Related papers: Pathological Science
An imperative aspect of modern science is that scientific institutions act for the benefit of a common scientific enterprise, rather than for the personal gain of individuals within them. This implies that science should not perpetuate…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
Scientific and technological progress has historically been very beneficial to humanity but this does not always need to be true. Going forward, science may enable bad actors to cause genetically engineered pandemics that are more frequent…
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…
I describe my path to unconventionality in my exploration of theoretical and applied aspects of computation towards revealing the algorithmic and reprogrammable properties and capabilities of the world, in particular related to applications…
Theoretical physics is the search for simple and universal mathematical descriptions of the natural world. In contrast, much of modern biology is an exploration of the complexity and diversity of life. For many, this contrast is prima facie…
If quantum mechanics is taken for granted the randomness derived from it may be vacuous or even delusional, yet sufficient for many practical purposes. "Random" quantum events are intimately related to the emergence of both space-time as…
Physics of Life research in the UK is proving to be transformative to scientific insight and translational impact, but challenges remain. Here I discuss its disruptive potential and the barriers to interdisciplinary research seen through…
This talk describes how techniques developed by Computer Scientists have helped our understanding of certain problems in statistical physics which involve randomness and ``frustration''. Examples will be given from two problems that have…
This article exists first and foremost to contribute to a tribute to Patrick Cattiaux. One of the two authors has known Patrick Cattiaux for a very long time, and owes him a great deal. If we are to illustrate the adage that life is made up…
Impact of academic research onto the non-academic world is of increasing importance as authorities seek return on public investment. Impact opens new opportunities for what are known as "professional services": as scientometrical tools…
The positivistic assumptions of determinism and objectivism in the realm of Newtonian mechanics are questioned in this paper. While objectivism is only challenged through proposing the mildest form of subjectivism, determinism is…
Biomedical Information Extraction is an exciting field at the crossroads of Natural Language Processing, Biology and Medicine. It encompasses a variety of different tasks that require application of state-of-the-art NLP techniques, such as…
The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern…
The exponentially growing number of scientific papers stimulates a discussion on the interplay between quantity and quality in science. In particular, one may wonder which publication strategy may offer more chances of success: publishing…
Three laws of information theory have been proposed. Labeling by introducing nonsymmetry and formatting by introducing symmetry are defined. The function L (L=lnw, w is the number of microstates, or the sum of entropy and information,…
Identifying the effects of causes and causes of effects is vital in virtually every scientific field. Often, however, the needed probabilities may not be fully identifiable from the data sources available. This paper shows how partial…
'If I cannot build it, I do not understand it.' So said Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, and by his metric, we understand a bit about physics, less about chemistry, and almost nothing about biology. When we fully understand a phenomenon, we…
This is an essay about understanding complexity science, via some peculiarities of the field, as a meeting place for a special kind of scientist. It comes out of my hobby of reading popular-science complex systems books, and builds on notes…
A newly predicted state of matter is a simple theoretical example of a phase that conducts electricity but is not smoothly connected to our conventional model of metals. A viewpoint on arXiv:1201.5998.