相关论文: Sociophysics: a personal testimony
The foundation of two very early Usenet newsgroups in astrophysics, still existent today, and some milestones in their history have been tracked from the origins at Princeton University in 1983 to 1994. They result to be pioneering…
The process of social expansion in Europe can be better understood with various concepts related to complexity science. Findings of exploratory research show a typical process of social expansion in Europe within the period 1495-1945, in…
Many domains of science have developed complex simulations to describe phenomena of interest. While these simulations provide high-fidelity models, they are poorly suited for inference and lead to challenging inverse problems. We review the…
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 very humble origins of the Cyberspace, and all the related developments that smoothly conspired and converged towards this concept, making its emergence possible, as the personal computer, TEX and LATEX, the Fax, the internet, the…
The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of…
Extensive cooperation among unrelated individuals is unique to humans, who often sacrifice personal benefits for the common good and work together to achieve what they are unable to execute alone. The evolutionary success of our species is…
Since more than a century we investigate cosmic particles coming from the Universe with the aim of understanding their nature, their origin and how they are accelerated. So far, cosmic rays have provided many impressive results, giving…
This is the foreword to the book we edited on the origins and early development of supersymmetry, which has been just issued by World Scientific. This book presents a view on the discovery of supersymmetry and pioneering investigations…
The purpose of this paper is to show the magic of physics by showing the physics of magic. What usually makes magic tricks interesting is that something unexpected occurs. Similarly, demonstrations are interesting inasmuch as they produce…
I address the question of measuring the subjective perception of the passage of time at the individual level in relation to its objective duration using a physicist-type treatment. A simple model is thus built in terms of a very small…
The science of science is an emerging field that studies the practice of science itself. We present the first study of the cybersecurity discipline from a science of science perspective. We examine the evolution of two comparable…
Development of optometry in western countries was studied on a viewpoint of the history of science. It was revealed that optometry had been formed on the basis of optics, a branch of physics, to which biomedical study was added. Optometry…
It has been shown that the long term evolution of the Gross Product of the World after World War II can be well portrayed by the exponential function with the crossover at the year 1973, cinsiding with the Oil Crisis onset. For the the…
The suggestion in 1986 of a possible gravity-like ``fifth" fundamental force renewed interest in the question of whether new macroscopic forces are present in nature. Such forces are predicted in many theories which unify gravity with the…
In this essay, I argue that the idea that there is a most fundamental discipline, or level of reality, is mistaken. My argument is a result of my experiences with the "science wars", a debate that raged between scientists and sociologists…
We present a rational analysis of curiosity, proposing that people's curiosity is driven by seeking stimuli that maximize their ability to make appropriate responses in the future. This perspective offers a way to unify previous theories of…
This paper takes James David Forbes' Encyclopaedia Britannica entry, Dissertation Sixth, as a lens to examine physics as a cognitive, practical, and social, enterprise. Forbes wrote this survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century…
There has been a recent spate of essays defending presentism, the view in the metaphysics of time according to which all and only present events or entities exist. What is particularly striking about this resurgence is that it takes place…
Predicting the social and behavioral impact of future technologies, before they are achieved, would allow us to guide their development and regulation before these impacts get entrenched. Traditionally, this prediction has relied on…