Related papers: Can Future Events Influence the Present?
General relativity allows a variety of future singularities to occur in the evolution of the universe. At these future singularities, the universe will end in a singular state after a finite proper time and geometrical invariants of the…
This is a reply to Johansen's comment on `Are Financial Crashes Predictable?', by L. Laloux, M. Potters, R. Cont, J.P. Aguilar, J.P. Bouchaud, Europhys. Lett. 45, p. 1 (1999).
Gott has promulgated a rule for making probabilistic predictions of the future duration of a phenomenon based on the phenomenon's present age [Nature, Vol. 363, 315 (1993)]. I show that the two usual methods for deriving Gott's rule are…
Whether the fate of our species can be forecast from its past has been the topic of considerable controversy. One refutation of the so-called Doomsday Argument is based on the premise that we are more likely to exist in a universe…
Several theoretical results concerning event-by-event fluctuations are discussed: (1) a role of the global conservation laws and concept of statistical ensembles; (2) strongly intensive measures are introduced; they give a possibility to…
Human reading behavior is sensitive to surprisal: more predictable words tend to be read faster. Unexpectedly, this applies not only to the surprisal of the word that is currently being read, but also to the surprisal of upcoming…
Correctly assessing a scientist's past research impact and potential for future impact is key in recruitment decisions and other evaluation processes. While a candidate's future impact is the main concern for these decisions, most measures…
We note that the empirical predictions of the "Quantum Clock Proposal" [L. Maccone and K. Sacha, Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 110402 (2020)] are paradoxical when viewed as a solution to the quantum arrival-time problem.
Ex ante forecast outcomes should be interpreted as counterfactuals (potential histories), with errors as the spread between outcomes. Reapplying measurements of uncertainty about the estimation errors of the estimation errors of an…
There are countless examples in the history of science that not only were the laws of physics often incomplete and more limited in their domain of validity than was realized, but at times they missed the mark completely. Despite this, our…
In a prediction market, individuals can sequentially place bets on the outcome of a future event. This leaves a trail of personal probabilities for the event, each being conditional on the current individual's private background knowledge…
Current statistics can be calculated in various ways. Event-based approaches use the statistics of the number of events occuring during a given time. Time-based approaches use the statistics of the time needed to reach a given number of…
Rejoinder to "The Future of Indirect Evidence" [arXiv:1012.1161]
Within quantum mechanics it is possible to assign a probability to the chance that a measurement has been made at a specific time t. However, the interpretation of such a probability is far from clear. We argue that a recent measuring…
This essay is a two-step reflection on the question 'Which events (can be said to) occur in quantum phenomena?' The first step regiments the ontological category of "statistical phenomena" and studies the adequacy of "probabilistic event…
A new general procedure for a priori selection of more predictable events from a time series of observed variable is proposed. The procedure is applicable to time series which contains different types of events that feature significantly…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
When a dataset contains forecasts on unscheduled events, such as natural catastrophes, outcomes may be censored or ``hidden'' since some events have not yet occurred. This article finds that this can lead to a selection bias which affects…
It is demonstrated that today's quantum fluctuation theorems are component part of old quantum fluctuation-dissipation relations [Sov.Phys.-JETP 45, 125 (1977)], and typical misunderstandings in this area are pointed out.
When most people think of physics, they think of what they learned in high school physics: that the world is fundamentally predictable. Given the position and velocity of a particle in space, it should be possible to predict its position at…