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 $\beta$ and $\gamma$, 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 $\beta$ and $\gamma$ 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 $\gamma=1$. 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 α\alpha and their metrological significance

We briefly review the recent experimental results on possible variations of the fine structure constant $\alpha$ on the cosmological time scale and its position dependence. We outline the theoretical grounds for the assumption that $\alpha$ might be variable, mention some phenomenological models incorporating a variable $\alpha$ into the context of modern cosmology and discuss the significance of possible $\alpha$ variations for theoretical and practical metrology.Comment: Latex, 17 pages, brief review. References updated, minor errors remove