A man ain't nothin but a man

The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on April 9, 2009)Includes bibliographical references.Thesis (M.F.A.) University of Missouri-Columbia 2007.Dissertations, Academic -- University of Missouri--Columbia -- Art.In reflecting personally and historically, mythological tales and folklore such as the legend of John Henry and the many sagas of Greek mythological figures, have acted as a kind of measuring guide or moral compass for masculine traits. Aspects of our cultural masculinity are reflected in these stories. They serve in some cases as a manual for young men to look towards for guidance. The roles that men have played through history have always intrigued me; men who were singular figures of greatness, who actually existed well beyond myth and legend. Some of these men were alive and their prowess was so great they became more than human, showing that their feats seemed virtually impossible to normal men at that time. These stories and struggles go on in the culture and perhaps the genetics of my own family

Black hole evolution by spectral methods

Current methods of evolving a spacetime containing one or more black holes are plagued by instabilities that prohibit long-term evolution. Some of these instabilities may be due to the numerical method used, traditionally finite differencing. In this paper, we explore the use of a pseudospectral collocation (PSC) method for the evolution of a spherically symmetric black hole spacetime in one dimension using a hyperbolic formulation of Einstein's equations. We demonstrate that our PSC method is able to evolve a spherically symmetric black hole spacetime forever without enforcing constraints, even if we add dynamics via a Klein-Gordon scalar field. We find that, in contrast to finite-differencing methods, black hole excision is a trivial operation using PSC applied to a hyperbolic formulation of Einstein's equations. We discuss the extension of this method to three spatial dimensions.Comment: 20 pages, 17 figures, submitted to PR

Pseudoscalar Conversion and X-rays from the Sun

We investigate the detection of a pseudoscalar $\phi$ that couples electromagnetically via an interaction ${1\over4}g \phi F {\tilde F}$. In particular, we focus on the conversion of pseudoscalars produced in the sun's interior in the presence of the sun's external magnetic dipole field and sunspot-related magnetic fields. We find that the sunspot approach is superior. Measurements by the SXT on the Yohkoh satellite can measure the coupling constant down to $g=0.5$--$1 \times 10^{-10}\,\rm GeV^{-1}$, provided the pseudoscalar mass $m < 7{\times} 10^{-6}\,$eV, which makes it competitive with other astrophysical approaches.Comment: 15 pages, RevTex file. Figures available upon request to [email protected]. (please include full mailing address in request). Submitted to Physics Letters

Semiclassical Gravity in the Far Field Limit of Stars, Black Holes, and Wormholes

Semiclassical gravity is investigated in a large class of asymptotically flat, static, spherically symmetric spacetimes including those containing static stars, black holes, and wormholes. Specifically the stress-energy tensors of massless free spin 0 and spin 1/2 fields are computed to leading order in the asymptotic regions of these spacetimes. This is done for spin 0 fields in Schwarzschild spacetime using a WKB approximation. It is done numerically for the spin 1/2 field in Schwarzschild, extreme Reissner-Nordstrom, and various wormhole spacetimes. And it is done by finding analytic solutions to the leading order mode equations in a large class of asymptotically flat static spherically symmetric spacetimes. Agreement is shown between these various computational methods. It is found that for all of the spacetimes considered, the energy density and pressure in the asymptotic region are proportional to 1/r^5 to leading order. Furthermore, for the spin 1/2 field and the conformally coupled scalar field, the stress-energy tensor depends only on the leading order geometry in the far field limit. This is also true for the minimally coupled scalar field for spacetimes containing either a static star or a black hole, but not for spacetimes containing a wormhole.Comment: 43 pages, 2 figures. Reference added, minor changes, PRD versio