Maxwell's Fishpond

Most of us will have at some time thrown a pebble into water, and watched the ripples spread outwards and fade away. But now there is a way to reverse the process, and make those ripples turn around and reconverge again, ... and again, and again. To do this we have designed the Maxwell's Fishpond, a water wave or "Transformation Aquatics" version of the Maxwell's Fisheye lens [Tyc et al. 2011, Luneberg 1964] that is now well-known from transformation optics. These are transformation devices where wave propagation on the surface of a sphere is not modelled on an actual sphere, but in a flat device with carefully designed spatially varying properties. And just as for rays from a point source on a sphere, a wave disturbance in a Maxwell's Fisheye or Fishpond spreads out at first, but then reforms itself at its opposing point in the device. Here we show how such a device can be made for water waves, partly in friendly competition with comparable electromagnetic devices [Ma et al. 2011] and partly as an accessible and fun demonstration of the power of transformation mechanics. To the eye, our Maxwell's Fishpond was capable of reforming a disturbance up to five times, although such a feat required taking considerable care, close observation, and a little luck. What can you see in the video at http://www.qols.ph.ic.ac.uk/~kinsle/files/MFishpond/ ?Comment: 9 pages (v2 add links, improve fig.3, minor corrections, v3 add journal info

(Re)defining the English Reformation

The study of the Reformation has arguably never been in better shape, as new books and articles appear with dizzying regularity. The current rude good health of the subject can be substantiated by a few minutes spent with the catalog of the British Library. A title keyword search under “Reformation” produces 490 items for the 1960s, dipping to 449 for the 1970s. But in the 1980s, this shoots up to 656 and remains at almost exactly that level through the 1990s. In the new century up to the end of 2007, no fewer than 563 books with the word “Reformation” in the title have been published and deposited at the British Library. Moreover, the concerns of Reformation history and theology are now regularly cropping up in places where they have not been much in evidence before: in art history, musicology, and literary studies, for example. To point to just one particular case, the study of William Shakespeare—always a reliable barometer of Anglo‐American cultural and academic preoccupations—has taken a decidedly religious turn over recent years, in which questions of the meaning and impact of the Reformation are very much to the fore.1 The collective problem faced by students of the Reformation, if indeed we have a problem, is not therefore one of nurturing a tender and precarious plant, struggling to thrive in stony and unyielding historical soil. Rather, it is the challenge of maintaining order and coherence in a large and untidy garden, alive with luxuriant foliage, periodic colorful blooms, and a smattering of undesirable weeds

John Calvin, Authority, and the Evangelical Conviction of the Evidentness of Truth

John Calvin stands apart as a singularly powerful figure in the history of Western Civilization. His thought undergirds the fundamental principles of liberal democracy that dominate the most advanced nations on earth in the modern age, and his theology continues to influence the doctrine and leadership of the Reformed church’s many inheritors. This paper emphasizes and identifies the importance of understanding of Calvin’s views on secular and ecclesiastical authority and evaluates them

Tracking the Evolution of the Companionate Marriage Ideal in Early Modern Comedies

This thesis examines the socially constructed ideal of companionate marriage in Elizabethan and Jacobean England through four dramas by Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton. It probes the question of how these theatrical productions of early modern England fit within or defy the emerging social trends regarding companionate marriage. It uses socioeconomic statuses, religious affiliations, and emerging notions of race as lenses through which to analyze the romantic couples depicted in these plays. The results of this study indicate that, while exact authorial intentions remain unknown, these plays served as proponents of the companionate marriage while dually challenging the persisting restrictive social norms that prevented prospective unions between religiously, socioeconomically, and/or racially divergent individuals

Simplicial quantum dynamics

Present-day quantum field theory can be regularized by a decomposition into quantum simplices. This replaces the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space by a high-dimensional spinor space and singular canonical Lie groups by regular spin groups. It radically changes the uncertainty principle for small distances. Gaugeons, including the gravitational, are represented as bound fermion-pairs, and space-time curvature as a singular organized limit of quantum non-commutativity. Keywords: Quantum logic, quantum set theory, quantum gravity, quantum topology, simplicial quantization.Comment: 25 pages. 1 table. Conference of the International Association for Relativistic Dynamics, Taiwan, 201

Reformation: Europe\u27s house divided 1490-1700

Title: Reformation: Europe\u27s house divided 1490-1700. Author: MacCulloch, Diarmaid Reformation xxviii, 832 p. Publisher: London : Allen Lane, 2003

Modeling student pathways in a physics bachelor's degree program

Physics education research has used quantitative modeling techniques to explore learning, affect, and other aspects of physics education. However, these studies have rarely examined the predictive output of the models, instead focusing on the inferences or causal relationships observed in various data sets. This research introduces a modern predictive modeling approach to the PER community using transcript data for students declaring physics majors at Michigan State University (MSU). Using a machine learning model, this analysis demonstrates that students who switch from a physics degree program to an engineering degree program do not take the third semester course in thermodynamics and modern physics, and may take engineering courses while registered as a physics major. Performance in introductory physics and calculus courses, measured by grade as well as a students' declared gender and ethnicity play a much smaller role relative to the other features included the model. These results are used to compare traditional statistical analysis to a more modern modeling approach.Comment: submitted to Physical Review Physics Education Researc