Lifetimes of Heavy-Flavour Hadrons -- Whence and Whither?

A theoretical treatment for the weak decays of heavy-flavour hadrons has been developed that is genuinely based on QCD. Its methodology as it applies to total lifetimes and the underlying theoretical issues are sketched. Predictions are compared with present data. One discrepancy emerges: the beauty baryon lifetime appears to be significantly shorter than expected. The ramifications of those findings are analyzed in detail.Comment: 15 pages, no figures, LATEX, two references added and new information concerning a lower charm content in B decays incorporate

The leader operators of the (d+1)(d+1)-dimensional relativistic rotating oscillators

The main pairs of leader operators of the quantum models of relativistic rotating oscillators in arbitrary dimensions are derived. To this end one exploits the fact that these models generate P\"{o}schl-Teller radial problems with remarkable properties of supersymmetry and shape invariance.Comment: 11 page

Robustness to fundamental uncertainty in AGI alignment

The AGI alignment problem has a bimodal distribution of outcomes with most outcomes clustering around the poles of total success and existential, catastrophic failure. Consequently, attempts to solve AGI alignment should, all else equal, prefer false negatives (ignoring research programs that would have been successful) to false positives (pursuing research programs that will unexpectedly fail). Thus, we propose adopting a policy of responding to points of metaphysical and practical uncertainty associated with the alignment problem by limiting and choosing necessary assumptions to reduce the risk false positives. Herein we explore in detail some of the relevant points of uncertainty that AGI alignment research hinges on and consider how to reduce false positives in response to them

CP, T and CPT Symmetries at the Turn of a New Millenium

After summarizing the status concerning CP violation in 1998 I describe the exciting developments of the last two years and extrapolate to the future. I comment on recent lessons about T and CPT invariance maninly from CPLEAR and emphasize the potential of finding New Physics by analyzing $K_{\mu 3}$ and charm decays and searching for electric dipole moments.Comment: 21 pages, LaTex, Lecture given at LEAP2000, Venice, Italy, Aug. 21 - 26, 200