Scientific essentialism aims to account for the natural laws’ special capacity to support counterfactuals. I argue that scientific essentialism can do so only by resorting to devices that are just as ad hoc as those that essentialists accuse Humean regularity theories of employing. I conclude by offering an account of the laws’ distinctive relation to counterfactuals that portrays laws as conti...

In this paper I examine and question Marc Lange’s account of laws, and his claim that the law delineating the range of natural kinds of fundamental particle has a lesser grade of necessity that the laws connecting the fundamental properties of those kinds with their derived properties.

Discrepancy between discrete models and continuous theoretical ones is a common concern with the behavior laws of matter. We propose an alternative frame in which the transition from a discrete to a continuous model becomes very natural. A statistical description of matter laws is given in this contexte.

The Gestalt laws of perceptual organization were originally conceived as qualitative principles, intrinsic to the brain. In this paper, we develop quantitative models for these laws based upon the statistics of natural images. In particular, we study the laws of proximity, good continuation and similarity as they relate to the perceptual organization of contours. We measure the statistical powe...

The subject of large-scale disasters is broadly introduced in this article. Both the art and science of predicting, preventing and mitigating natural and manmade disasters are discussed. A universal, quantitative metric that puts all natural and manmade disasters on a common scale is proposed. Issues of prediction, control and mitigation of catastrophes are presented. The laws of nature govern ...

The natural su(N) generalization of the XX model is introduced and analyzed. It is defined in terms of the characterizing properties of the usual XX model: the existence of two infinite sequences of mutually commuting conservation laws and the existence of two infinite sequences of mastersymmetries. The integrability of these models, which cannot be obtained in a degenerate limit of the su(N)-X...