Following the Newark, NJ Drinking Water Lead Crisis

In the summer of 2018, after it was revealed that there were dangerous levels of lead in the drinking water in Newark, New Jersey, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the New Jersey Education Workers Caucus filed a lawsuit against the City of Newark. They claimed the city did not comply with statues in the Safe Drinking Water Act, Lead and Copper Rule, and New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act. This case follows the nationally recognized case in Flint, MI, and both cases present undertones of systemic racism through the inaction of local governments. While the jury is still out on whether the city of Newark will be held responsible, this paper analyzes the case, relevant legislation and stakeholders strategies

Concept of field modes and the behavior of the magnetohydrodynamic field

A method for studying the behavior of fields by splitting their behavior into independent field modes is presented. The method is used to explore the characteristics of steady, two-dimensional, linearized magnetohydrodynamic fields with finite viscosity and resistivity and arbitrary orientation of the magnetic vector relative to the velocity vector.It is shown that in general boundary layers and wakes cease to exist in magnetohydrodynamics. Their place is taken by diffusing waves which, in reality, are the fields of a set of viscous-resistive sources, vortices, poles and currents whose field lines are strongly oriented along the characteristic wave directions. When the viscosity and resistivity are equal, these waves diffuse in a simple and independent way, but when these quantities are not equal, the diffusing waves generate a new kind of wake which is located, veil-like, in the fan-shaped region between the two wave directions. These wakes are fed from the differential diffusion of the primary waves. In the special case for which the resistivity is much greater than the viscosity, a new type of pseudo boundary layer is shown to exist in the velocity field. When the viscosity is much greater than the resistivity, this pseudo boundary layer occurs in the magnetic field

The Transient Behavior of Nonlinear Systems

It is shown that the classical perturbation procedure for treating nonlinear systems leads to solutions expressed as Fourier-like series with slowly varying coefficients. These slowly varying coefficients contain the information about the long term behavior of the system. Inconsistently, the classical perturbation procedure expresses these coefficients as power series, a mode of expression which has notoriously poor long term validity. An operational procedure is presented for treating oscillations having slowly variable amplitudes and frequencies. An extension of the usual impedance concepts is presented for expressing the frequency characteristics of both linear and nonlinear elements when oscillations with many frequencies are present simultaneously and when these oscillations vary in both frequency and amplitude. From these methods, a perturbation procedure is devised which permits the behavior of systems to be computed with any order of accuracy, using only the algebraic processes which are characteristic of operational procedures. This procedure avoids expressing its results in terms of the local time. Instead, it expresses them in terms of the fundamental characteristics of the oscillations which axe present. As a consequence, the final solutions have the much desired long term validity and they may be used to obtain asymptotic estimates of the behavior of the system. The method is able to treat systems containing nonlinear perturbing elements and elements which we have described as moderately nonlinear. By means of examples it is shown that it is a straightforward process to treat systems to second order accuracy. This level of accuracy covers a large number of the intercoupling effects that characterize the more sophisticated nonlinear phenomena

Bell inequality for arbitrary many settings of the analyzers

A generalization of the CHSH-Bell inequality to arbitrary many settings is presented. The singlet state of two spin \half violates this inequality for all numbers of setting. In the limit of arbitrarily large number of settings, the violation tends to the finite ratio $4/\pi \approx 1.27$.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figur

Modeling the Singlet State with Local Variables

A local-variable model yielding the statistics from the singlet state is presented for the case of inefficient detectors and/or lowered visibility. It has independent errors and the highest efficiency at perfect visibility is 77.80%, while the highest visibility at perfect detector-efficiency is 63.66%. Thus, the model cannot be refuted by measurements made to date.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figure

Bell inequality and the locality loophole: Active versus passive switches

All experimental tests of the violation of Bell's inequality suffer from some loopholes. We show that the locality loophole is not independent of the detection loophole: in experiments using low efficient detectors, the locality loophole can be closed equivalently using active or passive switches.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

A local hidden variable model of quantum correlation exploiting the detection loophole

A local hidden variable model exploiting the detection loophole to reproduce exactly the quantum correlation of the singlet state is presented. The model is shown to be compatible with both the CHSH and the CH Bell inequalities. Moreover, it bears the same rotational symmetry as spins. The reason why the model can reproduce the quantum correlation without violating the Bell theorem is that in the model the efficiency of the detectors depends on the local hidden variable. On average the detector efficiency is limited to 75%.Comment: 6 pages + 1 figure. A software producing data violating Bell inequality between two classical computers can be downloaded from http://www.gapoptique.unige.ch/News/BellSoft.as

On the Numerical Determination of Relaxation and Retardation Spectra for Linearly Viscoelastic Materials

Knowledge of the relaxation spectrum is important because (1) it provides an intrinsic characterization of the mechanical properties for linearly viscoelastic materials and (2) it offers a rational way to derive the coefficients for a Prony or Dirichlet series representation of the relaxation modulus of importance to some engineering analyses. A numerical solution based on Simpson quadrature leads to an unstable solution in the sense that a decrease in integration intervals produces a progressively worse solution which oscillates between positive and negative values. This difficulty may be overcome by requiring that the curvature of the relaxation spectrum with respect to the relaxation times be minimized. The method is tested on the modified power law and good agreement with the exact and numerically determined relaxation spectrum is obtained. However, when the same method is used to determine the retardation spectrum, only the unstable solution is obtained, although the form of the integral equation is the same. This different behavior is attributed to the difference in the characteristics of the relaxation and retardation spectral functions

Philosophy Enters the Optics Laboratory: Bell's Theorem and its First Experimental Tests (1965-1982)

This paper deals with the ways that the issue of completing quantum mechanics was brought into laboratories and became a topic in mainstream quantum optics. It focuses on the period between 1965, when Bell published what now we call Bell's theorem, and 1982, when Aspect published the results of his experiments. I argue that what was considered good physics after Aspect's experiments was once considered by many a philosophical matter instead of a scientific one, and that the path from philosophy to physics required a change in the physics community's attitude about the status of the foundations of quantum mechanics.Comment: 57 pages, accepted by Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physic