Under an iron sky: On the entropy at the start of the Universe

Curiously, our Universe was born in a low entropy state, with abundant free energy to power stars and life. The form that this free energy takes is usually thought to be gravitational: the Universe is almost perfectly smooth, and so can produce sources of energy as matter collapses under gravity. It has recently been argued that a more important source of low-entropy energy is nuclear: the Universe expands too fast to remain in nuclear statistical equilibrium, effectively shutting off nucleosynthesis in the first few minutes, providing leftover hydrogen as fuel for stars. Here, we fill in the astrophysical details of this scenario and seek the conditions under which a Universe will emerge from early nucleosynthesis as almost-purely iron. In so doing, we identify a hitherto-overlooked character in the story of the origin of the second law: matter–antimatter asymmetry.

Labor Market Segmentation and Immigrant Competition: A Quantal Response Statistical Equilibrium Analysis

Competition between and within groups of workers takes place in labor markets that are segmented along various, often unobservable dimensions. This paper proposes a measure of the intensity of competition in labor markets on the basis of limited data. The maximum entropy principle is used to make inferences about the unobserved mobility decisions of workers in US household data. The quantal response statistical equilibrium class of models can be seen to give robust microfoundations to the persistent patterns of wage inequality. An application to labor market competition between native and foreign-born workers in the United States shows that this class of models captures a substantial proportion of the informational content of observed wage distributions.

The impact of spectra quality on nebular abundances

ABSTRACT I explore the effects of observational errors on nebular chemical abundances using a sample of 179 optical spectra of 42 planetary nebulae (PNe) observed by different authors. The spectra are analysed in a homogeneous way to derive physical conditions and ionic and total abundances. The effects of recombination on the [O ii] and [N ii] emission lines are estimated by including the effective recombination coefficients in the statistical equilibrium equations that are solved for O+ and N+. The results are shown to be significantly different than those derived using previous approaches. The O+ abundances derived with the blue and red lines of [O ii] differ by up to a factor of 6, indicating that the relative intensities of lines widely separated in wavelength can be highly uncertain. In fact, the He ii lines in the range 4000–6800 Å imply that most of the spectra are bluer than expected. Scores are assigned to the spectra using different criteria and the spectrum with the highest score for each PN is taken as the reference spectrum. The differences between the abundances derived with the reference spectrum and those derived with the other spectra available for each object are used to estimate the 1σ observational uncertainties in the final abundances: 0.11 dex for O/H and Ar/H, 0.14 dex for N/H, Ne/H, and Cl/H, and 0.16 dex for S/H.