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Young Alumni Build on Early Success
OFARIZONASTATEUNIVERSITY Ahead of their time THEMAGAZINE Young alumni build on early success “It’s Time” for a new look for Sun Devil Athletics Coping with technological change Playwrights explore drama in the desert MAY 2011 | VOL. 14 NO. 4 ASU ALUMNI ASSOCIATION BOARD AND NATIONAL COUNCIL 2010–2011 OFFICERS CHAIR Chris Spinella ’83 B.S. CHAIR-ELECT George Diaz Jr. ’96 B.A., ’99 M.P.A. TREASURER President’s Letter Robert Boschee ’83 B.S., ’85 M.B.A. This month, we celebrated the achievements PAST CHAIR of the Class of 2011 at Spring Commencement. Bill Kavan ’92 B.A. This year’s graduating class is filled with PRESIDENT thousands of talented, accomplished students, many of whom have not only studied the top Christine Wilkinson ’66 B.A.E., ’76 Ph.D. challenges in their professions, but taken the first steps toward being part of the solution to BOARD OF DIRECTORS* those challenges. We also have welcomed back Barbara Clark ’84 M.Ed. the Class of 1961 whose members participated in Commencement and other Andy Hanshaw ’87 B.S. activities provided by the Alumni Association as part of Golden Reunion, the 50th anniversary of their graduation from ASU. This is such a special time as Barbara Hoffnagle ’83 M.S.E. we bring back alumni to the university to see what ASU looks like today, Ivan Johnson ’73 B.A., ’86 M.B.A. tour some of the new facilities, learn about new programs and share their Tara McCollum Plese ’78 B.A., ’84 M.P.A. fondest college memories. -
"Goodness Without Godness", with Professor Phil Zuckerman
The HSSB Secular Circular – March 2020 1 Newsletter of the Humanist Society of Santa Barbara www.SBHumanists.org MARCH 2020 Please join us for our March Speaker… How Foreign Policy Really Works: Diplomats’ Tricks of the Trade Hugh Neighbour spent four fascinating decades working around the globe as a U.S. diplomat and as a naval officer. Examine how diplomacy actually works in the real world. The talk will be followed by open discussion and a lively Q & A. Our Speaker: During his long career, Hugh Neighbour specialized in political and economic affairs, working on U.S. Foreign Service Officer (Retired) and Lecturer, Hugh Neighbour multilateral issues, including both arms control and human rights. Hugh's final diplomatic post was as Chief Arms Control Delegate for the U.S. at the OSCE in Vienna, responsible for conventional arms control across Europe, Central Asia, and North America. He was assigned to Germany when the Berlin Wall fell and Germany unified, to Bolivia when an uprising cut off food supplies for weeks, to Panama as General Noriega stole an election, and to Australia when the ANZUS treaty was fundamentally altered. He was stationed in London during the height of the Cold War, in Stockholm when non-aligned Sweden helped NATO intervene in Bosnia, and in the Fiji Islands where he ran U.S. relations with 8 island countries and territories. He was awarded the Secretary of State's Career Achievement Award. Prior to this, Hugh was a bridge watch officer in the U.S. Navy. After service at sea on a missile cruiser, he served ashore in the Middle East. -
Understanding a Warped Cosmos
Lisa Randall. “One challenge today is to see what you can do with large amounts of data, to study fundamental properties, not just questions of how electromagnetism gives rise to certain things. Can we actually see deviations from what you would predict in conventional theories?” Rami Shllush Understanding a warped cosmos What’s the connection between dinosaurs and dark matter? What is the glue that holds the universe together? Is there a fourth - and fifth - dimension? These are just some of the questions that occupy Lisa Randall, the first female physicist to get tenure at Princeton, Harvard and MIT ■ ״ ״r* י •• 1 י׳ The CERN facility, near Geneva. “We need higher-energy machines and particle Illustration of a large asteroid colliding with Earth over the Yucatan Peninsula, in accelerators,” says Randall, “but to really see new things, we need even more Mexico. The impact of such occurrences are thought to have led to the death of the powerful machines.” Richard Juillian/AFP dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. Mark Garlick/Science Photo Libra Ido Efrati in the sciences. In 2016 he mystery of the universe,be seen as evidence that dark matter Over the years, studies have specializes interview with The New she and the many riddles that re- interacted in some way with hydrogen mapped the presence of dark matter Yorker, related that in her teens she had fre- main open about itcan be ex- atoms, thus leadingto the loweringof in various placesin the universe,in- the of the dark matter. our emplifiedin myriad ways. temperature eludingin the center of galaxy,the quent confrontations with her mother, to One of the most frustratingPhysicistsresponding the article Milky Way. -
September Issue
