Fearless: Eric Lee

Snapping pictures of his fellow Gettysburgians around campus as the visual communications intern, and fearlessly working with other students to create, organize, and lead the new Asian Student Alliance (ASA) group on campus, Eric Lee ’15 finds himself at the crossroads of art and activism. New to campus this year after two years in the making, the ASA is a student-led, -run, and -organized group focused on celebrating different Asian cultures and heritages, closing the gap between international and domestic students, and creating a social, cultural, and political forum for students to dialogue, specifically about issues facing Asian communities. [excerpt

Risk that Lasts: Prioritizing Propositional Risk in Honors Education

The fear of missing the mark often shapes how honors students approach risk in the classroom and, consequently, how instructors build risk-taking exercises into their curriculums. This paper explores the concept of propositional risk in the context of honors pedagogy, wherein students are challenged to interrogate deeply held beliefs and tasked with exercises designed to call forth the full complexity of attendant issues surrounding any individual viewpoint. As distinct from strategic risk, which can be characterized as performative and externally motivated, propositional risk requires students to critically evaluate a spectrum of thought, value, and ideology in the context of singular, independent vantages. The author uses examples from a study abroad program and provides tips for fostering propositional tension in the classroom, suggesting that this type of risk, latent with the potential for change, is of greater benefit to the student long-term

Weakly-bound Hadronic Molecule near a 3-body Threshold

The X(3872) seems to be a loosely-bound hadronic molecule whose constituents are two charm mesons. A novel feature of this molecule is that the mass difference of the constituents is close to the mass of a lighter meson that can be exchanged between them, namely the pion. We analyze this feature in a simple model with spin-0 mesons only. Various observables are calculated to next-to-leading order in the interaction strength of the exchanged meson. Renormalization requires summing a geometric series of next-to-leading order corrections. The dependence of observables on the ultraviolet cutoff can be removed by renormalizations of the mass of the heaviest meson, the coupling constant for the contact interaction between the heavy mesons, and short-distance coefficients in the operator product expansion. The next-to-leading order correction has an unphysical infrared divergence at the threshold of the two heavier mesons that can be eliminated by a further resummation that takes into account the nonzero width of the heaviest meson.Comment: 37 pages, 13 figures, submitted to Phys.Rev.