Related papers: Ex-nihilo: Obstacles Surrounding Teaching the Stan…
We argue that the Big Bang can be understood as a type of mirror. We show how reflecting boundary conditions for spinors and higher spin fields are fixed by local Lorentz and gauge symmetry, and how a temporal mirror (like the Bang) differs…
These notes are intended as an introductory course for experimental particle physicists interested in the recent developments in astrophysics and cosmology. I will describe the standard Big Bang theory of the evolution of the universe, with…
After a brief review of current scenarios for the resolution and/or avoidance of the Big Bang, an alternative hypothesis is put forward implying an infinite increase in complexity towards the initial singularity. This may result in an…
As observations and student models become complex, educational assessments that exploit advances in technology and cognitive psychology can outstrip familiar testing models and analytic methods. Within the Portal conceptual framework for…
The recent (2019-02) demonstration of the power of huge language models such as GPT-2 to memorise the answers to factoid questions raises questions about the extent to which knowledge is being embedded directly within these large models.…
After a brief introduction to the sixteenth and seventeenth century views of the Universe and the nineteenth century paradox of Olbers, we start the history of the cosmic expansion with Hubble's epochal discovery of the recession velocities…
A new class of neutrino dark energy models is presented. The new models are characterized by the lack of exotic particles or couplings that violate the standard model symmetry. It is shown that these models lead to several concrete…
School accountability systems increasingly hold schools to account for their performances using value-added models purporting to measure the effects of schools on student learning. The most common approach is to fit a linear regression of…
Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students' troubles with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as epistemology: students' beliefs about knowledge and learning can hinder them from…
We recently reported evidence that large language models are capable of solving a wide range of text-based analogy problems in a zero-shot manner, indicating the presence of an emergent capacity for analogical reasoning. Two recent…
It has been recently shown that the requirement of anomaly cancellation in a (non-supersymmetric) six-dimensional version of the standard model fixes the field content to the known three generations. We discuss the phenomenological…
We discuss some of the signatures associated with extensions of the Standard Model related to the neutrino and electroweak symmetry breaking sectors, with and without supersymmetry. The topics include a basic discussion of the theory of…
We argue that most advances in science and technology during the past and the present centuries rely on modern physics concepts developed in the early $20$th century. The reliance is so profound that any improvement of literacy of science…
Generating appropriate initial conditions for the Universe is key to discussing cosmic evolution constructively. In standard cosmology the traditional approach assumes an early Universe that emerges from an infinite density, spacetime…
Continual learning enables incremental learning of new tasks without forgetting those previously learned, resulting in positive knowledge transfer that can enhance performance on both new and old tasks. However, continual learning poses new…
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…
The reliable prediction of the temporal behavior of complex systems is key in numerous scientific fields. This strong interest is however hindered by modeling issues: often, the governing equations describing the physics of the system under…
Here we test Neutral models against the evolution of English word frequency and vocabulary at the population scale, as recorded in annual word frequencies from three centuries of English language books. Against these data, we test both…
The hot Big-Bang standard model for the evolution of the universe, despite strong successes, lets unresolved a number of problems. One of its main drawbacks, known as the horizon problem, was until now thought to be only solvable by an…
For two decades the hot big-bang model has been referred to as the standard cosmology -- and for good reason. For just as long cosmologists have known that there are fundamental questions that are not addressed by the standard cosmology and…