Related papers: Is nature natural?
Selection, the tendency of some traits to become more frequent than others in a population under the influence of some (natural or artificial) agency, is a key component of Darwinian evolution and countless other natural and social…
I bring forward some arguments to support the thesis that nature is fundamentally discrete, and present my own thoughts about the direction in which one could look for a possible, consistent "theory of everything" describing gravitation and…
Neutrino oscillations present the only robust example of experimentally detected physics beyond the standard model. This review discusses the established and several hypothetical beyond standard models neutrino characteristics and their…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
In these lectures I describe some of the open questions in the standard model relating to the nature and origin of mass, forces and matter and discuss some of the speculative theoretical ideas put forth in this regard. Some of the topics…
Philosophers have spilled much ink over the discovery of ideas in the classical 'context of discovery'. However, there has been little engagement with the question of what constitutes a discovery of 'things in the world'. A much-overlooked…
First we review Veltman's suggestion to attack the naturalness problem in the Standard model by requiring absence of quadratic divergences and the resulting mass formula. Then we emphasise the influence of Veltman's suggestion in…
If the parameters defining the physics of our universe departed from their present values, the observed rich structure and complexity would not be supported. This article considers whether similar fine-tuning of parameters applies to…
Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…
The notion that nature is subject to laws is exciting from many different viewpoints. This paper is based on the context of modern cosmology and presents a more philosophical discussion. It will list the significant interdisciplinary…
The smallness of the vacuum energy density and its near coincidence with the average matter density of the universe are naturally explained by anthropic selection. An alternative explanation, based on the cyclic model of Steinhardt and…
The standard model of particle physics is marvelously successful. However, it is obviously not a complete or final theory. I shall argue here that the structure of the standard model gives some quite concrete, compelling hints regarding…
For decades, the unnaturalness of the weak scale has been the dominant problem motivating new particle physics, and weak-scale supersymmetry has been the dominant proposed solution. This paradigm is now being challenged by a wealth of…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Nearly 60 years ago Weinberg suggested a criterion for particle "compositeness", which has acquired new life with the discovery of new, exotic hadrons. His idea resonates with model-based intuition. I discuss the role it plays in the…
A central issue in ecology today is that of the factors determining the relative abundance of species within a natural community. The proper application of the principles of statistical physics to the problem of species abundance…
Two people may claim both to be naturalists, but have divergent conceptions of basic elements of the natural world which lead them to mean different things when they talk about laws of nature, or states, or the role of mathematics in…
Although ultimately motivated by quantum theoretical considerations, Everett's many-world idea remains valid, as an approximation, in the classical limit. However to be applicable it must in any case be applied in conjunction with an…
This article is a presentation of specific recent results describing scaling limits of individual-based models. Thanks to them, we wish to relate the time-scales typical of demographic dynamics and natural selection to the parameters of the…
Environmentally-induced superselection or "einselection" has been proposed as an observer-independent mechanism by which apparently classical systems "emerge" from physical interactions between degrees of freedom described completely…