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Full-Text Articles in Physics
Why Ideas First Appear In Informal Form? Why It Is Very Difficult To Know Yourself? Fuzzy-Based Explanation, Miroslav Svitek, Vladik Kreinovich
Why Ideas First Appear In Informal Form? Why It Is Very Difficult To Know Yourself? Fuzzy-Based Explanation, Miroslav Svitek, Vladik Kreinovich
Departmental Technical Reports (CS)
To a lay person reading about history of physics, it may sound as if the progress of physics comes from geniuses whose inspiration leads them to precise equations that -- almost magically -- explain all the data: this is what Newton did with mechanics, this is what Schroedinger did with quantum physics, this is what Einstein did with gravitation. However, a deeper study of history of physics shows that in all these cases, these geniuses did not start from scratch -- they formalized ideas that first appeared in imprecise ("fuzzy") form. In this paper, we explain -- on the qualitative …
Can Physics Attain Its Goals: Extending D'Agostino's Analysis To 21st Century And Beyond, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich
Can Physics Attain Its Goals: Extending D'Agostino's Analysis To 21st Century And Beyond, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich
Departmental Technical Reports (CS)
In his 2000 seminal book, Silvo D'Agostino provided the detailed overview of the history of ideas underlying 19th and 20th century physics. Now that we are two decades into the 21st century, a natural question is: how can we extend his analysis to the 21st century physics -- and, if possible, beyond, to try to predict how physics will change? To perform this analysis, we go beyond an analysis of what happened and focus more on why para-digm changes happened in the history of physics. To better understand these paradigm changes, we analyze now only what were the main ideas …
Freedom Of Will, Physics, And Human Intelligence: An Idea, Miroslav Svitek, Vladik Kreinovich, Nguyen Hoang Phuong
Freedom Of Will, Physics, And Human Intelligence: An Idea, Miroslav Svitek, Vladik Kreinovich, Nguyen Hoang Phuong
Departmental Technical Reports (CS)
Among the main fundamental challenges related to physics and human intelligence are: How can we reconcile the free will with the deterministic character of physical equations? What is the physical meaning of extra spatial dimensions needed to make quantum physics consistent? and Why are we often smarter than brain-simulating neural networks? In this paper, we show that while each of these challenges is difficult to resolve on its own, it may be possible to resolve all three of them if we consider them together. The proposed possible solution is that human reasoning uses the extra spatial dimensions. This may sound …
Fuzzy Techniques, Laplace Indeterminacy Principle, And Maximum Entropy Approach Explain Lindy Effect And Help Avoid Meaningless Infinities In Physics, Julio C. Urenda, Sean R. Aguilar, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich
Fuzzy Techniques, Laplace Indeterminacy Principle, And Maximum Entropy Approach Explain Lindy Effect And Help Avoid Meaningless Infinities In Physics, Julio C. Urenda, Sean R. Aguilar, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich
Departmental Technical Reports (CS)
In many real-life situations, the only information that we have about some quantity S is a lower bound T ≤ S. In such a situation, what is a reasonable estimate for S? For example, we know that a company has survived for T years, and based on this information, we want to predict for how long it will continue surviving. At first glance, this is a type of a problem to which we can apply the usual fuzzy methodology -- but unfortunately, a straightforward use of this methodology leads to a counter-intuitive infinite estimate for S. There is an empirical …
Is Our World Becoming Less Quantum?, Lidice Castro, Vladik Kreinovich
Is Our World Becoming Less Quantum?, Lidice Castro, Vladik Kreinovich
Departmental Technical Reports (CS)
According to the general idea of quantization, all physical dependencies are only approximately deterministic, and all physical "constants" are actually varying. A natural conclusion -- that some physicists made -- is that Planck's constant (that determines the magnitude of quantum effects) can also vary. In this paper, we use another general physics idea -- the second law of thermodynamics -- to conclude that with time, this constant can only decrease. Thus, with time (we are talking cosmological scales, of course), our world is becoming less quantum.
Need For Shift-Invariant Fractional Differentiation Explains The Appearance Of Complex Numbers In Physics, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich
Need For Shift-Invariant Fractional Differentiation Explains The Appearance Of Complex Numbers In Physics, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich
Departmental Technical Reports (CS)
Complex numbers are ubiquitous in physics, they lead to a natural description of different physical processes and to efficient algorithms for solving the corresponding problems. But why this seemingly counterintuitive mathematical construction is so natural here? In this paper, we provide a possible explanation of this phenomenon: namely, we show that complex numbers appear if take into account that some physical system are described by derivatives of fractional order and that a physically meaningful analysis of such derivatives naturally leads to complex numbers.