The Future of Fundamental Physics

Daedalus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 141 (3) ◽  
pp. 53-66
Author(s):  
Nima Arkani-Hamed
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Short Distance ◽  
Quantum Fluctuations ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Space Time ◽  
First Century ◽  
Fundamental Physics ◽  
Theoretical Structure ◽  
Radical Ideas

Fundamental physics began the twentieth century with the twin revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics, and much of the second half of the century was devoted to the construction of a theoretical structure unifying these radical ideas. But this foundation has also led us to a number of paradoxes in our understanding of nature. Attempts to make sense of quantum mechanics and gravity at the smallest distance scales lead inexorably to the conclusion that space-time is an approximate notion that must emerge from more primitive building blocks. Furthermore, violent short-distance quantum fluctuations in the vacuum seem to make the existence of a macroscopic world wildly implausible, and yet we live comfortably in a huge universe. What, if anything, tames these fluctuations? Why is there a macroscopic universe? These are two of the central theoretical challenges of fundamental physics in the twenty-first century. In this essay, I describe the circle of ideas surrounding these questions, as well as some of the theoretical and experimental fronts on which they are being attacked.

Quantum fluctuations near a space–time singularity

1989 ◽  
Vol 67 (10) ◽  
pp. 935-938
Author(s):  
K. D. Krori ◽  
P. Borgohain ◽  
Dipali Das Kar
Keyword(s):  
Wave Function ◽  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Bianchi Type ◽  
Quantum Fluctuations ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Operator Technique ◽  
Time Singularity ◽  
Quantum Uncertainty ◽  
Initial Epoch ◽  
The Universe

The well-known operator technique in quantum mechanics is used to study quantum fluctuations near the space–time singularity using Kantowski–Sachs and Bianchi type VIo metrics. In both cases the wave function of the universe is found to diverge near the space–time singularity, indicating the divergence of the quantum uncertainty near the initial epoch.

Past

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Kellerman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Business Schools ◽  
First Century ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Lao Tzu ◽  
Leadership And Management ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
The Many

The chapter focuses on how leadership was taught in the distant and recent past. The first section is on five of the greatest leadership teachers ever—Lao-tzu, Confucius, Plato, Plutarch, and Machiavelli—who shared a deep belief in the idea that leadership could be taught and left legacies that included timeless and transcendent literary masterworks. The second section explores how leadership went from being conceived of as a practice reserved only for a select few to one that could be exercised by the many. The ideas of the Enlightenment changed our conception of leadership. Since then, the leadership literature has urged people without power and authority, that is, followers, to understand that they too could be agents of change. The third section turns to leadership and management in business. It was precisely the twentieth-century failure of business schools to make management a profession that gave rise to the twenty-first-century leadership industry.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. xviii-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Gerald Kennedy ◽  
Scott Peeples
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Literature ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Critical Approaches

Edgar Allan Poe has long occupied a problematic place in discussions of American literature. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, an intensive reexamination of his relationship to nineteenth-century print culture and the controversies of Jacksonian America reframed our understanding of his work. Whereas scholars once regarded his dark fantasies as extraneous to American experience, we now recognize the complex and nuanced ways in which Poe’s work responded to and questioned core assumptions of American culture. The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe offers a wide-ranging exploration of Poe, rereading his works through a variety of critical approaches and illuminating his ultimate impact on global literature, art, and culture. The introduction to the volume traces the development of scholarship on Poe from the time of his death in 1849 to the beginning of the twenty-first century, exploring the future possibilities for the study of Poe in the digital era.

scholarly journals On Russell’s 1927 Book The Analysis of Matter

Philosophies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Said Mikki
Keyword(s):  
General Relativity ◽  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
Foundations Of Physics ◽  
The World ◽  
Ordinal Space ◽  
Historical Fact

The goal of this article is to bring into wider attention the often neglected important work by Bertrand Russell on the philosophy of nature and the foundations of physics, published in the year 1927. It is suggested that the idea of what could be named Russell space, introduced in Part III of that book, may be viewed as more fundamental than many other types of spaces since the highly abstract nature of the topological ordinal space proposed by Russell there would incorporate into its very fabric the emergent nature of spacetime by deploying event assemblages, but not spacetime or particles, as the fundamental building blocks of the world. We also point out the curious historical fact that the book The Analysis of Matter can be chronologically considered the earliest book-length generic attempt to reflect on the relation between quantum mechanics, just emerging by that time, and general relativity.

