Engineering Commons^™

We Must Choose The Simplest Physical Theory: Levin-Li-Vitanyi Theorem And Its Potential Physical Applications, Dirk Fox, Martin Schmidt, Misha Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Luc Longpre, Jeff Kuhn

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

If several physical theories are consistent with the same experimental data, which theory should we choose? Physicists often choose the simplest theory; this principle (explicitly formulated by Occam) is one of the basic principles of physical reasoning. However, until recently, this principle was mainly a heuristic because it uses the informal notion of simplicity.

With the explicit notion of simplicity coming from the Algorithmic Information theory, it is possible not only to formalize this principle in a way that is consistent with its traditional usage in physics, but also to prove this principle, or, to be more precise, deduce it …