Related papers: What does it mean to "make sense" of physics?
Learning to create, use, and evaluate models is a central element of becoming a scientist. In physics, we often begin an analysis of a complex system with highly simplified or toy models. In introductory physics classes, we tend to use them…
One of the main activities in science teaching, and in particular in Physics teaching, is not only the discussion of both modern problems and problems which solution is an urgent matter. It means that the picture of an active and alive…
At the heart of intuitionistic type theory lies an intuitive semantics called the "meaning explanations"; crucially, when meaning explanations are taken as definitive for type theory, the core notion is no longer "proof" but "verification".…
Mathematics is one of the ways our species makes sense of this world and I believe that it is inherent in our thinking machinery. The mathematics we do in turn is dependent on the way we view our universe and ourselves. Lakoff and Nunez…
This is the first of a series of papers that we intend to publish about the epistemology of fundamental physics in its current state. One of the main objectives of these papers is to improve our understanding of fundamental physics (and…
We try to understand how particles acquire mass in general, and in particular, how they acquire mass in the standard model and beyond.
The best mathematical arguments against a realistic interpretation of quantum mechanics - that gives definite but partially unknown values to all observables - are analysed and shown to be based on reasoning that is not compelling. This…
Quantum Mechanics, almost 80 years after its arrival, is a well established and experimentally not falsified theory. It has predicted and explained a whole series of natural phenomena of a very delicate nature. But its interpretation has…
Philosophical thinking has a side effect: by aiming to find the essence of a diverse set of phenomena, it often makes it difficult to see the differences between them. This can be the case with Mathematics, Programming, Writing and…
An indeterministic interpretation of classical physics has been proposed recently, in which the argument relies on attacking an alleged unwarranted metaphysical hidden assumption of the standard deterministic interpretation. This short…
Quantum mechanics is a fundamentally probabilistic theory (at least so far as the empirical predictions are concerned). It follows that, if one wants to properly understand quantum mechanics, it is essential to clearly understand the…
In the past century many fundamental results on unpredictability, undecidability and uncertainty have compelled scientists to grapple with the idea that some questions may never be resolved within our current theories. While this…
Practicing mathematicians often assume that mathematical claims, when they are true, have good reasons to be true. Such a state of affairs is "unreasonable", in Wigner's sense, because basic results in computational complexity suggest that…
The representations of the world around in physics built with help of causality are analyzed and seems incomplete. The observer's causal representations form a closed logical system, i.e. the compact group related to cause-effect chains.…
This essay considers the special character of mathematical reasoning, and draws on observations from interactive theorem proving and the history of mathematics to clarify the nature of formal and informal mathematical language. It proposes…
The procedure used to "do physics" in the macroscopic world is familiar: You take an object, start it off with a particular position and velocity, subject it to known forces (say gravity or friction, or both), and follow its trajectory. You…
We report on our study of student understanding of the physics of mechanical waves, specifically the propagation and superposition of simple wavepulses traveling on long, taut strings. We introduce the terms "particle pulses mental model"…
We spell out a definition of sentience that may be useful for designing and building it in machines. We propose that for sentience to be meaningful for AI, it must be fleshed out in functional, computational terms, in enough detail to allow…
Many have wondered how mathematics, which appears to be the result of both human creativity and human discovery, can possibly exhibit the degree of success and seemingly-universal applicability to quantifying the physical world as…
Learning physics is a context dependent process. I consider a broader interdisciplinary problem of where differences in understanding and reasoning arise. I suggest the long run effects a multiple choice based learning system as well as…