Related papers: Pathological Science
Throughout history, a relatively small number of individuals have made a profound and lasting impact on science and society. Despite long-standing, multi-disciplinary interests in understanding careers of elite scientists, there have been…
Donald Rumsfeld, in attempting to excuse the inexcusable, once (in)famously said that ``there are things that we know we know; there are things that we know we don't know; and then there are things that we don't know that we don't know".…
Relativistic heavy ion collisions offer the possibility to produce exotic metastable states of nuclear matter containing (roughly) equal number of strangeness compared to the content in baryon number. The reasoning of both their stability…
The formalism of quantum systems with diagonal singularities is applied to describe scattering processes. Well defined states are obtained for infinite time, which are related to a ''weak form'' of intrinsic irreversibility. Real and…
This is a short, light spirited account of how some possibly important science actually happened. It very much conflicts with Popper's contention that the key to scientific progress is falsification.
The present discussion concerning certain fundamental physical theories (such as string theory and multiverse cosmology) has reopened the demarcation problem between science and non-science. While parts of the physics community see the…
Experience shows that disciplinary science cannot describe life without contradictions. We show that one of the fundamental reasons is the disciplinarity itself: the disciplines deal with a limited set of quantities. This way some 'outlaw'…
A significant amount of high-impact contemporary scientific research occurs where biology, computer science, engineering and chemistry converge. Although programmes have been put in place to support such work, the complex dynamics of…
The laws of quantum mechanics are couched in subtle mathematical language. The laws are not usually stated in a compact pedagogical form. Here I present a possible way to correct this. Essential facts can be distilled into seven statements…
The only acceptable reason why measurements are irreversible and outcomes definite is the intrinsic definiteness and irreversibility of human sensory experience. While QBists deserve credit for their spirited defense of this position, Niels…
In the first part of the talk, I give a low-resolution overview of the current state of particle physics - the triumph of the Standard Model and its discontents. I review and re-endorse the remarkably direct and (to me) compelling argument…
In this article, it is shown specifically that natural system chance events as represented by theory predicted (a priori) probabilistic statements used in such realms as modern particle physics, among others, are only random relative to the…
Extensions of nuclear physics to the strange sector are reviewed, covering data and models of Lambda and other hypernuclei, multi-strange matter, and anti-kaon bound states and condensation. Past achievements are highlighted, present…
These lectures deal with the problem of inductive inference, that is, the problem of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information. Is there a general method for handling uncertainty? Or, at least, are there rules that could in…
Existing physical theories do not predict every feature of our experience but only certain regularities of that experience. That difference between what could be observed and what can be predicted is one kind of limit on scientific…
This paper shows that some of the limit-like quantities currently used in statistical mechanics are ill-defined in the mathematical sense. Along the line, it is shown that significant progresses in non-equilibrium gas dynamics can be made…
This is the transcript of a lecture given at UMass-Lowell in which I compare and contrast the work of Godel and of Turing and my own work on incompleteness. I also discuss randomness in physics vs randomness in pure mathematics.
Psychology is a discipline standing at the crossroads of hard and social sciences. Therefore it is especially interesting to study bibliometric characteristics of psychology journals. We also take two adjacent disciplines, neurosciences and…
Professor Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, best known for his doctrine of falsifiability. His axiomatic formulation of probability, however, is unknown to current…
In their account of theory change in logic, Aberdein and Read distinguish 'glorious' from 'inglorious' revolutions--only the former preserves all 'the key components of a theory' [1]. A widespread view, expressed in these terms, is that…