Related papers: Life in a random universe: Sciama's argument recon…
The fundamental laws and constants of our universe seem to be finely tuned for life. The various multiverse hypotheses are popular explanations for the fine tuning. This paper reviews the four main suggestions on inference in the presence…
Small-world networks are ubiquitous in real-life systems. Most previous models of small-world networks are stochastic. The randomness makes it more difficult to gain a visual understanding on how do different nodes of networks interact with…
If the results of the first LHC run are not betraying us, many decades of particle physics are culminating in a complete and consistent theory for all non-gravitational physics: the Standard Model. But despite this monumental achievement…
The discovery of a Higgs boson at the electroweak scale appears to point toward supersymmetry, as the most likely mechanism for protecting a scalar boson mass from enormous radiative corrections. The earlier discovery of neutrino masses…
Based on the cosmological results of the Planck Mission, we show that all parameters describing our Universe within the \Lambda CDM model can be constructed from a small set of numbers known from conspiracy theory. Our finding is confirmed…
We consider one infinite path of a Random Walk in Random Environment (RWRE, for short) in an unknown environment. This environment consists of either i.i.d.\ site or bond randomness. At each position the random walker stops and tells us the…
Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the…
Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…
Quantum weirdness has been in the news recently, thanks to an ingenious new experiment by a team led by Roland Hanson, at the Delft University of Technology. Much of the coverage presents the experiment as good (even conclusive) news for…
Many cosmological models assume or imply that the total size of the universe is very large, perhaps even infinite. Here we argue instead that the universe might be comparatively small, in fact not much larger than the currently observed…
The history of life on Earth and in other potential life-bearing planetary platforms is deeply linked to the history of the universe. Since life as we know it relies on chemical elements forged in dying heavy stars, the universe needs to be…
Dynamical dark energy (DE) has been proposed to explain various aspects of the cosmological constant (CC) problem(s). For example, it is very difficult to accept that a strictly constant Lambda-term constitutes the ultimate explanation for…
In a recent paper [1], it has been claimed that the outcomes of a quantum coin toss which is idealized as an infinite binary sequence is 1-random. We also defend the correctness of this claim and assert that the outcomes of quantum…
The assumption that a complete description of an early state of the universe does not privilege any position or direction in space leads to a unified account of probability in cosmology, macroscopic physics, and quantum mechanics. Such a…
We argue that whether the universe is infinite or finite is less crucial than usually supposed. Paradoxes of repeating behaviour in the infinite, or eternal inflationary, universe can be alleviated by a realistic definition of differing…
The hypothesis is rapidly gaining popularity that the dark energy pervading our universe is extra-repulsive ($-p>\rho$). The density of such a substance(usually called phantom energy) grows with the cosmological expansion and may become…
Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the Sun? We address this question by calculating the relative formation probability per unit time of habitable Earth-like planets within a fixed comoving volume of…
Current observations seem to mildly favor an evolving dark energy with the equation of state getting across -1. This form of dark energy, dubbed Quintom, is studied phenomenologically in this paper with an oscillating equation of state. We…
Astronomy is an observationally-led subject where chance discoveries play an important role. A whole range of such discoveries is continually made, from the trivial to the highly significant. What is generally needed is for luck to strike…
All spontaneous emergence of quantum particles from false vacuums can occur via usual energy-based Lagrangians; or, as we show, via a variational principle of minimum loss of Fisher information. By this principle all material existence in…