Related papers: The surprise examination or unexpected hanging par…
This paper gives a counterexample to the impossibility, by G\"odel's second incompleteness theorem, of proving a formula expressing the consistency of arithmetic in a fragment of arithmetic on the assumption that the latter is consistent.…
In this article, we present several apparent paradoxes of special relativity and their respective solutions. These paradoxes have appeared since the advent of relativity in 1905, and in fact they are never paradoxes. From a didactic point…
Scientific breakthroughs typically emerge through the surprising violation of established research ideas, yet quantifying surprise has remained elusive because it requires a coherent model of all contemporary scientific worldviews. Deep…
The inconsistencies involved in the foundation of set theory were invariably caused by infinity and self-reference; and only with the opportune axiomatic restrictions could them be obviated. Throughout history, both concepts have proved to…
The Jeffreys-Lindley paradox exposes a rift between Bayesian and frequentist hypothesis testing that strikes at the heart of statistical inference. Contrary to what most current literature suggests, the paradox was central to the Bayesian…
This thesis presents the strong and weak forms of the Banach-Tarski paradox based on the Hausdorff paradox. It provides modernized proofs of the paradoxes and necessary properties of equidecomposable and paradoxical sets. The historical…
The Doomsday argument and anthropic reasoning are two puzzling examples of probabilistic confirmation. In both cases, a lack of knowledge apparently yields surprising conclusions. Since they are formulated within a Bayesian framework, they…
Is speculative mathematics dangerous? Recent interactions between physics and mathematics pose the question with some force: traditional mathematical norms discourage speculation, but it is the fabric of theoretical physics. In practice…
In this note some philosophical thoughts and observations about mathematics are expressed, arranged as challenges to some common claims.
We review why the Thomas rotation is a crucial facet of special relativity, that is just as fundamental, and just as "unintuitive" and "paradoxical", as such traditional effects as length contraction, time dilation, and the ambiguity of…
Developing a better understanding of surprising or counterintuitive phenomena has constituted a significant portion of deep learning research in recent years. These include double descent, grokking, and the lottery ticket hypothesis --…
In this paper, we present a paradox arising from the acceptance of the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM) within classical mathematics. Specifically, we construct a nonzero analytic function on a connected open subset of the complex plane whose…
This paper collects some problems that I have encountered during the years, have puzzled me and which, to the best of my knowledge, are still open. Most of them are well-known and have been first stated by other authors. In this sad season…
"Mathematicians, like physicists, are pushed by a strong fascination. Research in mathematics is hard, it is intellectually painful even if it is rewarding, and you would not do it without some strong urge." [D. Ruelle]. We shall give some…
We discuss several aspects of infinity in the history of mathematics.
Eugene Wigner famously argued for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" for describing physics and other natural sciences in his 1960 essay. That essay has now led to some 55 years of (sometimes anguished) soul searching ---…
A Pomeron phenomenon remains a mystery. A short review of the experimental situation in diffractive physics and an account of some spectacular manifestations of the Pomeron are given.
The logic of abduction involves a collision between deduction and induction, where empirical surprises violate expectations and scientists innovate to resolve them. Here we reformulate abduction as a social process, occurring not only…
In statistical mechanics, the generally called Stirling approximation is actually an approximation of Stirling's formula. In this article, it is shown that the term that is dropped is in fact the one that takes fluctuations into account.…
If there is a "platonic world" M of mathematical facts, what does M contain precisely? I observe that if M is too large, it is uninteresting, because the value is in the selection, not in the totality; if it is smaller and interesting, it…