Impossible? Impossible Things are Happening Every Day!

The Biopsychosocial Model: Exploring Six Impossible Things

In our view, the biopsychosocial model is a vision and an approach to practice rather than an empirically verifiable theory, a coherent philosophy, or a clinical method. In some cases, when that vision is confused with ideologic dogmatism, it can invite abandonment of the vision entirely or in selected situations. The authors suggest that habits of mind may be the missing link between a biopsyc...

Decentralised Currencies Are Probably Impossible

Equalitarian Societies are Economically Impossible

The inequality of wealth distribution is a universal phenomenon in civilized nations and it is often imputed to the Matthew effect, that is, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Some philosophers unjustified this phenomenon and tried to put the human civilization upon the evenness of wealth. Noticing the facts that 1) the emergence of centralism is the starting point of human civilizati...

ideal quantum coin tossing are impossible.

There had been well known claims of “provably unbreakable” quantum protocols for bit commitment and coin tossing. However, we, and independently Mayers, showed that all proposed quantum bit commitment (and therefore coin tossing) schemes are, in principle, insecure because the sender, Alice, can always cheat successfully by using an EPR-type of attack and delaying her measurements. One might wo...

Impossible Frontiers

A key result of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is that the market portfolio— the portfolio of all assets in which each asset’s weight is proportional to its total market capitalization—lies on the mean-variance-efficient frontier, the set of portfolios having mean-variance characteristics that cannot be improved upon. Therefore, the CAPM cannot be consistent with efficient frontiers for...