Food for Thought: A Few Recent arXiv Papers

Since my research touches on the basics of QM, I have developed this habit of visiting arXiv.org every now and then. Last week or so, at arXiv.org, I found a couple of interesting articles on physics in general. I would like to share these with you.

One of these is: Dragoljub A. Cucic,  “Types of paradox in physics,” arXiv:0912.1864v1 [^]. It’s a very comprehensive kind of article. Impressed, I did an author search on Cucic, and found a few more papers on this and related topics by him [^].

The other article I have in mind is: Franco Bagnoli, “From Newton to cellular automata,” arXiv:0912.2056v1 [^]. Once again, the scope of this article is just wonderfully wide, even though the writing tends to be a bit too terse at places. But Bagnoli compensates for this by including a neat “concept map.”

Both the papers are easily accessible even to undergraduates. Both provide enormous food for thought.

Indeed, I already find myself wondering if I should write an article or two addressing one or two of the many paradoxes that Cucic lists. [I am still getting my thoughts together.]

And, I cannot thank Bagnoli enough for providing a kind of “white paper” material that was so badly needed in explaining to other researchers (not just to laymen) just what kind of research ideas and methods I seem to be pursuing and how these differ from those in the typical PhD researches, esp. those from the engineering sciences. It helps explain why there is this  general (and pretty vague) impression to the effect that there is not enough “maths” or “rigour” in my research or in my papers… Bagnoli helps point out the why of it…

I might even write an informal article showing what kind of maths it will look like if an artificial attempt is made to mathematicize these ideas at any cost, using only the classical or traditional way of putting maths… [I would write such an article anyway but especially so if some renowned researcher/mathematician otherwise has problems accepting my research and so asks me to do so (as I had indicated in my post at my personal blog [^].)]

Anyway, do go over the abovementioned articles, and if you wish to discuss, feel free to leave a comment or two.

--Ajit