Related papers: Science and Paranormal Phenomena
One of the main activities in science teaching, and in particular in Physics teaching, is not only the discussion of both modern problems and problems which solution is an urgent matter. It means that the picture of an active and alive…
The semantics for counterfactuals due to David Lewis has been challenged on the basis of unlikely, or impossible, events. Such events may skew a given similarity order in favour of those possible worlds which exhibit them. By updating the…
Increasing numbers of physicists engage in research activities that address biological questions from physics perspectives or strive to develop physics insights from active biological processes. The on-going development and success of such…
In this essay, I argue that modern science is not the dichotomous pairing of theory and experiment that it is typically presented as, and I offer an alternative paradigm defined by its functions as a human endeavor. I also demonstrate how…
Laymen and sometimes even physicists think of natural sciences, in particular of theoretical and mathematical physics often as subjects, which unfold according to an intrinsic logical pattern, with the limitations being set only by the…
This paper is devoted to show the advantages of introducing a geometric viewpoint and a non extensive formulation in the description of apparently unrelated phenomena: combustion and earthquakes. Here, it is shown how the introduction of a…
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…
In this paper we analyze the cosmological dynamics of phantom field in a variety of potentials unbounded from above. We demonstrate that the nature of future evolution generically depends upon the steepness of the phantom potential and…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…
Some thoughts are presented on the inter-relation between beauty and truth in science in general and theoretical physics in particular. Some conjectural procedures that can be used to create new ideas, concepts and results are illustrated…
The scientific fields of quantum mechanics and signal-analysis originated within different settings, aimed at different goals and started from different scientific paradigms. Yet the development of the two subjects has become increasingly…
The notion of objective probability or chance, as a physical trait of the world, has proved elusive; the identification of chances with actual frequencies does not succeed. An adequate theory of chance should explain not only the connection…
The concept of a random Lagrangian is proposed. It is considered as a basis for a new view of the old problems such as renormalization, nonzero vacuum energy and the anthropic principle. It gives rise to nontrivial consequences both in…
We describe how cosmology has converged towards a beautiful model of the Universe: the Big Bang Universe. We praise this model, but show there is a dark side to it. This dark side is usually called ``the cosmological problems'': a set of…
This article gives a brief survey of the theory and applications of anomalies.
A critical discussion of our knowledge about extragalactic cosmic rays and magnetic fields is attempted. What do we know for sure? What are our prejudices? How do we confront our models with the observations? How can we assess the…
Quantum physics and biology have long been regarded as unrelated disciplines, describing nature at the inanimate microlevel on the one hand and living species on the other hand. Over the last decades the life sciences have succeeded in…
This article is the written version of the closing talk presented at the conference `A Century of Cosmology' held at San Servolo, Italy, in August 2007. I focus on the prospects of constraining fundamental physics from cosmological…
We introduce an algebraic framework for interacting quantum systems that enables studying complex phenomena, characterized by the coexistence and competition of various broken symmetry states of matter. The approach unveils the hidden unity…