Heat Kernel Asymptotics on Homogeneous Bundles

We consider Laplacians acting on sections of homogeneous vector bundles over symmetric spaces. By using an integral representation of the heat semi-group we find a formal solution for the heat kernel diagonal that gives a generating function for the whole sequence of heat invariants. We argue that the obtained formal solution correctly reproduces the exact heat kernel diagonal after a suitable regularization and analytical continuation.Comment: 29 pages, Proceedings of the 2007 Midwest Geometry Conference in Honor of Thomas P. Branso

From Cambridge Keynesian to Institutional Economist: The Unnoticed Contributions of Robert Neild

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Robert Neild (born 1924) has made a major contribution to economics and to peace studies. This paper provides a brief sketch of Neild’s life and work. While noting his research in economic policy and peace studies, this essay devotes more attention to his largely-unnoticed contributions to institutional and evolutionary economics since 1984. These are important in their own right, but they are especially notable because Cambridge heterodox economists have been devoted mainly to other approaches, including Marxism and post-Keynesianism. Neild’s distinctive contribution is partly explained by his closeness to both Nicholas Kaldor and Gunnar Myrdal. Myrdal made explicit his adherence to the original American institutionalism: Neild extended that link to Cambridge.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Young children’s impressionable use of teleology: the influence of question wording and questioned topic on teleological explanations for natural phenomena

There is a significant body of research on children's preconceptions concerning scientific concepts and the impact this has upon their science education. One active issue concerns the extent to which young children's explanations for the existence of natural kinds rely on a teleological rationale: for example, rain is for watering the grass, or tigers’ stripes are for camouflage. It has been argued that this teleological tendency hampers children's ability to learn about causality in the natural world. This paper investigates two factors (question wording and topic) which it is argued have led to a misestimation of children's teleological tendencies within the area natural phenomena: i.e., those that are time-constrained, natural events or process such as snow, clouds or night. Sixty-six (5- to 8-years-old) children took part in a repeated-measures experiment, answering both open- and leading-questions across 10 topics of natural phenomena. The findings indicate that children's teleological reasoning may have been overestimated as open question forms significantly reduced their tendency to answer teleologically. Moreover, the concept of teleology is more nuanced than often suggested. Consequently, young children may be more able to learn about causal explanations for the existence of natural phenomena than the literature implies

Scientific, institutional and personal rivalries among Soviet geographers in the late Stalin era

Scientific, institutional and personal rivalries between three key centres of geographical research and scholarship (the Academy of Sciences Institute of Geography and the Faculties of Geography at Moscow and Leningrad State Universities) are surveyed for the period from 1945 to the early 1950s. It is argued that the debates and rivalries between members of the three institutions appear to have been motivated by a variety of scientific, ideological, institutional and personal factors, but that genuine scientific disagreements were at least as important as political and ideological factors in influencing the course of the debates and in determining their final outcome

Causal structures and causal boundaries

We give an up-to-date perspective with a general overview of the theory of causal properties, the derived causal structures, their classification and applications, and the definition and construction of causal boundaries and of causal symmetries, mostly for Lorentzian manifolds but also in more abstract settings.Comment: Final version. To appear in Classical and Quantum Gravit

The meaning of life in a developing universe

The evolution of life on Earth has produced an organism that is beginning to model and understand its own evolution and the possible future evolution of life in the universe. These models and associated evidence show that evolution on Earth has a trajectory. The scale over which living processes are organized cooperatively has increased progressively, as has its evolvability. Recent theoretical advances raise the possibility that this trajectory is itself part of a wider developmental process. According to these theories, the developmental process has been shaped by a larger evolutionary process that involves the reproduction of universes. This evolutionary process has tuned the key parameters of the universe to increase the likelihood that life will emerge and develop to produce outcomes that are successful in the larger process (e.g. a key outcome may be to produce life and intelligence that intentionally reproduces the universe and tunes the parameters of ‘offspring’ universes). Theory suggests that when life emerges on a planet, it moves along this trajectory of its own accord. However, at a particular point evolution will continue to advance only if organisms emerge that decide to advance the evolutionary process intentionally. The organisms must be prepared to make this commitment even though the ultimate nature and destination of the process is uncertain, and may forever remain unknown. Organisms that complete this transition to intentional evolution will drive the further development of life and intelligence in the universe. Humanity’s increasing understanding of the evolution of life in the universe is rapidly bringing it to the threshold of this major evolutionary transition

Two-spinor Formulation of First Order Gravity coupled to Dirac Fields

Two-spinor formalism for Einstein Lagrangian is developed. The gravitational field is regarded as a composite object derived from soldering forms. Our formalism is geometrically and globally well-defined and may be used in virtually any 4m-dimensional manifold with arbitrary signature as well as without any stringent topological requirement on space-time, such as parallelizability. Interactions and feedbacks between gravity and spinor fields are considered. As is well known, the Hilbert-Einstein Lagrangian is second order also when expressed in terms of soldering forms. A covariant splitting is then analysed leading to a first order Lagrangian which is recognized to play a fundamental role in the theory of conserved quantities. The splitting and thence the first order Lagrangian depend on a reference spin connection which is physically interpreted as setting the zero level for conserved quantities. A complete and detailed treatment of conserved quantities is then presented.Comment: 16 pages, Plain TE

Whose Science and whose Religion? Reflections on the Relations between Scientific and Religious Worldviews

Arguments about the relationship between science and religion often proceed by identifying a set of essential characteristics of scientific and religious worldviews and arguing on the basis of these characteristics for claims about a relationship of conflict or compatibility between them. Such a strategy is doomed to failure because science, to some extent, and religion, to a much larger extent, are cultural phenomena that are too diverse in their expressions to be characterized in terms of a unified worldview. In this paper I follow a different strategy. Having offered a loose characterization of the nature of science, I pose five questions about specific areas where religious and scientific worldviews may conflict - questions about the nature of faith, the belief in a God or Gods, the authority of sacred texts, the relationship between scientific and religious conceptions of the mind/soul, and the relationship between scientific and religious understandings of moral behavior. My review of these questions will show that they cannot be answered unequivocally because there is no agreement amongst religious believers as to the meaning of important religious concepts. Thus, whether scientific and religious worldviews conflict depends essentially upon whose science and whose religion one is considering. In closing, I consider the implications of this conundrum for science education

How Malthusian Ideology crept into the Newsroom: British tabloids and the coverage of the ‘underclass’

This article argues that Malthusianism as a series of discursive regimes, developed in the Victorian-era, serves in times of austerity to reproduce an elite understanding of social exclusion in which those in a state of poverty are to blame for their own situation. It highlights that Malthusianism is present in the public discourse, becoming an underlining feature in news coverage of the so-called ‘underclass’. Our findings broadly contradict the normative claim that journalism ‘speaks truth to power’, and suggest instead that overall as a political practice, journalism tends to reproduce and reinforce hegemonic discourses of power. The piece is based on critical discourse analysis (CDA), which has been applied to a significant sample of news articles published by tabloid newspapers in Britain which focussed on the concept of the ‘underclass’. By looking at the evidence, the authors argue that the ‘underclass’ is a concept used by some journalists to cast people living in poverty as ‘undeserving’ of public and state support. In so doing, these journalists help create a narrative which supports cuts in welfare provisions and additional punitive measures against some of the most vulnerable members of society