Related papers: The world beyond physics: how big is it?
This article frames the relation between biology and physics by characterizing the former as a subdiscipline rather than a special case of the latter. To do this, we posit biological physics as the science of living matter in contrast to…
We give a brief overview on the successes and theoretical problems of the Standard Model and discuss the basics of low-scale supersymmetry. We also address some of recent proposals for physics beyond the Standard Model and the connection to…
Feynman's light microscope invites us to reconsider what we thought we knew about quantum reality. Rather than invoking wavefunction collapse to predict the loss of fringes in a monitored interferometer, Feynman analyzes the problem in…
It goes without saying that we are stuck with the universe we have. Nevertheless, we would like to go beyond simply describing our observed universe, and try to understand why it is that way rather than some other way. Physicists and…
The emphasis in the developmet of theories with more than three spatial dimensions has recently shifted towards ``brane world'' picture, which assumes that ordinary matter (with possible exceptions of gravitons and other, hypothetic,…
Is the universe computable? If so, it may be much cheaper in terms of information requirements to compute all computable universes instead of just ours. I apply basic concepts of Kolmogorov complexity theory to the set of possible…
A generalized view of Duality is offered as a bridge between physical sciences and the more abstract philosophical dimensions bordering on mysticism. To that end several examples of duality are first cited from from conventional physics…
Measurement in biological systems became a subject of concern as a consequence of numerous reports on limited reproducibility of experimental results. To reveal origins of this inconsistency, we have examined general features of biological…
Increasing numbers of physicists engage in research activities that address biological questions from physics perspectives or strive to develop physics insights from active biological processes. The on-going development and success of such…
A measure of complexity based on a probabilistic description of physical systems is proposed. This measure incorporates the main features of the intuitive notion of such a magnitude. It can be applied to many physical situations and to…
The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of…
It is proposed to define "quantumness" of a system (micro or macroscopic, physical, biological, social, political) by starting with understanding that quantum mechanics is a statistical theory. It says us only about probability…
This article addresses the question of when physical laws and their consequences can be computed. If a physical system is capable of universal computation, then its energy gap can't be computed. At an even more fundamental level, the most…
Existing physical theories do not predict every feature of our experience but only certain regularities of that experience. That difference between what could be observed and what can be predicted is one kind of limit on scientific…
Some general considerations on the notion of entropy in physics are presented. An attempt is made to clarify the question of the differentiation between physical entropy (the Clausius-Boltzmann one) and quantities called entropies…
Many physical and biological systems can be studied using complex network theory, a new statistical physics understanding of graph theory. The recent application of complex network theory to the study of functional brain networks generated…
I explore physics implications of the External Reality Hypothesis (ERH) that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans. I argue that with a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, it implies the…
It is argued that the nature of probability is essentially informational rather than physical and that quantum mechanical predictions should be viewed as logical inferences made on the basis of the information content of a given…
Statistical mechanics is one of the most powerful and elegant tools in the quantitative sciences. One key virtue of statistical mechanics is that it is designed to examine large systems with many interacting degrees of freedom, providing a…
Experiments are once again under way at the LHC. This time around, however, the mood in the high-energy physics community is pessimistic. There is a growing suspicion that naturalness arguments that predict new physics near the weak scale…