Related papers: Refuting the Metaphysics of Wolfram and Tegmark
Motivated by a generalization of Hempel's dilemma, I introduce a novel notion of empirical structure, as well as theory supervenience as a new reductive relationship between theories. One theory supervenes on another theory if the empirical…
Many physicists, following Einstein, believe that the ultimate aim of theoretical physics is to find a unified theory of all interactions which would not depend on any free dimensionless constant, i.e., a dimensionless constant that is only…
I flesh out the sense in which the informational approach to interpreting quantum mechanics, as defended by Pitowsky and Bub and lately by a number of other authors, is (neo-)Bohrian. I argue that on this approach, quantum mechanics…
In the philosophical literature, symmetries of physical theories are most often interpreted within the general doctrine called 'Sophistication'. Roughly speaking, it says that models related by symmetries can peacefully co-exist while…
General relativity poses serious problems for counterfactual propositions peculiar to it as a physical theory. Because these problems arise solely from the dynamical nature of spacetime geometry, they are shared by all schools of thought on…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
Cosmology is living through fascinating times, where new observations from ground and space telescopes are questioning the established paradigm, the so-called Lambda Cold Dark Matter model. The particle nature of Dark Matter is severely…
In a recent article, M. Tegmark poses the hypothesis that our known universe is a ``baggage free'' mathematical structure among many other possible ones, which also correspond to other physical universes --Mathematical Universe Hypothesis,…
This paper has been withdrawn by the author. In this short paper I will put in evidence a problem nested in Ozawa's effort to block von Neumann's chains and in his attributing the wave-collapse to a interaction between systems. This…
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time…
In view of the sobering findings of science, theology and to a lesser degree metaphysics is confronted with a humiliating loss, and a need for reinterpretation, of allegories and narratives which have served as guidance to the perplexed for…
The basic physics disciplines of Maxwell's electrodynamics and Newton's mechanics have been thoroughly tested in the laboratory, but they can nevertheless also support nonphysical solutions. The unphysical nature of some dynamical…
One of the major difficulties of modern science underlies at the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Different approaches towards such theory have been proposed. Noncommutative theories serve as the root of almost all…
The original Wigner's friend paradox is a gedankenexperiment involving an observer described by an external agent. The paradox highlights the tension between unitary evolution and collapse in quantum theory, and is sometimes taken as…
MOG as a modified gravity theory is designed to be replaced with dark matter. In this theory, in addition to the metric tensor, a massive vector is a gravity field where each particle has a charge proportional to the inertial mass and…
The geometric foundations of General Relativity are revisited, with particular attention to its gauge invariance, as a key to understanding the true nature of spacetime. Beyond the common image of spacetime as a deformable 'fabric' filling…
Recent advances in semiclassical gravity, both in our understanding of the gravitational path integral and the algebraic structure of a gravitating subregion, rely on the presence of an observer to obtain a nontrivial Hilbert space for…
The application of the notion of `observable' from gauge theory to diffeomorphism-invariant theories -- most relevantly to general relativity -- has led to numerous conceptual and technical issues when interpreting classical theories with…
What kind of macroscopic structural and dynamical patterns can we observe in real-world hypergraphs? What can be underlying local dynamics on individuals, which ultimately lead to the observed patterns, beyond apparently random evolution?…
Stephen Wolfram has recently outlined an unorthodox, multicomputational approach to fundamental theory, encompassing not only physics but also mathematics in a structure he calls The Ruliad, understood to be the entangled limit of all…