49 research outputs found
Evolutionism and Historical Particularism at the St. Petersburg Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography
The paper describes the early 20th century debates between several leading Russian anthropologists, including Lev Shternberg, on the best way of displaying artifacts in the newly refurbished Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in St. Petersburg. These debates revealed major tensions and contradictions between evolutionism and historical particularism, as well as universalism and nationalism within Russian anthropology of that era
On Observational Predictions from Multidimensional Gravity
We discuss possible observational manifestations of static, spherically
symmetric solutions of a class of multidimensional theories of gravity, which
includes the low energy limits of supergravities and superstring theories as
special cases. We discuss the choice of a physical conformal frame to be used
for the description of observations. General expressions are given for (i) the
Eddington parameters and , characterizing the post-Newtonian
gravitational field of a central body, (ii) p-brane black hole temperatures in
different conformal frames and (iii) the Coulomb law modified by extra
dimensions. It is concluded, in particular, that and depend on
the integration constants and can be therefore different for different central
bodies. If, however, the Einstein frame is adopted for describing observations,
we always obtain . The modified Coulomb law is shown to be
independent of the choice of a 4-dimensional conformal frame. We also argue the
possible existence of specific multidimensional objects, T-holes, potentially
observable as bodies with mirror surfaces.Comment: 16 pages, Latex2
Possible variations of the fine structure constant and their metrological significance
We briefly review the recent experimental results on possible variations of
the fine structure constant on the cosmological time scale and its
position dependence. We outline the theoretical grounds for the assumption that
might be variable, mention some phenomenological models incorporating
a variable into the context of modern cosmology and discuss the
significance of possible variations for theoretical and practical
metrology.Comment: Latex, 17 pages, brief review. References updated, minor errors
remove