Related papers: Social physics
Despite the extraordinary successes the two great bastions of $20^{th}$ century science (Quantum Theory and General Relativity) are troubled with serious conceptual and mathematical difficulties. As a result, further growth of fundamental…
The purpose of this paper is to show the magic of physics by showing the physics of magic. What usually makes magic tricks interesting is that something unexpected occurs. Similarly, demonstrations are interesting inasmuch as they produce…
Social networks enable users to freely communicate with each other and share their recent news, ongoing activities or views about different topics. As a result, they can be seen as a potentially viable source of information to understand…
Nearing a century since its inception, quantum mechanics is as lively as ever. Its signature manifestations, such as superposition, wave-particle duality, uncertainty principle, entanglement and nonlocality, were long confronted as weird…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
This article looks at philosophical aspects and questions that modern astrophysical research gives rise to. Other than cosmology, astrophysics particularly deals with understanding phenomena and processes operating at "intermediate" cosmic…
Over the past 25 years, I have been involved in some intriguing developments in the foundations of physics, exploring the quantum reality problem, the relationship between quantum theory and gravity and the interplay between consciousness…
Quantum physics and biology have long been regarded as unrelated disciplines, describing nature at the inanimate microlevel on the one hand and living species on the other hand. Over the last decades the life sciences have succeeded in…
The psychology of science is the least developed member of the family of science studies. It is growing, however, increasingly into a promising discipline. After a very brief review of this emerging sub-field of psychology, we call for it…
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…
In this paper we explore the theory of communities of practice in the context of a physics college course and in particular the classroom environment of an advanced laboratory. We introduce the idea of elements of a classroom community…
Physicists have recently begun doing research in finance, and even though this movement is less than five years old, interesting and useful contributions have already emerged. This article reviews these developments in four areas, including…
Multiscale and multiphysics applications are now commonplace, and many researchers focus on combining existing models to construct combined multiscale models. Here we present a concise review of multiscale applications and their source…
Increasingly, the physics community is attending to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion, both in language and action. We are more publicly recognizing our individual responsibilities as physicists to address social injustice and…
Econophysics is an approach to quantitative economy using ideas, models, conceptual and computational methods of statistical physics. In recent years many of physical theories like theory of turbulence, scaling, random matrix theory or…
Although not as wide, and popular, as that of quantum mechanics, the investigation of fundamental aspects of statistical mechanics constitutes an important research field in the building of modern physics. Besides the interest for itself,…
Astronomy, of all the sciences, is possibly the one with the most public appeal across all age groups. This is also evidenced by the existence of a large number of planetaria and amateur astronomy societies, which is unique to the field.…
While speed is an ubiquitous concept in physics, its inverse - known as slowness - sometimes proves more relevant. We discuss some case studies within classical physics where such a notion is fruitful, before exploring how it can be…
The fluctuations in nonequilibrium systems are under intense theoretical and experimental investigation. Topical ``fluctuation relations'' describe symmetries of the statistical properties of certain observables, in a variety of models and…
Predicting the social and behavioral impact of future technologies, before they are achieved, would allow us to guide their development and regulation before these impacts get entrenched. Traditionally, this prediction has relied on…