Four Cultures: The Ontological Turn

When the Hebraic and Hellenistic tributaries of Western civilization are added to the scientific and humanistic components of modern culture, the areas of concern for these four subcultures conform, surprisingly, to the chief links of the Great Chain of Being

Report of the QCD Tools Working Group

We report on the activities of the ``QCD Tools for heavy flavors and new physics searches'' working group of the Run II Workshop on QCD and Weak Bosons. The contributions cover the topics of improved parton showering and comparisons of Monte Carlo programs and resummation calculations, recent developments in Pythia, the methodology of measuring backgrounds to new physics searches, variable flavor number schemes for heavy quark electro-production, the underlying event in hard scattering processes, and the Monte Carlo MCFM for NLO processes.Comment: LaTeX, 47 pages, 41 figures, 10 tables, uses run2col.sty, to appear in the Proceedings of the Workshop on "QCD and Weak Boson Physics in Run II", Fermilab, March - November 199

Exclusive high-Q2Q^2 electroproduction: light-cone wave functions and electromagnetic form factors of mesons,

We apply the light-cone technique to electroproduction reaction $ep\to e\pi^+n$ long considered as a means of measuring the electromagnetic form factor of the pion. We show that the interpretation of the long-standing puzzle of large transverse cross section ($\sigma_T$) in terms of the $\gamma^*\rho\to \pi$ transition on the $\rho$ mesons in the light-cone proton is possible, but requires quite a slow decrease of the F_{\rho\pi}(\q2) form factor. This interpretation can be tested in the related $ep\to e\pi^0p$ reaction. Corrections which are due to the final-state meson-baryon interactions (FSI) are evaluated and are shown to amount to a $25\%$ effect at moderately large \q2. Vanishing FSI with increasing $Q^2$ - the color transparency phenomenon - is shown to be very strong

Fluctuation induces evolutionary branching in a modeled microbial ecosystem

The impact of environmental fluctuation on species diversity is studied with a model of the evolutionary ecology of microorganisms. We show that environmental fluctuation induces evolutionary branching and assures the consequential coexistence of multiple species. Pairwise invasibility analysis is applied to illustrate the speciation process. We also discuss how fluctuation affects species diversity.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to Physical Review Letter