Related papers: What does it mean to "make sense" of physics?
Although black holes are objects of central importance across many fields of physics, there is no agreed upon definition for them, a fact that does not seem to be widely recognized. Physicists in different fields conceive of and reason…
This article was written in response to a request from an editor of American Vedantist. It is shown that the idea that consciousness is essential to understanding quantum mechanics arises from logical fallacies. This may be welcome news to…
Some aspects of the physical nature of language are discussed. In particular, physical models of language must exist that are efficiently implementable. The existence requirement is essential because without physical models no communication…
Paradoxes are a relatively frequent occurrence in physics. The nature of their genesis is diverse and they are found in all branches of physics. There are a number of general and special classifications of paradoxes, but there are no…
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…
Recent years have seen a boom in interest in machine learning systems that can provide a human-understandable rationale for their predictions or decisions. However, exactly what kinds of explanation are truly human-interpretable remains…
Learning to use math in physics involves combining (blending) our everyday experiences and the conceptual ideas of physics with symbolic mathematical representations. Graphs are one of the best ways to learn to build the blend. They are a…
Some contributions of physics towards the understanding of consciousness are described. As recent relevant models, associative memory neural networks are mentioned. It is shown that consciousness and quantum physics share some properties.…
Modern fundamental physics poses new questions for philosophy, which, as it seems to us, have not yet received appropriate attention from philosophers of science. This paper formulates a number of such questions in order to present them to…
Despite its apparent complexity, our world seems to be governed by simple laws of physics. This volume provides a philosophical introduction to such laws. I explain how they are connected to some of the central issues in philosophy, such as…
Physics is considered as one of the most prevailing and problematic subjects by the students in the realm of science. Students perceived physics as a difficult subject during high school days and become more evasive when they reach college.…
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…
In this paper, it is argued that theoretical physics is more akin to an organism than to a rigid structure.It is in this sense that the epithet, "sick", applies to it. It is argued that classical physics is a model of a healthy science, and…
We discuss the possibility of making the {\it initial} definitions of mutually different (possibly interacting, or even entangled) systems in the context of decoherence theory. We point out relativity of the concept of elementary physical…
A formal theory of meaning (the process of knowledge accumulation) as multiplicative chaos is proposed. The epistemological process is understood as the process of subjective extraction of some knowledge from the incoming information. The…
Even though there has been a tremendous amount of research done in how to help students learn physics, students are still coming away missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: why bother with physics? Students learn fundamental laws and how to…
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…
Human languages employ constructions that tacitly assume specific properties of the limited range of phenomena they evolved to describe. These assumed properties are true features of that limited context, but may not be general or precise…
Some thoughts are presented on the inter-relation between beauty and truth in science in general and theoretical physics in particular. Some conjectural procedures that can be used to create new ideas, concepts and results are illustrated…
A number of issues related to measurement show that self-consistency is lacking in quantum mechanics as this theory has been generally understood. Each issue is presented as a point in this paper. Each point can be resolved by incorporating…