THE GLOBAL PRESS, ISSUE 1 OCT 4, 2013 JOHN MUIR K-12 MAGNET SCHOOL | BUILDING GLOBAL CITIZENS | FALL 2013 Sam Rempola - Editor-In-Chief Harry Pearce - Science & Technology Rahja Williams - Global Connections Pedro Quiroz & Tanya Reyes - Art Nicole Matthews - Food & Entertainment Mayra Jaramillo & Charday Drayton-White - Student Life Areli Ventura - Graphic Design Staff Writers: Genesis Felix, Rahel Garcia, Jose Juarez- Bardales, Riley Petka, Munah Togba Muir excited to announce class ambassadors by Mayra Jaramillo Annual peace march a success Being a class ambassador means by Jose Juarez students get the opportunity to On September 20th, John Muir held its annual peace walk, an event that brings together represent their classes and bring ideas students from all grades. As is the tradition, we were led by our own peace dove as we walked to the attention of ASB. Candidates were around the school holding signs and flags promoting peace. selected by their teachers based on maturity, academic standing, and leadership skills and then chosen by Muir welcomes new principal by Areli Ventura & Jael Villagomez their class. The ASB is looking forward appreciates the opportunity to have a direct to getting input from the more Muir students are happy to introduce our impact on students’ lives. Mrs. Bellofatto feels representatives of the student body, so new principal, Mrs. Laura Bellofatto. Mrs. being a principal is an amazing experience. the school supports all students. Bellofatto previously worked as a principal at Eleventh grade ambassador, Rahja When Mrs. Bellofatto is not at school, she Morse High and the Construction Tech likes to be outdoors. -
Chapter 22 the Entropy of the Universe and the Maximum Entropy Production Principle
Chapter 22 The Entropy of the Universe and the Maximum Entropy Production Principle Charles H. Lineweaver Abstract If the universe had been born in a high entropy, equilibrium state, there would be no stars, no planets and no life. Thus, the initial low entropy of the universe is the fundamental reason why we are here. However, we have a poor understanding of why the initial entropy was low and of the relationship between gravity and entropy. We are also struggling with how to meaningfully define the maximum entropy of the universe. This is important because the entropy gap between the maximum entropy of the universe and the actual entropy of the universe is a measure of the free energy left in the universe to drive all processes. I review these entropic issues and the entropy budget of the universe. I argue that the low initial entropy of the universe could be the result of the inflationary origin of matter from unclumpable false vacuum energy. The entropy of massive black holes dominates the entropy budget of the universe. The entropy of a black hole is proportional to the square of its mass. Therefore, determining whether the Maximum Entropy Production Principle (MaxEP) applies to the entropy of the universe is equivalent to determining whether the accretion disks around black holes are maximally efficient at dumping mass onto the central black hole. In an attempt to make this question more precise, I review the magnetic angular momentum transport mechanisms of accretion disks that are responsible for increasing the masses of black holes 22.1 The Entropy of the Observable Universe Stars are shining, supernovae are exploding, black holes are forming, winds on planetary surfaces are blowing dust around, and hot things like coffee mugs are cooling down. -
Solo Journey to a Fifth Dimension with More Than 100 Parameters of Digital Trans- Formation, Which Evolve As the Plot Progresses
NATURE|Vol 460|9 July 2009 OPINION French, and Spanish pillaging of native Ameri- eties for the same reason everyone else does: familiar world is confined to a four-dimensional can resources in the sixteenth and seventeenth economic success. space-time ‘brane’ that lies, in her theory, within centuries, during the heyday of piracy. The Invisible Hook is a good addition to a larger five-dimensional ‘hyperspace’. Moving Sovereign governments may have legalized the genre of popular economics: a fun and into the fifth dimension takes the fictional trav- such plundering, but they were not necessarily enlightening read, and rock solid in its schol- eller into regions of vastly magnified gravity that more moral than the pirates who re-plundered arly bona fides. ■ distorts other attributes of reality and experi- that same wealth. Both used the threat of force, Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic magazine, ence: time, distance, energy and mass. as Leeson reminds us. He does not argue for a columnist for Scientific American, and author of The challenge was to depict this exotic jour- moral equivalency, rather he explains that The Mind of the Market. ney as a beautiful experience for the audience. pirates form their own versions of civil soci- e-mail: [email protected] Parra samples the sounds produced by the sing- ers and instruments and passes them through an elaborate digital system of real-time signal processing and synthesis. The instrumental and vocal scores are of stunning complexity, Solo journey to a fifth dimension with more than 100 parameters of digital trans- formation, which evolve as the plot progresses. -
