Related papers: The Meaning of Infinity
We study the structure of the partial order induced by the definability relation on definitions of truth for the language of arithmetic. Formally, a definition of truth is any sentence $\alpha$ which extends a weak arithmetical theory…
We discuss the possibility of making the {\it initial} definitions of mutually different (possibly interacting, or even entangled) systems in the context of decoherence theory. We point out relativity of the concept of elementary physical…
What is the largest number accessible to the human imagination? The question is neither entirely mathematical nor entirely philosophical. Mathematical formulations of the problem fall into two classes: those that fail to fully capture the…
This article presents a novel interpretation of quantum mechanics. It extends the meaning of ``measurement'' to include all property-indicating facts. Intrinsically space is undifferentiated: there are no points on which a world of locally…
To model is to represent. The threshold of decidability defines two epistemological choices: one model (or a finite number of models) suffices for representing the dynamics below the undecidable; above this threshold (defined as…
What is the nature of reality? How should be an answer to this question? At this level, we are so deep that all our concepts are obscure. Quantum theory (QT) is at this level. The quest for interpreting it fails because the clarity of our…
There are many examples in the literature that suggest that indistinguishability is intransitive, despite the fact that the indistinguishability relation is typically taken to be an equivalence relation (and thus transitive). It is shown…
General topology of the universe is descibed. It is concluded that topology of the present universe is greater or stronger than the topology of the universe in the past and topology of the future universe will be stronger or greater than…
All inhabitants of this universe, from galaxies to people, are finite. Yet the universe itself is often assumed to be infinite. If instead the universe is topologically finite, then light and matter can take chaotic paths around the compact…
The galaxies of nonstandard enlargements of conventionally infinite as well as of transfinite graphs are defined, analyzed, and illustrated by some examples. It is then shown that any such enlargement either has exactly one galaxy, its…
Although black holes are objects of central importance across many fields of physics, there is no agreed upon definition for them, a fact that does not seem to be widely recognized. Physicists in different fields conceive of and reason…
A variety of physical unknowables are discussed. Provable lack of physical omniscience, omnipredictability and omnipotence is derived by reduction to problems which are known to be recursively unsolvable. "Chaotic" symbolic dynamical…
Based on the conjecture that rather than the second law of thermodynamics inevitably be breached as matter approaches a big crunch or a black hole singularity, the order of events should reverse, a model of the universe that resolves a…
Tree sets are abstract structures that can be used to model various tree-shaped objects in combinatorics. Finite tree sets can be represented by finite graph-theoretical trees. We extend this representation theory to infinite tree sets.…
Measurement outcomes provide data for a physical theory. Unless they are objective they support no objective scientific knowledge. So the outcome of a quantum measurement must be an objective physical fact. But recent arguments purport to…
G\"odel's second incompleteness theorem is standardly understood as showing that no sufficiently strong, consistent theory of arithmetic can prove its own consistency, a result typically interpreted against a model-theoretic background in…
There are many ways we can not know. Even in systems that we created ourselves, as, for example, systems in mathematical logic, Go\"edel and Tarski's theorems impose limits on what we can know. As we try to speak of the real world, things…
We reduce the principal problem of Additive Number Theory of whether an infinite sequence of integers constitutes a finite basis for the integers to a Diophantine problem involving the difference set of the sequence, by proving a formula…
In this article we present an axiomatic definition of sets with individuals and a definition of natural numbers and ordinals. We use the axioms pairs, union, power, regularity and separation. We define the equality of sets and of…
Motivated by the problem of finding finite versions of classical incompleteness theorems, we present some conjectures that go beyond ${\bf NP\neq co NP}$. These conjectures formally connect computational complexity with the difficulty of…