Gladstone, Religious Freedom and Practical Reasoning

W.E. Gladstone’s changing and inconsistent views on religious oaths and established churches present an intriguing puzzle. This article compares and contrasts his early and later stances on these topics with the purpose of evaluating the place of practical judgments in his arguments. This exploration reveals that the prevailing description of Gladstone’s views, which privileges the role practicality played in his later support for a more liberal set of policies governing church–state relations, does not explain the changes and inconsistencies in his position as well as does a description that emphasizes the changes and continuities in his fundamental philosophy. In conclusion, connections are suggested between this explanation of Gladstone’s views and theoretical considerations regarding the development of liberal freedoms

Satellite gravitational orbital perturbations and the gravitomagnetic clock effect

In order to detect the gravitomagnetic clock effect by means of two counter-orbiting satellites placed on identical equatorial and circular orbits around the Earth with radius 7000 km their radial and azimuthal positions must be known with an accuracy of delta r =10^{-1} mm and delta phi =10^{-2} mas per revolution. In this work we investigate if the radial and azimuthal perturbations induced by the dynamical and static parts of the Earth' s gravitational field meet this requirements. While the radial direction is affected only by harmonic perturbations with periods up to some tens of days, the azimuthal location is perturbed by a secular drift and very long period effects.It results that the present level of accuracy in the knowledge both of the Earth solid and ocean tides, and of the static part of the geopotential does not allow an easy detection of the gravitomagnetic clock effect, at least by using short arcs only.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to Int. Journal of Mod. Phys.

FCNC and non-standard soft-breaking terms in weak-scale Supersymmetry

We study the inclusion of non-standard soft-breaking terms in the minimal SUSY extension of the SM, considering it as a model of weak-scale SUSY. These terms modify the sfermion mass matrices, which can induce new sources of flavour violation. Bounds on the new soft parameters can be estimated from current data. The results are then applied to evaluate FCNC top decay t -> c + hi (hi= h,H,A). Implications of complex soft parameters for CP violation are also addressed.Comment: Revised version (8 pages), title changed and references corrected. Presented at VIII Mexican Workshop on Particles and Fields, Merida (1999

A Gravitomagnetic Effect on the Orbit of a Test Body due to the Earth's Variable Angular Momentum

The well known general relativistic Lense-Thirring drag of the orbit of a test particle in the stationary field of a central slowly rotating body is generated, in the weak-field and slow-motion approximation of General Relativity, by a gravitomagnetic Lorentz-like acceleration in the equations of motion of the test particle. In it the gravitomagnetic field is due to the central body's angular momentum supposed to be constant. In the context of the gravitational analogue of the Larmor theorem, such acceleration looks like a Coriolis inertial term in an accelerated frame. In this paper the effect of the variation in time of the central body's angular momentum on the orbit of a test mass is considered. It can be shown that it is analogue to the inertial acceleration due to the time derivative of the angular velocity vector of an accelerated frame. The possibility of detecting such effect in the gravitational field of the Earth with LAGEOS-like satellites is investigated. It turns out that the orbital effects are far too small to be measured.Comment: LaTex2e, 1 table, no figures, 7 page