THEORETICAL PHYSICS AS A FORMAL THEORY OF INDUCTIVE INFERENCE
Dr Andrei Soklakov, Department of Mathematics, Royal Holloway, University of London

Abstract: At the fundamental level, theoretical physics can be viewed as a study of natural phenomena using the methods of inductive inference. This interpretation has a number of potential applications in both physics and computer science.

A lot of physical postulates are essentially experimental facts which can be verified in the laboratory but not really understood as intuitively simple axioms. In the long term this slows down progress because generalization of complicated concepts is difficult. The formal theory of inductive inference provides a number of intuitively simple tools which are designed to keep the complexity of hypotheses as low as possible. I show how these tools can be used to simplify a number of unnatural axioms in modern theoretical physics. I argue that this approach may lead to a new physical theory with a better insight into the structure of fundamental interactions.

A new link between physics and computer science can also be helpful in making the theory of inductive inference more applicable to real world problems. Apart from borrowing ideas and some mathematical methods used in physics, the connection to physics can stimulate new research. In particular, it may suggest some natural restrictions on the class of reference computers which could make Kolmogorov complexity more applied than it is at the moment.

This seminar was held at the Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London on 22 May 2001.

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