相关论文: Pathological Science
Many things in mathematics seem lamost unreasonably nice. This includes objects, counterexamples, proofs. In this preprint I discuss many examples of this phenomenon with emphasis on the ring of polynomials in a countably infinite number of…
It is proposed that using both self-non-self and danger theories give a better understanding of how the immune system works. It is proposed that comparing immune system to police force is useful in this case since police responds both to…
In 1965, I published a paper, exhibiting a hitherto unknown limit of the Lorentz group, which I christened Carroll group because of its seemingly paradoxical physical contents. Since I saw it as more curious than relevant, I published it in…
In his book `Physics and Philosophy', Heisenberg suggested that the quantum world is one of ``potentialities or possibilities'' and that the classical realm is one of ``things or facts''. After ascertaining that his categories most…
Humor is an important social phenomenon, serving complex social and psychological functions. However, despite being studied for millennia humor is computationally not well understood, often considered an AI-complete problem. In this work,…
Science prizes purportedly reward innovation and explorations of new phenomena. Yet, in practice prizes may inadvertently divert resources from similarly impactful but less celebrated scholars. Despite this paradox, knowledge of how…
A non-native English speaking physics professor formulates obvious yet useful rules for writing research papers.
Astrobiology is a scientific discipline that studies life in the Universe. We call it a discipline and not a science because some authors have cast doubts over its epistemological status by calling it 'a science without an object of study'.…
What is Statistics? Opinions vary. In fact, there is a continuous spectrum of attitudes toward statistics ranging from pure theoreticians, proving asymptotic efficiency and searching for most powerful tests, to wild practitioners, blindly…
These are the lecture notes from my 2014 PCMI graduate summer school lectures. In these lectures, we'll study simple models of materials from several different perspectives: geometry (packing problems), information theory (error-correcting…
Fast growing scientific topics have famously been key harbingers of the new frontiers of science, yet, large-scale analyses of their genesis and impact are rare. We investigate one possible factor connected with a topic's extraordinary…
This chapter is a collection of techniques, warnings, facts and ideas that are sometimes regarded as theoretical curiosities in high-energy physics but have important consequences in condensed matter physics. In particular, we describe…
The use of statistical methods for the description of complex quantum systems was primarily motivated by the failure of a line-by-line interpretation of atomic spectra. Such methods reveal regularities and trends in the distributions of…
In this paper we discuss the relevance of the algebraic approach to quantum phenomena first introduced by von Neumann before he confessed to Birkoff that he no longer believed in Hilbert space. This approach is more general and allows us to…
This is an extended version of my 2018 Heinemann prize lecture describing the work for which I got the prize. The citation is very broad so this describes virtually all my work prior to 1995 and some afterwards. It discusses work in…
A variety of physical unknowables are discussed. Provable lack of physical omniscience, omnipredictability and omnipotence is derived by reduction to problems which are known to be recursively unsolvable. "Chaotic" symbolic dynamical…
According to scientific realism, science gives us an approximately true description of what the world is like. But what does it mean? In this chapter, we focus on the ontological and metaphysical aspects of this discussion. That is, we are…
Perhaps more than any other of the physical sciences, cosmology exemplifies the inevitable contact between science and philosophy, including the problem of the demarcation criteria that distinguish science from non-science. Although modern…
We survey the Kolmogorov's approach to the notion of randomness through the Kolmogorov complexity theory. The original motivation of Kolmogorov was to give up a quantitative definition of information. In this theory, an object is randomness…
These lectures have been given to particle physicists, mostly experimentalists and very briefly and at a pedestrian level review the problems of dark matter. The content of the lectures is the following: 1. Introduction. 2. Cosmological…