Related papers: Physicists Are Still Joking
Incongruity often makes people laugh. You have to be smart to say stupid things. It requires to be even smarter for understanding them. This paper is a shameless attempt to formalize this intelligent behavior in the case of an agent…
Over the last four decades, the way knowledge is created in academia has transformed dramatically: research teams have grown larger, scholars draw from ever-wider pools of prior work, and the most influential discoveries increasingly emerge…
The present politically correct consensus is that increased exchange of scientific insight, knowledge, practitioners and skills at the global level brings significant benefits to all. The quantifiable scientometric changes during the last…
With the continuous advancement of reasoning abilities in Large Language Models (LLMs), their application to scientific reasoning tasks has gained significant research attention. Current research primarily emphasizes boosting LLMs'…
Speculation about Martian canals was a recurring feature of late nineteenth-century popular astronomy. This paper examines how colonial newspapers used humour to negotiate the epistemic uncertainty and interpretive excess associated with…
This article was written for a multi-volume History of Science, and published in Italian translation: Storia della Scienza, Volume IX, La Grande Scienza, pp 645-656 (published by Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Fondata da Giovanni…
Quantum mechanics led to spectacular technological developments, discovery of new constituents of matter and new materials. However there is still no consensus on its interpretation and limitations. Some scientists and scientific writers…
Wave-particle duality, wave function collapse, objective probability and nonlocality constitute four prominent puzzles in modern physics. Although these four topics may appear unrelated, a closer examination reveals that they do share some…
Over the past decades, the diversity of areas explored by physicists has exploded, encompassing new topics from biophysics and chemical physics to network science. However, it is unclear how these new subfields emerged from the traditional…
Scientific progress has long been understood as recombinant, with breakthroughs arising when existing ideas are joined in new ways. Empirical work in this tradition has focused on the inputs to discovery, asking whether a paper draws…
Scientific communication is an essential part of modern science: whereas Archimedes worked alone, Newton (correspondence with Hooke, 1676) acknowledged that "If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."…
Paradoxes are a relatively frequent occurrence in physics. The nature of their genesis is diverse and they are found in all branches of physics. There are a number of general and special classifications of paradoxes, but there are no…
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been increasingly applied in scientific activities for decades; however, it is still far from an insightful and trustworthy collaborator in the scientific process. Most existing AI methods are either too…
With rising life expectancies around the world and an older scientific workforce than ever before, what does aging mean for individual scientists, and what do aging scientists mean for scientific progress as a whole? Here we examine how…
Large language models like GPT-4 have achieved remarkable proficiency in a broad spectrum of language-based tasks, some of which are traditionally associated with hallmarks of human intelligence. This has prompted ongoing disagreements…
Currently it is widely accepted that the language of science is mathematics. This book explores an alternative idea where the future of science is based on the language of algorithms and programs. How such a language can actually be…
The distinction between sciences is becoming increasingly more artificial -- an approach from one area can be easily applied to the other. More exciting research nowadays is happening perhaps at the interfaces of disciplines like Physics,…
A suite of impressive scientific discoveries have been driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence. These almost all result from training flexible algorithms to solve difficult optimization problems specified in advance by teams of…
Scientific communication is an essential part of modern science: whereas Archimedes worked alone, Newton (1676) acknowledged that "If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." How is scientific…
Can mathematics help us find our way through all the wonders and mysteries of the universe? When physicists describe the laws governing the physical world, mathematics is always involved. Is this due to the fact that the universe is, at…