Physics of the Cosmic Microwave Background and the Planck Mission

This lecture is a sketch of the physics of the cosmic microwave background. The observed anisotropy can be divided into four main contributions: variations in the temperature and gravitational potential of the primordial plasma, Doppler effect from its motion, and a net red/blueshift the photons accumulate from traveling through evolving gravitational potentials on their way from the primordial plasma to here. These variations are due to primordial perturbations, probably caused by quantum fluctuations in the very early universe. The ongoing Planck satellite mission to observe the cosmic microwave background is also described.Comment: Proceedings of the 2010 CERN Summer School, Raseborg (Finland), submitted for publication in a CERN Yellow Repor

Rights, Harming and Wronging: A Restatement of the Interest Theory

This article introduces a new formulation of the interest theory of rights. The focus is on ‘Bentham’s test’, which was devised by Matthew Kramer to limit the expansiveness of the interest theory. According to the test, a party holds a right correlative to a duty only if that party stands to undergo a development that is typically detrimental if the duty is breached. The article shows how the entire interest theory can be reformulated in terms of the test. The article then focuses on a further strength of the interest theory, brought to the fore by the new formulation. In any Western legal system, the tortious maltreatment of a child or a mentally disabled individual results in a compensatory duty. The interest theory can account for such duties in a simple and elegant way. The will theory, on the other hand, struggles to explain such compensatory duties unless it abandons some of its main tenets

Animals, Slaves, and Corporations: Analyzing Legal Thinghood

The Article analyzes the notion of legal “thinghood” in the context of the person–thing bifurcation. In legal scholarship, there are numerous assumptions pertaining to this definition that are often not spelled out. In addition, one’s chosen definition of “thing” is often simply taken to be the correct one. The Article scrutinizes these assumptions and definitions. First, a brief history of the bifurcation is offered. Second, three possible definitions of “legal thing” are examined: Things as nonpersons, things as rights and duties, and things as property. The first two definitions are rejected as not being very interesting or serving any heuristic function. Conversely, understanding legal things as property is meaningful, useful, and helps to understand what it means to say that animals are legally things. Defining things as property has certain rather important implications, which are analyzed at the end of the Article. For instance, not everything needs to be either a person or a thing: The historical institution of outlawry involved treating individuals neither as legal persons nor as legal things. One must conclude that the person–thing bifurcation is less fundamental than is often assumed

How to establish a perennial legume-grass sward?

In 2002, a field experiment with split-plot design was established in Juva in order to compare the use of nurse crop to establish perennial legume grass sward in organic farming

Supersonic Deflagrations in Cosmological Phase Transitions

The classification of the hydrodynamical growth mechanisms for the spherical bubbles of the low-temperature phase in cosmological phase transitions is completed by showing that the bubbles can grow as supersonic deflagrations. Such deflagrations consist of a Jouguet deflagration, followed by a rarefaction wave. Depending on the amount of supercooling, the maximal velocity of supersonic deflagrations varies between the sound and the light velocities. The solutions faster than supersonic deflagrations are weak detonations.Comment: 8 pages, RevTeX, 6 figures. Complete paper appended as uuencoded postscript and at http://www.physics.helsinki.fi/tft/tft_preprints.htm

Factorization at fixed Q^2(1-x)

We consider QCD factorization between hard and soft subprocesses in inclusive reactions where the momentum fraction x of one parton approaches unity as the hard scale Q^2 -> \infty, such that Q^2(1-x) is fixed. In this "BB limit" the entire (multi-parton) Fock state containing the high x parton is coherent with the hard subprocess. The soft contribution is given by a forward multiparton matrix element. The BB limit corresponds to a fixed (large or small) missing mass and is thus closely connected to exclusive production. We analyze the Drell-Yan process h + N -> \gamma^* + X in detail, explaining why the virtual photon is longitudinally polarized for h = \pi and transversely polarized for h = p. The BB limit may be relevant also for other phenomena observed at high x, such as the large single spin asymmetries of p p -> \Lambda^\uparrow X and in p p^\uparrow -> \pi X.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures. v2: Version published in JHEP. Text modified as suggested by the refere