scholarly journals Corporate headquarters in the twenty-first century: an organization design perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Kunisch ◽  
Markus Menz ◽  
David Collis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Organization Design ◽  
Business Environment ◽  
First Century ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Corporate Headquarters ◽  
Special Collection ◽  
Design Perspective ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract The corporate headquarters (CHQ) of the multi-business enterprise, which emerged as the dominant organizational form for the conduct of business in the twentieth century, has attracted considerable scholarly attention. As the business environment undergoes a fundamental transition in the twenty-first century, we believe that understanding the evolving role of the CHQ from an organization design perspective will offer unique insights into the nature of business activity in the future. The purpose of this article, in keeping with the theme of the Journal of Organization Design Special Collection, is thus to invigorate research into the CHQ. We begin by explicating four canonical questions related to the design of the CHQ. We then survey fundamental changes in the business environment occurring in the twenty-first century, and discuss their potential implications for CHQ design. When suitable here we also refer to the contributions published in our Special Collection. Finally, we put forward recommendations for advancements and new directions for future research to foster a deeper and broader understanding of the topic. We believe that we are on the cusp of a change in the CHQ as radical as that which saw its initial emergence in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Exactly what form that change will take remains for practitioners and researchers to inform.

scholarly journals The Discarded Image and the Debunked Tao: Objective Value in C.S. Lewis’ Medieval Model and His Critique of Modernity †

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 597
Author(s):  
Yuxiao Su
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Relativism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Parallel Study ◽  
The Status ◽  
Implicit Belief ◽  
Objective Value ◽  
Medieval Model ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Spiritual Resource

This paper considers C.S. Lewis’ “doctrine of objective value” in two of his major works, The Abolition of Man and The Discarded Image. Lewis uses the Chinese name Tao, albeit with an incomplete understanding of its origins, for the objective worldview. The paper argues that Tao, as an explicit theme of The Abolition of Man, is also a determining undercurrent in The Discarded Image. In the former work, Tao is what Lewis wants to defend and restore against twentieth-century secular ideologies, which Lewis condemns as infected with “the poison of subjectivism”. In the latter work, where Lewis presents one of the best accounts of the European medieval model of the Universe, objective value (the Tao in Lewis’ argument) underlies both how the model has been shaped, and how Lewis, as a medievalist, accounts for and draws upon it as an intellectual and spiritual resource. The purpose of this parallel study is to show that Lewis’ explication of the Tao in The Abolition of Man, which is a “built-in”, implicit belief in The Discarded Image, provides a critique of tendencies towards the subjectivism prevalent in Lewis’ lifetime. These tendencies can be traced into the moral relativism, pluralism and reductionism of the twenty-first century, giving Lewis’ work the status of twentieth-century prophecy.

The Revival of Quantification: Reflections on Old New Histories

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Steven Ruggles
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second Wave

AbstractQuantitative historical analysis in the United States surged in three distinct waves. The first quantitative wave occurred as part of the “New History” that blossomed in the early twentieth century and disappeared in the 1940s and 1950s with the rise of consensus history. The second wave thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s during the ascendance of the New Economic History, the New Political History, and the New Social History, and died out during the “cultural turn” of the late twentieth century. The third wave of historical quantification—which I call the revival of quantification—emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century and is still underway. I describe characteristics of each wave and discuss the historiographical context of the ebb and flow of quantification in history.

‘A Heap of Broken Images’? Reviving Austro-German Debates over Musical Meaning, 1900–36

2013 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Pritchard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Educational Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Critical Hermeneutics ◽  
Musical Meaning ◽  
Force And Motion ◽  
The Status ◽  
Musical Interpretation ◽  
Twenty First Century

AbstractThis article examines a range of writings on the status of musical interpretation in Austria and Germany during the early decades of the twentieth century, and argues their relevance to current debates. While the division outlined by recent research between popular-critical hermeneutics and analytical ‘energetics’ at this time remains important, hitherto neglected contemporary reflections by Paul Bekker and Kurt Westphal demonstrate that the success of energetics was not due to any straightforward intellectual victory. Rather, the images of force and motion promoted by 1920s analysis were carried by historical currents in the philosophy, educational theory and arts of the time, revealing a culturally situated source for twenty-first-century analysis's preoccupations with motion and embodiment. The cultural relativization of such images may serve as a retrospective counteraction to the analytical rationalizing processes that culminated specifically in Heinrich Schenker's later work, and more generally in the privileging of graphic and notational imagery over poetic paraphrase.

scholarly journals PROBABILITY IN RELATIVISTIC QUANTUM MECHANICS AND FOLIATION OF SPACE–TIME

2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (32) ◽  
pp. 6243-6251 ◽  
Author(s):  
HRVOJE NIKOLIĆ
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Wave Equations ◽  
Integral Curve ◽  
Relativistic Quantum ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Relativistic Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Relativistic Wave ◽  
Probability Densities ◽  
The Many ◽  
Conserved Currents

The conserved probability densities (attributed to the conserved currents derived from relativistic wave equations) should be nonnegative and the integral of them over an entire hypersurface should be equal to one. To satisfy these requirements in a covariant manner, the foliation of space–time must be such that each integral curve of the current crosses each hypersurface of the foliation once and only once. In some cases, it is necessary to use hypersurfaces that are not spacelike everywhere. The generalization to the many-particle case is also possible.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document