explore the possibility that rather…
The hard problem in consciousness is the problem of understanding how physical processes in the brain could give rise to subjective conscious experience. In this paper, I suggest that in order to understand the relationship between…
When a decision, such as the approval or denial of a bank loan, is delegated to a computer, an explanation of that decision ought to be given with it. This ethical need to explain the decisions leads to the search for a formal definition of…
This paper introduces a theory about the role of language in learning physics. The theory is developed in the context of physics students' and physicists' talking and writing about the subject of quantum mechanics. We found that physicists'…
There is merely a short note on the selected issues of neutrino electromagnetic properties with focus on effects of new physics. The meaning of "new physics" is twofold: 1) a massive neutrino have nonzero electromagnetic properties that can…
Cosmoparticle physics is the natural result of development of mutual relationship between cosmology and particle physics. Its prospects offer the way to study the theory of everything and the true history of the Universe, based on it, in…
Many believe that the deep question of "why is there something rather than nothing?" is unanswerable. The universe just is and no further explanation for its existence is possible. In this paper I explain why this question must have an…
We show that the modern quantum mechanics, and particularly the theory of decoherence, allows for formulating a sort of a physical metatheory of consciousness. Particularly, the analysis of the necessary conditions for the occurrence of…
Gyroscopic motion explanation in texts is relatively long and requires reasonable level of comfort with the mathematical tools used. On the other hand, popular explanation outside academic courses does not explain the phenomenon and only…