Related papers: How relativistic heavy ion collisions can help us …
Heavy-ion collisions provide the only laboratory tests of relativistic quantum field theory at finite temperature. Understanding these is a necessary step in understanding the origins of our universe. These lectures introduce the subject to…
The fact that life has evolved in our universe constrains the laws of physics. The anthropic principle proposes that these constraints are sometimes very tight and can be used to explain in a sense the corresponding laws. Recently a…
It is possible to completely explain all aspects of quantum mechanics by expressing the relations between physical properties in terms of complex conditional probabilities (Phys. Rev. A 89, 042115(2014)). These fully deterministic…
In physical theories, boundary or initial conditions play the role of selecting special situations which can be described by a theory with its general laws. Cosmology has long been suspected to be different in that its fundamental theory…
Even when completely and consistently formulated, a fundamental theory of physics and cosmological boundary conditions may not give unambiguous and unique predictions for the universe we observe; indeed inflation, string/M theory, and…
The Anthropic Principle has been with us since the 1970s. This Principle is advanced to account for the "fine tuning" of the 25 constants of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Were these constants very different, life could not exist.…
In the {\em Many Worlds Interpretation} of quantum mechanics, the range of possible worlds (or histories) provides variation, and the Anthropic Principle is a selective principle analogous to natural selection. When looked on in this way,…
There are interesting parallels between the physics of heavy ion collisions and cosmology. Both systems are out-of-equilibrium and relativistic fluid dynamics plays an important role for their theoretical description. From a comparison one…
Despite its apparent complexity, our world seems to be governed by simple laws of physics. This volume provides a philosophical introduction to such laws. I explain how they are connected to some of the central issues in philosophy, such as…
Selection effects in cosmology are often invoked to "explain" why some of the fundamental constant of Nature, and in particular the cosmological constant, take on the value they do in our Universe. We briefly review this probabilistic…
Anthropic principle can help us to understand many properties of our world. However, for a long time this principle seemed too metaphysical and many scientists were ashamed to use it in their research. I describe here a justification of the…
No matter how counterintuitive they are, quantum phenomena are all simple consequences of the laws of Quantum Mechanics. It is not needed to extend the theory with hidden mechanisms or additional principles to explain what Quantum Mechanics…
The interaction between two parts in a compound quantum system may be reconsidered more completely than before and some new understandings and conclusions different from current quantum mechanics are obtained, including the conservation law…
According to our current conception of physics, any valid physical theory is supposed to describe the objective evolution of a unique external world. However, this condition is challenged by quantum theory, which suggests that physical…
It is generally believed that physical laws, reflecting an inherent order in the universe, are ordained by nature. However, in modern physics the observer plays a central role raising questions about how an observer-centric physics can…
We start with the cosmic Friedmann equations, where we adopt a novel perspective rooted in a Lagrangian formulation grounded in Newtonian mechanics and the first law of thermodynamics. Our investigation operates under the assumption that…
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…
The LHC will probe the nature of the vacuum that determines the properties of particles and the forces between them. Of particular importance is the fact that our current theories allow the Universe to be trapped in a metastable vacuum,…
It is argued that quantum mechanics follows naturally from the assumptions that there are no fundamental causal laws but only probabilities for physical processes that are constrained by symmetries, and reality is relational in the sense…
Topical phenomena in high-energy physics related to collision experiments of heavy nuclei ("Little Bang") and early universe cosmology ("Big Bang") involve far-from-equilibrium dynamics described by quantum field theory. One example…