Avoiding Boltzmann Brain Domination in Holographic Dark Energy Models
Physics Letters B 750 (2015) 181–183 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Physics Letters B www.elsevier.com/locate/physletb Avoiding Boltzmann Brain domination in holographic dark energy models R. Horvat Rudjer Boškovi´c Institute, P.O.B. 180, 10002 Zagreb, Croatia a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: In a spatially infinite and eternal universe approaching ultimately a de Sitter (or quasi-de Sitter) Received 2 March 2015 regime, structure can form by thermal fluctuations as such a space is thermal. The models of Dark Received in revised form 10 August 2015 Energy invoking holographic principle fit naturally into such a category, and spontaneous formation of Accepted 2 September 2015 isolated brains in otherwise empty space seems the most perplexing, creating the paradox of Boltzmann Available online 7 September 2015 Brains (BB). It is thus appropriate to ask if such models can be made free from domination by Boltzmann Editor: M. Cveticˇ Brains. Here we consider only the simplest model, but adopt both the local and the global viewpoint in the description of the Universe. In the former case, we find that if a dimensionless model parameter c, which modulates the Dark Energy density, lies outside the exponentially narrow strip around the most natural c = 1line, the theory is rendered BB-safe. In the latter case, the bound on c is exponentially stronger, and seemingly at odds with those bounds on c obtained from various observational tests. © 2015 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V. -
Existence Is Evidence of Immortality by Michael Huemer
Existence Is Evidence of Immortality by Michael Huemer Abstract: Time may be infinite in both directions. If it is, then, if persons could live at most once in all of time, the probability that you would be alive now would be zero. Since you are alive now, with certainty, either the past is finite, or persons can live more than once. 1. Overview Do persons continue to exist after the destruction of their bodies? Many believe so. This might occur either because we have immaterial souls that persist in another, non-physical realm; or because our bodies will be somehow reanimated after we die; or because we will live on in new bodies in the physical realm.1 I shall suggest herein that the third alternative, “reincarnation,” is surprisingly plausible. More specifically, I shall argue (i) that your present existence constitutes significant evidence that you will be reincarnated, and (ii) that if the history of the universe is infinite, then you will be reincarnated. My argument is entirely secular and philosophical. The basic line of thought is something like this. The universe has an infinite future. Given unlimited time, every qualitative state that has ever occurred will occur again, infinitely many times. This includes the qualitative states that in fact brought about your current life. A sufficiently precise repetition of the right conditions will qualify as literally creating another incarnation of you. Some theories about the nature of persons rule this out; however, these theories also imply that, given an infinite past, your present existence is a probability-zero event. -
Philosophical Reflections on Modern Quantum Gravity Research
Stringed along or caught in a loop? Stringed along or caught in a loop? Philosophical reflections on modern quantum gravity research Keizo Matsubara Dissertation presented at Uppsala University to be publicly examined in Geijersalen, Building 6, (Eng 6-1023), English Park Campus, Thunbergsvägen 3P, Uppsala, Friday, January 18, 2013 at 10:15 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The examination will be conducted in English. Abstract Matsubara, K. 2013. Stringed along or caught in a loop?: Philosophical reflections on modern quantum gravity research. Filosofiska Institutionen. 139 pp. Uppsala. ISBN 978-91-506-2324-6. A number of philosophical questions, all connected to modern research in quantum gravity, are discussed in this dissertation. The goal of research in quantum gravity is to find a quantum theory for gravitation; the ot- her fundamental forces are already understood in terms of quantum physics. Quantum gravity is studied within a number of different research programmes. The most popular are string theory and loop quantum gravity; besides these a number of other approaches are pursued. Due to the lack of empirical support, it is relevant to assess the scientific status of this rese- arch. This is done from four different points of view, namely the ones held by: logical positi- vists, Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos. It is then argued that research in quantum gravity may be considered scientific, conditional on scientists being open with the tentative and speculative nature of their pursuits. Given the lack of empirical progress, in all approaches to quantum gravity, a pluralistic strategy is advised. In string theory there are different theoretical formulations, or dualities, which are physi- cally equivalent. -
