Related papers: What Makes A Discovery
This work presents a brief and non-technical description of the main results and concepts of the modern scientific cosmology, viewing it from an epistemological perspective which allows a dialog with other modes of thinking like e.g.…
Inference is the process of using facts we know to learn about facts we do not know. A theory of inference gives assumptions necessary to get from the former to the latter, along with a definition for and summary of the resulting…
Model selection aims to determine which theoretical models are most plausible given some data, without necessarily asking about the preferred values of the model parameters. A common model selection question is to ask when new data require…
I argue that research in physics operates under an implicit community philosophy, and I offer a definition I think physicists would accept, by and large. I compare this definition to what philosophers, sociologists, and historians of…
A scientific reasoning system makes decisions using objective evidence in the form of independent experimental trials, propositional axioms, and constraints on the probabilities of events. As a first step towards this goal, we propose a…
Teaching how to derive minimax decision rules can be challenging because of the lack of examples that are simple enough to be used in the classroom. Motivated by this challenge, we provide a new example that illustrates the use of standard…
Ambitious civilizations that expand for resources at an intergalactic scale could be observable from a cosmological distance, but how likely is one to be visible to us? The question comes down to estimating the appearance rate of such…
The paper starts with the proposal that the cause of the apparent insolubility of the free-will problem are several popular but strongly metaphysical notions and hypotheses. To reduce the metaphysics, some ideas are borrowed from physics. A…
The application of Bayesian methods in cosmology and astrophysics has flourished over the past decade, spurred by data sets of increasing size and complexity. In many respects, Bayesian methods have proven to be vastly superior to more…
I discuss how modern cosmology illustrates under-determination of theoretical hypotheses by data, in ways that are different from most philosophical discussions. I emphasize cosmology's concern with what data could in principle be collected…
Reconciliation of frequentist and Bayesian approaches to elementary treatment of data in nuclear and particle physics is attempted. Unique procedure to express the significance of a small count in presence of background is henceforth…
Non-canonical phenomena - defined here as observables which are either insufficiently characterized by existing theory, or otherwise represent inconsistencies with prior observations - are of burgeoning interest in the field of…
Over the past decade advancements in the understanding of several astrophysical phenomena have allowed us to infer a concordance cosmological model that successfully accounts for most of the observations of our universe. This has opened up…
We propose a method to estimate the probability of new physics discovery in future high energy physics experiments. Physics simulation gives both the average numbers $<N_b>$ of background and $<N_s>$ of signal events. We find that the…
We propose here a \emph{novel} method which singles out the \emph{a priori} unavoidable dependence on the underlying cosmological model when extracting parameter constraints, providing robust limits which only depend on the considered…
To discover new drugs is to seek and to prove causality. As an emerging approach leveraging human knowledge and creativity, data, and machine intelligence, causal inference holds the promise of reducing cognitive bias and improving decision…
The goal of this thesis is twofold; introduce the fundamentals of Bayesian inference and computation focusing on astronomical and cosmological applications, and present recent advances in probabilistic computational methods developed by the…
The network of cosmological tests is tight enough now to show that the relativistic Big Bang cosmology is a good approximation to what happened as the universe expanded and cooled through light element production and evolved to the present.…
This paper proposes a new definition of science based on the distinction between the activity of scientists and the product of that activity: the former is denoted (lower-case) science and the latter (upper-case) Science. These definitions…
In this Chapter, I will explore the use of modeling in order to understand how Science works. I will discuss the modeling of scientific communities, providing a general, non-comprehensive overview of existing models, with a focus on the use…