Related papers: Idealizations and analogies
A comparison of the standard models in particle physics and in cosmology demonstrates that they are not compatible, though both are well established. Basics of modern cosmology are briefly reviewed. It is argued that the measurements of the…
There have been recent attempts at justifying, from first principles, and within the standard framework, the emergence of classical behavior in the post-inflationary cosmological context. Accounting for this emergence is an important issue,…
The review presents general methods for treating complicated problems that cannot be solved exactly and whose solution encounters two major difficulties. First, there are no small parameters allowing for the safe use of perturbation theory…
From various points of view it is argued that one may find phenomena similar to the quantum effects also in macroscopic cases. This forces one to give up as a general requirement the assumption of realism as formulated by Gill and others.…
A growing number of commentators have, in recent years, noted the important affinities in the views of Immanuel Kant and Niels Bohr. While these commentators are correct, the picture they present of the connections between Bohr and Kant is…
An ultimate universal theory -- a complete theory that accounts, via few and simple first principles, for all the phenomena already observed and that will ever be observed -- has been, and still is, the aspiration of most physicists and…
The ``unification'' of fundamental physical forces (interactions) imagines a ``single'' conceptual entity using which {\em all} the observable or physical phenomena, {\em ie}, changes to physical bodies, would be suitably describable. The…
In this communication, the approach of phenomenological universalities of growth are considered to describe the behaviour of a system showing oscillatory growth. Two phenomenological classes are proposed to consider the behaviour of a…
We consider $N$ two-dimensional Ising models coupled in presence of quenched disorder and use scale invariant scattering theory to exactly show the presence of a line of renormalization group fixed points for any fixed value of $N$ other…
We present the quantum measurement problem as a serious physics problem. Serious because without a resolution, quantum theory is not complete, as it does not tell how one should - in principle - perform measurements. It is physical in the…
A popular science article designed to introduce people familiar with basic cosmological nomenclature with models alternative to cosmological inflation. The paper briefly discusses the modern view of the Big Bang model, inflation (both its…
It is argued that Feynman's rules for evaluating probabilities, combined with von Neumann's principle of psycho-physical parallelism, help avoid inconsistencies, often associated with quantum theory. The former allows one to assign…
This article examines the subtle relationship between chaos and randomness, two concepts that, although they refer to seemingly unpredictable phenomenon, are based on fundamentally different principles. Chaos manifests in deterministic…
The concept of emergence is critically analyzed in particular with respect to the assumed emergence of mental properties from a neuronal basis. We argue that so-called contextual emergence is needed to avoid an eliminatory reductionism.…
The class of random-cluster models is a unification of a variety of stochastic processes of significance for probability and statistical physics, including percolation, Ising, and Potts models; in addition, their study has impact on the…
Every experiment or observational study is made in a context. This context is being explicitly considered in this book. To do so, a conceptual variable is defined as any variable which can be defined by (a group of) researchers in a given…
In this talk we discuss three different issues. First of all, there exist several proposals how to solve cosmological problems by adiabatic expansion of the Universe, without any use of inflation. We explain why these models do not solve…
The emergence of collective oscillations and synchronization is a widespread phenomenon in complex systems. While widely studied in dynamical systems theory, this phenomenon is not well understood in the context of out-of-equilibrium phase…
We present a general framework for understanding and analyzing critical behaviour in gravitational collapse. We adopt the method of renormalization group, which has the following advantages. (1) It provides a natural explanation for various…
The unreduced, universally nonperturbative analysis of arbitrary interaction process, described by a quite general equation, provides the truly complete, "dynamically multivalued" general solution that leads to dynamically derived,…