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The interdisciplinary topic of archaeo-astronomy links science subjects such as astronomy with archaeology and sociology to explore how ancient societies perceived the heavens above. This is achieved by analysing ancient sites such as…
The amount of information available to the mathematics teacher is so enormous that the selection of desirable content is gradually becoming a huge task in itself. With respect to the inclusion of elements of history of mathematics in…
"You never forget how to ride a bike", -- but how is that possible? The brain is able to learn complex skills, stop the practice for years, learn other skills in between, and still retrieve the original knowledge when necessary. The…
We are at the dawn of the second quantum revolution, where our ability to create and control individual quantum systems is poised to drive transformative advancements in basic science, computation, and everyday life. However, quantum theory…
Global celebration greeted the 2012 discovery at CERN's Large Hadron Collider of a particle that matches the textbook description of the Higgs boson. That achievement validated a remarkable chain of theoretical reasoning that combined the…
The purpose of this paper is to look into how central notions in statistical learning theory, such as realisability, generalise under the assumption that train and test distribution are issued from the same credal set, i.e., a convex set of…
Primordial nucleosynthesis, or big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), is one of the three evidences for the big bang model, together with the expansion of the universe and the cosmic microwave background. There is a good global agreement over a…
Both the basic educational contents for students and study programs for science teachers include several topics in physics and astronomy, from the simplest ones to others as advanced as nuclear fusion to explain stellar evolution and…
The rich experiences of an intentional, goal-oriented life emerge, in an unpredictable fashion, from the basic laws of physics. Here I argue that this unpredictability is no mirage: there are true gaps between life and non-life, mind and…
Assuming the lightest neutralino forms dark matter, we study its residual annihilation after freeze-out at the early universe. If taking place after the big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) the annihilation products, especially at the hadronic…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) ascend in popularity, offering information with unprecedented convenience compared to traditional search engines, we delve into the intriguing possibility that a new, singular perspective is being propagated.…
When we teach physics to prospective scientists and engineers we are teaching more than the "facts" of physics - more, even, than the methods and concepts of physics. We are introducing them to a complex culture - a mode of thinking and the…
Of the light nuclides observed in the universe today, D, 3He, 4He, and 7Li are relics from its early evolution. The primordial abundances of these relics, produced via Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) during the first half hour of the…
Many professional physicists do not fully understand the implications of the Einstein equivalence principle of general relativity. Consequently, many are unaware of the fact that special relativity is fully capable of handling accelerated…
This essay discusses recent progress on Euclidean wormholes as candidate contributions to the Universe's initial quantum state. The comparison with the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal highlights both a conceptual affinity and genuine…
The problem of learning in the absence of external intelligence is discussed in the context of a simple model. The model consists of a set of randomly connected, or layered integrate-and fire neurons. Inputs to and outputs from the…
This is a summary of a course given at the Fourth Mexican School on Gravitation and Mathematical Physics on some aspects of PBB cosmology. After introductory remarks the lectures concentrate on some amusing consequences derived from the…
In this paper, I outline some problems in the students' understanding of the explanation of recoil motion when introduced to them in the context of Newton's third law. I propose to explain the origin of recoil from a microscopic point of…
Popular accounts of exciting discoveries often draw students to physics and astronomy, but at the introductory level it is challenging to connect with these in a meaningful way. The use of real astronomical data in the classroom can help…
In this article, we discuss the ubiquity of Big Data and machine learning in society and propose that it evinces the need of further investigation of their fundamental limitations. We extend the ``too much information tends to behave like…