Related papers: Is nature natural?
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
This note discusses the matter of probing Beyond the Standard Model physics and how, to succeed in this quest, the interpretations of the Standard Model regarding observed phenomena must be utilized with caution. We give several specific…
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection does not predict long-term progress or advancement, nor does it provide a useful way to define or understand these concepts. Nevertheless, the history of life is marked by major trends that…
Classical objects have been excluded as subjects of the observed quantum properties, and the related problem of quantum objects nature has been suspended since the early days of Quantum Theory. Recent experiments show that the problem could…
I give an overview of the topic of this special issue, the applications of (statistical) physics to social sciences at large. I discuss several examples of simple social models put forward by physicists and discuss their interest. I argue…
One of the most striking features of quantum theory is the existence of entangled states, responsible for Einstein's so called "spooky action at a distance". These states emerge from the mathematical formalism of quantum theory, but to date…
We consider the so-called $\natural$-model. It is an one-default model which gives the conditional law of a random time with respect to a reference filtration. This model has been studied in the case where the parameters are continuous. In…
We explore the landscape of technical naturalness for nonrelativistic systems, finding surprises which challenge and enrich our relativistic intuition already in the simplest case of a single scalar field. While the immediate applications…
The Random Dynamics program is a proposal to explain the origin of all symmetries, including Lorentz and gauge invariance without appeal to any fundamental invariance of the laws of nature, and to derive the known physical laws in such a…
We establish the potential existence of natural relations between the Cabibbo angle and the quark mass ratios, in a Standard Model with one Higgs doublet and two quark generations. The argument is based on the calculation of the divergent…
We consider how to define a natural probability distribution over worlds within a simple class of deterministic many-worlds theories. This can help us understand the typical properties of worlds within such states, and hence explain the…
Two main ingredients of current particle physics such as local gauge symmetry and mass generation via the Higgs mechanism being basic ground of the Standard Model are widely confirmed by experimental data. However, some problems such as…
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…
After discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN the Standard Model acquired a status of the full, correct theory of the elementary particles in the electroweak range. What general conclusions can be inferred from the SM? I am suggesting here…
While many observations support the validity of Einstein's general relativity as the theory of gravity, there are yet many that suggest the presence of new physics. In order to explain the high-redshift supernovae Ia observations together…
Many systems involve numerous interacting parts and the whole system can have properties that the individual parts do not. I take this novelty as the defining characteristic of an emergent property. Other characteristics associated with…
These notes introduce probabilistic landscape models defined on high-dimensional discrete sequence spaces. The models are motivated primarily by fitness landscapes in evolutionary biology, but links to statistical physics and computer…
According to the so-called ``Quantum Darwinist'' approach, the emergence of ``classical islands'' from a quantum background is assumed to obey a (selection) principle of maximal information. We illustrate this idea by considering the…
As far as algebraic properties are concerned, the usual addition on the class of ordinal numbers is not really well behaved; for example, it is not commutative, nor left cancellative etc. In a few cases, the natural Hessemberg sum is a…
The present observational status of neutrino physics is sketched, with emphasis on the hints that follow from solar and atmospheric neutrino observations, as well as dark matter. I also briefly review the ways to account for the observed…