Related papers: Physics to the rescue?
Without a doubt many problems in physics arise as a consequence of our philosophical conception of the world. In this contribution however we endeavor to alleviate this scenario by putting forward a philosophical approach under which some…
High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science…
During the last three decades, there has been a growing realization among physicists and cosmologists that the relation between particle physics and cosmology may constitute yet another successful example of the unity of science. However,…
One of the presuppositions of science since the times of Galileo, Newton, Laplace, and Descartes has been the predictability of the world. This idea has strongly influenced scientific and technological models. However, in recent decades,…
We discuss models and data of crowd disasters, crime, terrorism, war and disease spreading to show that conventional recipes, such as deterrence strategies, are often not effective and sufficient to contain them. Many common approaches do…
A non-technical argument is presented that there is a link between the mind and the physical world in modern physics. Special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and other areas of physics are explored.…
Statistics experiences a storm around the perceived misuse and possible abuse of its methods in the context of the so-called reproducibility crisis. The methods and styles of quantification practiced in mathematical modelling rarely make it…
Economies are complex man-made systems where organisms and markets interact according to motivations and principles not entirely understood yet. The increasing dissatisfaction with the postulates of traditional economics i.e. perfectly…
Empirical science needs to be based on facts and claims that can be reproduced. This calls for replicating the studies that proclaim the claims, but practice in most fields still fails to implement this idea. When such studies emerged in…
This paper discusses serious drawbacks of existing knowledge in macroeconomics and finance in explaining and predicting economic and financial phenomena. Complexity science is proposed as an alternative approach to be used in order to…
Complex macroscopic behaviour can arise in many-body systems with only very simple elements as a consequence of the combination of competition and inhomogeneity. This paper attempts to illustrate how statistical physics has driven this…
I try to clarify several confusions in the popular literature concerning chaos, determinism, the arrow of time, entropy and the role of probability in physics. Classical ideas going back to Laplace and Boltzmann are explained and defended…
With an investigation into how students in a physics Master of science program make sense of their whole first year study experience in one of the years following a programme reform, we try to offer insights and advice to consider when…
I provide a critical commentary regarding the attitude of the logician and the philosopher towards the physicist and physics. The commentary is intended to showcase how a general change in attitude towards making scientific inquiries can be…
Science is a crowning glory of the human spirit and its applications remain our best hope for social progress. But there are limitations to current science and perhaps to any science. The general mind-body problem is known to be intractable…
Meta-analysis is routinely performed in many scientific disciplines. This analysis is attractive since discoveries are possible even when all the individual studies are underpowered. However, the meta-analytic discoveries may be entirely…
Most scientists would hold that science has not established that the cosmos is physically comprehensible - i.e. such that there is some as-yet undiscovered true physical theory of everything that is unified. This is an empirically…
Communicating new scientific discoveries is key to human progress. Yet, this endeavor is hindered by monetary restrictions for publishing one's findings and accessing other scientists' reports. This process is further exacerbated by a large…
There has been increasing concern within the machine learning community that we are in a reproducibility crisis. As many have begun to work on this problem, all work we are aware of treat the issue of reproducibility as an intrinsic binary…
As 2005, the International Year of Physics, comes to an end, two physicists working primarily in geophysical research reflect on how geophysics is not an applied physics. Although geophysics has certainly benefited from progress in physics…