Related papers: The surprise examination or unexpected hanging par…

The Jeffreys-Lindley paradox displays how the use of a p-value (or number of standard deviations z) in a frequentist hypothesis test can lead to an inference that is radically different from that of a Bayesian hypothesis test in the form…

The classical Gibbs paradox concerns the entropy change upon mixing two gases. Whether an observer assigns an entropy increase to the process depends on their ability to distinguish the gases. A resolution is that an "ignorant" observer,…

This is the transcript of a lecture given at UMass-Lowell in which I compare and contrast the work of Godel and of Turing and my own work on incompleteness. I also discuss randomness in physics vs randomness in pure mathematics.

In 1957, Lindley published "A statistical paradox" in Biometrika, revealing a fundamental conflict between frequentist and Bayesian inference as sample size approaches infinity. We present a new paradox of a different kind: a conflict…

The prediction of the N-box paradox, that whichever box is opened will contain the record of the particle having passed through it, is traced to a failure to specify whether the other boxes are distinguishable or indistinguishable. These…

We find it necessary to advise the interested and active instructor of Physics on the wrongness of some computations in the aforementioned article. Surprisingly, the Journal refuses to even publish an erratum on the paper, which naturally…

Information is everywhere in nature which is very uncertain and unpredictable. But information, in itself, is a very ambiguous term. In this cursory write-up, we attempt to understand the formal meaning of information by quantifying…

Breakthrough discoveries and inventions involve unexpected combinations of contents including problems, methods, and natural entities, and also diverse contexts such as journals, subfields, and conferences. Drawing on data from tens of…

Speculative design uses provocative "what if?" scenarios to explore possible sociotechnical futures, yet lacks rigorous criteria for assessing the quality of speculation. We address this gap by reframing speculative design through an…

Here we continue with the ideas expressed in "On the strangeness of quantum mechanics" aiming to demonstrate more concretely how this philosophical outlook might be used as a key for resolving the measurement problem. We will address in…

Paradoxes are a very frequent phenomenon in processes of thought which strive towards the intelectual and cognitive shifts. They occur in all areas of human spiritual activites. What we are interested here in, are the paradoxes in physics.…

The goal of this paper is to experiment new math concepts and theories, especially if they run counter to the classical ones. To prove that contradiction is not a catastrophe, and to learn to handle it in an (un)usual way. To transform the…

The nature of cosmological dark matter finds its explanation in physics beyond the Standard model of elementary particles. The landscape of dark matter candidates contains a wide variety of species, either elusive or hardly detectable in…

In this paper we present three simple applications of probability and highlight and discuss their paradoxical flavour.

This paper presents reflections on the validity of a series of mathematical methods and technical assumptions that are encrusted in macrophysics (related to gravitational interaction), that seem to have little or no physical significance.…

A perplexing problem in understanding physical reality is why the universe seems comprehensible, and correspondingly why there should exist physical systems capable of comprehending it. In this essay I explore the possibility that rather…

I provide a critical commentary regarding the attitude of the logician and the philosopher towards the physicist and physics. The commentary is intended to showcase how a general change in attitude towards making scientific inquiries can be…

Interestingness is an important criterion by which we judge knowledge discovery. But, interestingness has escaped all attempts to capture its intuitive meaning into a concise and comprehensive form. A unifying paradigm is formulated by…

Reasoning about unpredicted change consists in explaining observations by events; we propose here an approach for explaining time-stamped observations by surprises, which are simple events consisting in the change of the truth value of a…

This note is mainly to point out, if needed, that uncertainty about models and their parameters has little to do with a `paradox'. The proposed `solution' is to formulate practical questions instead of seeking refuge into abstract…