It’s About the Journey: Lewis on Heroes and Personality in Out of the Silent Planet

In his novels, Lewis’s heroes come from humble beginnings and are shaped by circumstances until Lewis is satisfied with them; that is, until they reach their full potential. This draws on his belief that humans only attain true personality by surrendering their personalities to God, who then shapes them into true sons: “The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.

Multiphotons and Photon-Jets

We discuss an extension of the Standard Model with a new vector-boson decaying predominantly into a multi-photon final state through intermediate light degrees of freedom. The model has a distinctive phase in which the photons are collimated. As such, they would fail the isolation requirements of standard multi-photon searches, but group naturally into a novel object, the photon-jet. Once defined, the photon-jet object facilitates more inclusive searches for similar phenomena. We present a concrete model, discuss photon-jets more generally, and outline some strategies that may prove useful when searching for such objects.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Study of cryogenic fluid mixing techniques. Volume 1 - Large-scale experimental mixing investigations and liquid-oxygen mixer design Final report

Large-scale experimental liquid hydrogen mixing and liquid oxygen mixer desig

Complementarianism in Lewis and Milton: Eve and the Green Lady

This thesis explores the relationship between the genders as expressed in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra (1943) and the ways in which a modern understanding of gender relationships informs the literary criticism of each work. While these authors composed their works during very different periods in history, Milton and Lewis each write from a complementarian rather than an egalitarian view of gender. Each author embraces a hierarchical conception of the universe. The ramifications of this context on the criticism of the respective works means that the reader or critic must often set aside his or her own presuppositions. Disregarding the views of the text can hinder the reader from initially interpreting the work as its author intended. Since relationships between men and women have changed drastically since Milton’s time, it is especially important for a modern reader to examine what he or she assumes before reading Paradise Lost. Lewis’s extensive writing about medieval literature alerts us to the challenges in interpreting pre-Miltonic texts. This writing also provides an important reference point for how Lewis drew upon Paradise Lost in writing Perelandra. Understanding Lewis’s complementarian presentation of the First Mother in Perelandra allows the modern-day reader to better interpret Milton’s Eve as Milton intended

On optimum Hamiltonians for state transformations

For a prescribed pair of quantum states |psi_I> and |psi_F> we establish an elementary derivation of the optimum Hamiltonian, under constraints on its eigenvalues, that generates the unitary transformation |psi_I> --> |psi_F> in the shortest duration. The derivation is geometric in character and does not rely on variational calculus.Comment: 5 page

An alternative to the conventional micro-canonical ensemble

Usual approach to the foundations of quantum statistical physics is based on conventional micro-canonical ensemble as a starting point for deriving Boltzmann-Gibbs (BG) equilibrium. It leaves, however, a number of conceptual and practical questions unanswered. Here we discuss these questions, thereby motivating the study of a natural alternative known as Quantum Micro-Canonical (QMC) ensemble. We present a detailed numerical study of the properties of the QMC ensemble for finite quantum systems revealing a good agreement with the existing analytical results for large quantum systems. We also propose the way to introduce analytical corrections accounting for finite-size effects. With the above corrections, the agreement between the analytical and the numerical results becomes very accurate. The QMC ensemble leads to an unconventional kind of equilibrium, which may be realizable after strong perturbations in small isolated quantum systems having large number of levels. We demonstrate that the variance of energy fluctuations can be used to discriminate the QMC equilibrium from the BG equilibrium. We further suggest that the reason, why BG equilibrium commonly occurs in nature rather than the QMC-type equilibrium, has something to do with the notion of quantum collapse.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure