Related papers: Two Types of Natural Kind Discovery: Nobel Meets K…
What can we discover? As the discussion in this paper is limited to ontological considerations, it does not deal with the discovery of new concepts. It raises the following question: What are the entities or existents that we can discover?…
Thomas S. Kuhn interprets the development of the (natural) sciences as a specific dynamical process. Periods of piecemeal growth of knowledge based on widely accepted paradigms are interrupted by bursts of revolutionary changes which lead…
This work aims to formalize some of the ways scientific concepts are formed in the process of theoretical physics discovery. Since this may at first seem like a task beyond the scope of the exact sciences (natural and formal sciences), we…
During the past one hundred years three related elementary particles - the electron, the muon, and the tau - were discovered by very different scientific techniques. The author, who received the Wolf Prize and the Nobel Prize for the…
In this contribution to the proceedings of the 182nd Nobel Symposium, I reflect on the concept of "discovery" as it is used by physicists and astronomers. In particular, I comment on how the scientific community distinguishes discoveries…
Why is it interesting to try to understand the origin of the universe? Everything we observe today, including our existence, arose from that event. Although we still do not have a theory that allows us to describe the origin itself, the…
I reflect on some of the basic aspects of present day Beyond the Standard Model particle physics, focusing mostly on the issues of naturalness, in particular on the so-called hierarchy problem. To all of us, physics as natural science…
Interdisciplinary collaborations now sweep most fields of the natural and life sciences, necessary to tackle the world's most challenging problems. Yet, the scientific enterprise continues to be dominated by old stereotypes:…
This paper critically examines the models of scientific discovery propounded by Kuhn, McArthur, Hudson, and Schindler. As an alternative, we proffer the $\unicode{x201c}$change$\unicode{x2013}$driver model$\unicode{x201c}$. It conceives of…
Einstein was in many ways like a detective on a mystery trail, though in his case he was on the trail of nature's mysteries and not some murder mystery! And like all good detectives he had a style. It consisted of taking facts that he knew…
For more than half a century, dualities have been at the heart of modern physics. From quantum mechanics to statistical mechanics, condensed matter physics, quantum field theory and quantum gravity, dualities have proven useful in solving…
Niels Bohr wrote: "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature." In an…
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…
I show that with the discovery of the Higgs boson we have entered a new phase of our understanding of nature. This leads us towards a paradigm shift in the search for possible new physics, away from major extensions like supersymmetry…
The most abundant particles in the Universe are photons and neutrinos. Both types of particles are whirling around everywhere, since the early Universe. Hence the neutrinos are all around us, and permanently pass through our planet and our…
The fact that no evidence of new physics was found so far by LHC experiments has led some to call for the abandonment of the naturalness criterion. Others, on the contrary, have felt the need to break a lance in its defense by claiming that…
Technology leads discovery in astronomy, as in all other areas of science, so growth in technology leads to the continual stream of new discoveries which makes our field so fascinating. Derek de Solla Price had analysed the discovery…
It goes without saying that we are stuck with the universe we have. Nevertheless, we would like to go beyond simply describing our observed universe, and try to understand why it is that way rather than some other way. Physicists and…
Fast growing scientific topics have famously been key harbingers of the new frontiers of science, yet, large-scale analyses of their genesis and impact are rare. We investigate one possible factor connected with a topic's extraordinary…
The time lag between the publication of a Nobel discovery and the conferment of the prize has been rapidly increasing for all disciplines, especially for Physics. Does this mean that fundamental science is running out of groundbreaking…