Related papers: An objective criterion for evaluating new physical…
The emergence of an objective reality in line with the laws of the microscopic world has been the focus of longstanding debates. Recent approaches seem to have reached a consensus at least with respect to one aspect, namely, that the…
The principle of peer review is central to the evaluation of research, by ensuring that only high-quality items are funded or published. But peer review has also received criticism, as the selection of reviewers may introduce biases in the…
Rankings are a fact of life. Whether or not one likes them, they exist and are influential. Within academia, and in computer science in particular, rankings not only capture our attention but also widely influence people who have a limited…
The importance of peer-review in the scientific process can not be overestimated. Yet, due to increasing pressures of research and exponentially growing number of publications the task faced by the referees becomes ever more difficult. We…
Physics faculty care about their students learning physics content. In addition, they usually hope that their students will learn some deeper lessons about thinking critically and scientifically. They hope that as a result of taking a…
Being mathematics a natural language to Mankind and to physics, it must be constantly adapted to our necessities and our natural perception. Then, mathematical concepts are not absolute to reality. Although mathematical theories are…
A recent paper evaluating a new rubric-based graduate admissions approach using generic methods tentatively suggested that its decisions differed noticeably from the previous approach in an unspecified way. Using prior knowledge that the…
The number of scientific publications is constantly rising, increasing the strain on the review process. The number of submissions is actually higher, as each manuscript is often reviewed several times before publication. To face the deluge…
Bibliometricians have long recurred to citation counts to measure the impact of publications on the advancement of science. However, since the earliest days of the field, some scholars have questioned whether all citations should be worth…
To explain conceptual gap between classical/quantum and other, hypothetical descriptions of world, several principles has been proposed. So far, all these principles have not explicitly included the uncertainty relation. Here we introduce…
A physical theory consists of the mathematical formalism and an interpretation, which contains the definition of symbols, measurement assignments, concepts and principles, and an ontology. We present a scheme to classify these different…
It is argued that the traditional "realist" methodology of physics, according to which human concepts, laws and theories can grasp the essence of reality, is incompatible with the most fruitful interpretation of quantum formalism. The proof…
In this contribution, which introduces the "Crossing the Portal" session of the NOW 2024 meeting, I discuss the value of the concepts of interdisciplinarity and innovation for neutrino physics. After some historical considerations, which…
What is a physical theory? Although this intriguing question has been addressed from many different perspectives, some physicists and philosophers of physics have implicitly or explicitly embraced a philosophically-neutral definition of a…
New status in quantum mechanics is connected with recent achievements in the inverse problem. With its help instead of about ten exactly solvable models which serve as a basis of the contemporary education there are infinite (!) number,…
Influence theory is a foundational theory of physics that is not based on traditional empirically defined concepts, such as positions in space and time, mass, energy, or momentum. Instead, the aim is to derive these concepts, and their…
We comment on the fact that certain mathematical models that have been proposed in the quantum gravity literature, may not be subject to experimental checks, even if they turn out to be mathematically well defined. This means that they…
The search for a new scientific theory is typically prompted by an encounter with something in the world that cannot be explained by current theories. This is not the case for the search for a theory of quantum gravity, which has been…
There is noticeable consensus among physicists and philosophers that only gauge-invariant quantities can be physically real. However, this insight that physical quantities must be gauge-invariant is not well-reflected in standard approaches…
We consider evaluating improper priors in a formal Bayes setting according to the consequences of their use. Let $\Phi$ be a class of functions on the parameter space and consider estimating elements of $\Phi$ under quadratic loss. If the…