Related papers: The surprise examination or unexpected hanging par…
More than a paper, this is just a little divertissement about coauthoring, the Hirsch h-index, and bibliometric evaluation in general. Without pretending to yield any general conclusions, what I found rummaging through the physics…
Proietti et al. (arXiv:1902.05080) reported on an experiment designed to settle, or at least to throw light upon, the paradox of Wigner's friend. Without questioning the rigor or ingenuity of the experimental protocol, I argue that its…
Multiple testing problems arise naturally in scientific studies because of the need to capture or convey more information with more variables. The literature is enormous, but the emphasis is primarily methodological, providing numerous…
Emergence is a pregnant property in various fields. It is the fact for a phenomenon to appear surprisingly and to be such that it seems at first sight that it is not possible to predict its apparition. That is the reason why it has often…
I think we can agree that dealing with uncertainty is not easy. Probability is the main tool for dealing with uncertainty, and we know there are many probability-related puzzles and paradoxes. Here I describe a rather idiosyncratic…
With the help of online tools, unscrupulous authors can today generate a pseudo-scientific article and attempt to publish it. Some of these tools work by replacing or paraphrasing existing texts to produce new content, but they have a…
A sketch of some of the fundamental notions related to the nature of knowledge is offered, with special focus on the role of mathematics and my own opinions. No single idea exposed here is entirely original; indeed, this topic has been…
Notions of unknown truths and unknowable truths are important in formal epistemology, which are related to each other in e.g. Fitch's paradox of knowability. Although there have been some logical research on the notion of unknown truths and…
The concept of infinity took centuries to achieve recognized status in the field of mathematics, despite the fact that it was implicitly present in nearly all mathematical endeavors. Here I explore the idea that a similar development might…
The vivid debate concerning the paradox of information being lost when objects are swallowed by a black hole is shown to be void. We argue that no information is ever missing for any observer neither located above, nor falling beneath the…
Analogy has received attention as a form of inductive reasoning in the empirical sciences. However, its role in pure mathematics has received less consideration. This paper provides an account of how an analogy with a more familiar…
One source of beauty in mathematics is totally unexpected connections between two fundamentally different objects. For instance, is it not surprising that the time period of a real simple pendulum is linked with a function arising out of…
Mathematics enters the period of change unprecedented in its history, perhaps even a revolution: a switch to use of computers as assistants and checkers in production of proofs. This requires rethinking traditional approaches to mathematics…
Wigner's famous and influential claim that mathematics is "unreasonably effective" in physics is founded on unreasonable assumptions about the nature of mathematics and its independence of physics. Here I argue that what is surprising is…
This article is devoted to the study of which appears as the most famous paradoxes of quantum theory (Schrodinger cat, EPR argument and Aspect experiments, delayed choice experiments and retrocausality problems). Through these experiments,…
An age-old controversy in mathematics concerns the necessity and the possibility of constructive proofs. The controversy has been rekindled by recent advances which demonstrate the feasibility of a fully constructive mathematics. This…
In this paper we consider a few Calculus optimization problems in which we notice peculiar patterns. In each of these cases there is a geometric explanation for the pattern showing that it is not just a coincidence.
The 1961 Ellsberg paradox is typically seen as an empirical challenge to the subjective expected utility framework. Experiments based on Ellsberg's design have spawned a variety of new approaches, culminating in a new paradigm represented…
In this article we address the mystery of dark matter. We expound the various evidences, astrophysical and cosmological, leading to hypothesize the existence of an invisible form of matter, whose attempts at detecting it have so far all…
Anomalies drive scientific discovery -- they are associated with the cutting edge of the research frontier, and thus typically exploit data in the low signal-to-noise regime. In astronomy, the prevalence of systematics --- both "known…