Related papers: Enlightenment, Knowledge, Ignorance, Temptation
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…
Lecture script of a one-semester course that aims to develop an understanding and appreciation of fundemental concepts in modern physics for students who are comfortable with calculus. This document contains the first six lessons that will…
This is the first of a series of papers that we intend to publish about the epistemology of fundamental physics in its current state. One of the main objectives of these papers is to improve our understanding of fundamental physics (and…
This paper outlines a general formal framework for reasoning systems, intended to support future analysis of inference architectures across domains. We model reasoning systems as structured tuples comprising phenomena, explanation space,…
The basic physics disciplines of Maxwell's electrodynamics and Newton's mechanics have been thoroughly tested in the laboratory, but they can nevertheless also support nonphysical solutions. The unphysical nature of some dynamical…
The theory of cosmological perturbations is the main tool which connects theories of the early universe (based on new fundamental physics such as string theory) with cosmological observations. In these lectures, I will provide an…
This paper presents Abduction and Argumentation as two principled forms for reasoning, and fleshes out the fundamental role that they can play within Machine Learning. It reviews the state-of-the-art work over the past few decades on the…
Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students' troubles with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as epistemology: students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge and learning can hinder them…
A simple framework for reasoning under uncertainty and intervention is introduced. This is achieved in three steps. First, logic is restated in set-theoretic terms to obtain a framework for reasoning under certainty. Second, this framework…
An emerging theme in modern astrophysics is the connection between astronomical observations and the underlying physical phenomena that drive our cosmos. Both the mechanisms responsible for the observed astrophysical phenomena and the tools…
It has been recently proposed that gravity might be an entropic force. Although a well defined fundamental description for such a mechanism is still lacking, it is still possible to address the viability of phenomenological models of…
The observational evidence for the recent acceleration of the universe demonstrates that canonical theories of cosmology and particle physics are incomplete (or possibly incorrect) and that new physics is out there, waiting to be…
A logic is defined that allows to express information about statistical probabilities and about degrees of belief in specific propositions. By interpreting the two types of probabilities in one common probability space, the semantics given…
A well-known topic within the philosophy of physics is the problem of fine-tuning: the fact that the universal constants seem to take non-arbitrary values in order for live to thrive in our Universe. In this paper we will talk about this…
In learning quantum mechanics, an essential question has always been: How does one go about developing a "physical feel" for quantum phenomena? Naturally, one needs a basis or ground zero to start from, and that basis must be unlike…
This is a translation into English of my Masters thesis (hovedoppgave) from 1991. The main topic of the thesis is the relation between fundamental physics and philosophy, and a discussion of several possible ontologies of quantum field…
Over the past 25 years, I have been involved in some intriguing developments in the foundations of physics, exploring the quantum reality problem, the relationship between quantum theory and gravity and the interplay between consciousness…
We review astrophysical, cosmological and terrestrial evidence for and against the constancy of fundamental parameters of particle physics, and discuss theoretical issues of unification and scalar-mediated forces, finding that the current…
How can quantum mechanics be (i) the fundamental theoretical framework of contemporary physics and (ii) a probability calculus that presupposes the events to which, and on the basis of which, it assigns probabilities? The question is…
When teaching an elementary logic course to students who have a general scientific background but have never been exposed to logic, we have to face the problem that the notions of deduction rule and of derivation are completely new to them,…