Related papers: Infinite Growth: A Curse or a Blessing?
Many believe that the deep question of "why is there something rather than nothing?" is unanswerable. The universe just is and no further explanation for its existence is possible. In this paper I explain why this question must have an…
An age-old controversy in mathematics concerns the necessity and the possibility of constructive proofs. The controversy has been rekindled by recent advances which demonstrate the feasibility of a fully constructive mathematics. This…
Does inflation provide a compelling explanation for why the universe is so large, so flat, and so old, and a predictive theory of density perturbations? In this brief contribution (based on the role of the author as moderator of the…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
The dynamics of economies and infectious disease are inexorably linked: economic well-being influences health (sanitation, nutrition, treatment capacity, etc.) and health influences economic well-being (labor productivity lost to sickness…
There is a parallelism between growth in arithmetic combinatorics and growth in a geometric context. While, over $\mathbb{R}$ or $\mathbb{C}$, geometric statements on growth often have geometric proofs, what little is known over finite…
This contribution consists of two parts. In the first part, I review the tunneling approach to quantum cosmology and comment on the alternative approaches. In the second part, I discuss the relation between quantum cosmology and eternal…
The existence of life is one of the most fundamental problems of astrophysics. The intriguing existence of progressively complex and apparently improbable living beings should be a general tendency of life in the Universe. We are looking…
Mounting evidences are being gathered suggesting that income and wealth distribution in various countries or societies follow a robust pattern, close to the Gibbs distribution of energy in an ideal gas in equilibrium, but also deviating…
We propose an interpretation of the expansion and acceleration of the Universe from an information theoretic viewpoint. We obtain the time evolution of the configuration entropy of the mass distribution in a static Universe and show that…
The purpose of this roadmap article is to draw attention to a paradigm shift in our understanding of evolution towards a perspective of ecological-evolutionary feedback, highlighted through two recent highly simplified examples of rapid…
Present treatments of eternal inflation regulate infinities by imposing a geometric cutoff. We point out that some matter systems reach the cutoff in finite time. This implies a nonzero probability for a novel type of catastrophe. According…
Given a sufficiently large universe, numerous civilizations almost surely exist. Some of these civilizations will be short-lived and die out relatively early in their development, i.e., before having the chance to spread to other planets.…
We study an optimal consumption and investment problem in a possibly incomplete market with general, not necessarily convex, stochastic constraints. We give explicit solutions for investors with exponential, logarithmic and power utility.…
Last couple of decades have been the golden age for cosmology. High quality data confirmed the broad paradigm of standard cosmology but have thrusted upon us a preposterous composition for the universe which defies any simple explanation,…
Societal complexity may be at a historical peak. Distinct from entropy, complexity tends to rise as systems move away from order, crest at an intermediate state, and decline as entropy continues increasing. The use of a thermodynamic…
For Adam Smith, wealth was related to the division of labor. As people and firms specialize in different activities, economic efficiency increases, suggesting that development is associated with an increase in the number of individual…
We introduce and study the dynamics of an \emph{immortal} critical branching process. In the classic, critical branching process, particles give birth to a single offspring or die at the same rates. Even though the average population is…
Contrary to common belief, both the Earth's human population and its economic output have grown faster than exponential, i.e., in a super-Malthusian mode, for most of the known history. These growth rates are compatible with a spontaneous…
The acceleration of the expansion of the universe, ascribed to a dark energy, is one of the most intriguing discoveries in science. In addition to precise, systematics controlled data, clear, robust interpretation of the observations is…