Killer Collapse: Empirically Probing the Philosophically Unsatisfactory Region of GRW

GRW theory offers precise laws for the collapse of the wave function. These collapses are characterized by two new constants, λ and σ. Recent work has put experimental upper bounds on the collapse rate, λ. Lower bounds on λ have been more controversial since GRW begins to take on a many-worlds character for small values of λ. Here I examine GRW in this odd region of parameter space where collapse events act as natural disasters that destroy branches of the wave function along with their occupants. Our continued survival provides evidence that we don't live in a universe like that. I offer a quantitative analysis of how such evidence can be used to assess versions of GRW with small collapse rates in an effort to move towards more principled and experimentally-informed lower bounds for λ

Steps Toward Abolishing Capital Punishment: Incrementalism in the American Death Penalty

While scholars seem united on the sentiment that abolition is the ultimate resting place for capital sentencing in the United States, their arguments vary as to how the system will reach that point. For example, Carol and Jordan Steiker argue that the systemic disarray of capital sentencing in the United States is a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s attempt to constitutionalize capital sentencing. This Article contends that the U.S. Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisprudence that has developed since 1972, when the Court reset capital sentencing in Furman v. Georgia, has aided the Court in gradually narrowing capital punishment, as a result of the controlling “evolving standards of decency” standard. Specifically, the Court has narrowed capital punishment with respect to who may be sentenced to death, how sentences of death are imposed, and how defendants are executed. As a result, this Article contends that the “evolving standards of decency” standard paves the path toward abolition. First, this Article shows that incrementalism has led to the current landscape of capital punishment in the United States. Then, the Article contends that an incremental approach to reaching abolition is inherent in the governing “evolving standards of decency” standard and the most effective and realistic way of achieving abolition. Finally, the Article proposes the next steps in this approach to eliminating the death penalty in America

State College Times, February 23, 1933

Volume 21, Issue 74https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_1933/1028/thumbnail.jp