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The tremendous popular success of Chaos Theory shares some common points with the not less fortunate Relativity: they both rely on a misunderstanding. Indeed, ironically , the scientific meaning of these terms for mathematicians and…

Popular Physics · Physics 2016-02-09 Amaury Mouchet

The claim of the freedom of the will (understood as an individual who is transcendent to Nature) in the name of XXth century scientific knowledge, against the perspective of XVIIIth-XIXth century scientific materialism, is analysed and…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2018-01-11 Martin Lopez-Corredoira

How did it all begin? Although this question has undoubtedly lingered for as long as humans have walked the Earth, the answer still eludes us. Yet since my grandparents were born, scientists have been able to refine this question to a…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Max Tegmark

The aim of this note is to prove a new discrepancy principle. The advantage of the new discrepancy principle compared with the known one consists of solving a minimization problem approximately, rather than exactly, and in the proof of a…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2015-06-26 A. G. Ramm

We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2007-05-23 Carlos Gershenson

The Universe contains everything that exists, including life. And all that exists, including life, obeys universal physical laws. Do those laws then give adequate foundations for a complete explanation of biological phenomena? We discuss…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2022-04-29 Marina Cortês , Stuart A. Kauffman , Andrew R. Liddle , Lee Smolin

We prove some new results on existence of solutions to first--order ordinary differential equations with deviating arguments. Delay differential equations are included in our general framework, which even allows deviations to depend on the…

Classical Analysis and ODEs · Mathematics 2014-02-26 Rubén Figueroa , Rodrigo López Pouso

The main aim of this paper is to make a remark about the relation between (i) dualities between theories, as `duality' is understood in physics and (ii) equivalence of theories, as `equivalence' is understood in logic and philosophy. The…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2018-06-06 Jeremy Butterfield

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…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2021-03-24 Uri Ben-Ya'acov

The world appears to be well described by gauge theories; why? I suggest that gauge is more than mathematical redundancy. Gauge-dependent quantities can not be predicted, but there is a sense in which they can be measured. They describe…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2016-07-06 Carlo Rovelli

I present a short and almost irrefutable arguments that life does use quantum mechanical correlations in an essential way. The very same argument applies, mutatis mutandis, in relation to any abundant resource, and observations bears this…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2012-08-07 George Svetlichny

It is shown that in a quantum theory over a Galois field, the famous Dirac's result about antiparticles is generalized such that a particle and its antiparticle are already combined at the level of irreducible representations of the…

General Physics · Physics 2014-10-09 Felix M. Lev

The fundamental physical theories that interpret and explain behaviour of matter in nature are dependent on several unobservables and insensibles in their construction. While a rigorous natural philosophy cannot take them for granted, there…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2020-01-29 C. S. Unnikrishnan

We discuss the nature and a general formulation of the relativity principle and we show that it can be justified starting from a strictly operational point of view. We give some remark on the connection with the spacetime symmetry groups.…

Classical Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 M. Toller

According to Karl Popper assumptions are statements used to construct theories. During the construction of a theory whether the assumptions are either true or false turn out to be irrelevant in view of the fact that, actually, they gain…

Classical Physics · Physics 2014-12-09 Israel Perez

In this essay the ontological structure of reality is explored. The question of reducibility of biology to physics is considered in the context of their ultimate principles. It is shown that biology is an ontologically autonomous science…

General Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 A. Grandpierre

This paper is concerned with the well known Jeffreys-Lindley paradox. In a Bayesian set up, the so-called paradox arises when a point null hypothesis is tested and an objective prior is sought for the alternative hypothesis. In particular,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-03-16 Cristiano Villa , Stephen Walker

It is considered the study of determinism in the theories of physics. Based on fundamental postulates of physics, it is proved that the evolution of the universe is univocally determined, proving ultimately that free will does not exist. In…

General Physics · Physics 2014-07-08 Edgar Jose Candales Dugarte

One purpose -- quite a few thinkers would say the main purpose -- of seeking knowledge about the world is to enhance our ability to make good decisions. An item of knowledge that can make no conceivable difference with regard to anything we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-04-12 Henry E. Kyburg

In this article we address the mystery of dark matter. We expound the various evidences, astrophysical and cosmological, leading to hypothesize the existence of an invisible form of matter, whose attempts at detecting it have so far all…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2024-10-15 Sergio Luigi Cacciatori , Vittorio Gorini , Federico Re