Communications-Mathematics and Applied Mathematics/Download/8110
A Mathematician's Journey to the Edge of the Universe "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." ― Socrates Manjunath.R #16/1, 8th Main Road, Shivanagar, Rajajinagar, Bangalore560010, Karnataka, India *Corresponding Author Email: [email protected] *Website: http://www.myw3schools.com/ A Mathematician's Journey to the Edge of the Universe What’s the Ultimate Question? Since the dawn of the history of science from Copernicus (who took the details of Ptolemy, and found a way to look at the same construction from a slightly different perspective and discover that the Earth is not the center of the universe) and Galileo to the present, we (a hoard of talking monkeys who's consciousness is from a collection of connected neurons − hammering away on typewriters and by pure chance eventually ranging the values for the (fundamental) numbers that would allow the development of any form of intelligent life) have gazed at the stars and attempted to chart the heavens and still discovering the fundamental laws of nature often get asked: What is Dark Matter? ... What is Dark Energy? ... What Came Before the Big Bang? ... What's Inside a Black Hole? ... Will the universe continue expanding? Will it just stop or even begin to contract? Are We Alone? Beginning at Stonehenge and ending with the current crisis in String Theory, the story of this eternal question to uncover the mysteries of the universe describes a narrative that includes some of the greatest discoveries of all time and leading personalities, including Aristotle, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton, and the rise to the modern era of Einstein, Eddington, and Hawking. -
Anti-Universe Exists Arya Tanmay Gupta Department of Computer Science, Ramanujan College (University of Delhi), New Delhi, India
24584 Arya Tanmay Gupta/ Elixir Space Sci. 71 (2014) 24584-24585 Available online at www.elixirpublishers.com (Elixir International Journal) Space Science Elixir Space Sci. 71 (2014) 24584-24585 Anti-Universe exists Arya Tanmay Gupta Department of Computer Science, Ramanujan College (University of Delhi), New Delhi, India. ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history: Universe is continuously expanding, and is observed to expand at a continuous increasing Received: 16 April 2014; speed, much greater than that of light, though the theory of relativity destroys the Received in revised form: relevance of this statement. This gave birth to a theory called Big Bang theory, which says 20 May 2014; universe was born from a single point, started from pure energy and then came matter, Accepted: 30 May 2014; space, and time. Within a short time, it is said to have “fight” with anti-matter and a small part of total matter constructed this whole universe. Keywords © 2014 Elixir All rights reserved Universe, Expansion, Anti, Matter. Introduction universe was infant enough. The first element formed was About 14 billion years ago “something” happened. We do Hydrogen, then formed Helium and then traces of Lithium.[1] not know what happened, why it happened. But we know that an It is believed that when our universe was small, matter enormous amount of energy erupted out of precisely “nothing”. encountered its biggest enemy, anti-matter. For every billion That energy expanded all around and slowly it cooled down and particles of anti-matter, there were billion and one particles of converted into matter, off course according to Einstein’s matter. -
Report and Opinion 2016;8(6) 1
Report and Opinion 2016;8(6) http://www.sciencepub.net/report Beyond Einstein and Newton: A Scientific Odyssey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, And The Cosmos Manjunath R Independent Researcher #16/1, 8 Th Main Road, Shivanagar, Rajajinagar, Bangalore: 560010, Karnataka, India [email protected], [email protected] “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” : Lord Kelvin Abstract: General public regards science as a beautiful truth. But it is absolutely-absolutely false. Science has fatal limitations. The whole the scientific community is ignorant about it. It is strange that scientists are not raising the issues. Science means truth, and scientists are proponents of the truth. But they are teaching incorrect ideas to children (upcoming scientists) in schools /colleges etc. One who will raise the issue will face unprecedented initial criticism. Anyone can read the book and find out the truth. It is open to everyone. [Manjunath R. Beyond Einstein and Newton: A Scientific Odyssey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, And The Cosmos. Rep Opinion 2016;8(6):1-81]. ISSN 1553-9873 (print); ISSN 2375-7205 (online). http://www.sciencepub.net/report. 1. doi:10.7537/marsroj08061601. Keywords: Science; Cosmos; Equations; Dimensions; Creation; Big Bang. “But the creative principle resides in Subaltern notable – built on the work of the great mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it astronomers Galileo Galilei, Nicolaus Copernicus true that pure thought can