2,556 research outputs found
Implications of Standard-Model flavor violation for new physics searches
I discuss far-flung ramifications of light-quark flavor physics for searches
for physics beyond the Standard Model and consider, particularly, its role in
the interpretation of CP-violating observables in meson decays.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure
Perceiving âThe Philosophical Childâ: A Guide for the Perplexed
Though Jana Mohr Lone refers to childrenâs striving to wonder, to question, to figure out how the world works and where they fit as the âphilosophical self,â like its parent discipline, it could be argued that the philosophical self is actually the âparent self,ââthe wellspring of all the other aspects of personhood that we traditionally parse out, e.g., the intellectual, moral, social, and emotional selves. If that is the case, then to be blind to âThe Philosophical Child,â the latter being the title of Jana Mohr Loneâs book, is, in a sense then, to be blind to the child. Thus, though Mohr Lone says that the subject of her book is to assist parents in supporting the development of childrenâs philosophical selves, that claim may mask the gift that this lovely book can bring to the parent-child relationship if it is interpreted as helping children to become âsmarty pantsâ in the sense of acquiring esoteric skills to excel in the ivory-tower discipline of academic philosophy. This is not the focus of this book. This is not an invitation to learn about the history of philosophyâ about what some wise, usually white, usually men said about the fundamental questions that intrigue all humans. This is not an invitation to memorize and thus to sit in awe of what others think âas is too often the case in university classrooms. This book, rather, is a guide to how to actually philosophizeâhow to use questions to energetically and courageously make progress toward finding answers that one, through reflection, comes to believe are the best, given the reasons and evidence available. And to the degree that we and our children are successful, we give ourselves and our children the gift of continuously learning to become ever wiser
Communicating Toward Personhood
Marshalling a mind-numbing array of data, Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, shows that on virtually every conceivable measure, civic participation, or what he refers to as âsocial capital,â is plummeting to levels not seen for almost 100 years. And we should care, Putnam argues, because connectivity is directly related to both individual and social wellbeing on a wide variety of measures. On the other hand, social capital of the âbonding kindâ brings with it the ugly side effect of animosity toward outsiders. Given the increasing heterogeneity of our world, the goal therefore must be to enhance connectivity of the âbridging sort,â i.e., connecting across differences. This, in turn, requires that we first clarify what bridging communicative styles looks like. Examining communication as it might transpire in Kantâs kingdom of ends, through the perspective of Habermasâ âcommunicative action,â and within the scientific community, offers a compelling suggestion that there is a way of communicating such that, if adopted, one would come to view others as if they were persons, i.e., that a bridging communicative style facilitates a kind of bonding that sees through differences toward the commonality of personhood. This paper will briefly explore how communicating toward personhood might be promoted
The complexity of respecting together: From the point of view of one participant of the 2012 vancouver naaci conference
Dedication: I would like to dedicate this essay to Mort Morehouse, whose intelligence, warmth, and good humour sustains NAACI to this day. I would like, too, to dedicate this essay to Nadia Kennedy who, in her paper âRespecting the Complexity of CI,â suggests that respect for the rich non-reductive emergent memories and understandings that evolve out of participating in the sort of complex communicative interactions that we experienced at the 2012 NAACI conference requires âa turning around and looking back so that we might understand it better.â Thus, though âwe cannot grasp the essence of the system in some determinate way, since each description provides a limited view, and portrays some aspect of the system from a specific position inside or outside it, and at a specific point in time,â nonetheless respect requires that we try âto take different âsnapshotsâ of such systems and attempt to make sense of them.â It is as a result of this urging that the following snapshot was attempted. My thanks to Nadia for being such an inspiration, and to all the participants for making this conference such a memorable occasion
CPT, CP, and C transformations of fermions, and their consequences, in theories with B-L violation
We consider the transformation properties of fermions under the discrete
symmetries CPT, CP, and C in the presence of B-L violation. We thus generalize
the analysis of the known properties of Majorana neutrinos, probed via
neutrinoless double beta decay, to include the case of Dirac fermions with B-L
violation, which can be probed via neutron-antineutron oscillations. We show
that the resulting CPT phase has implications for the interplay of
neutron-antineutron oscillations with external fields and sources and consider
the differences in the Majorana dynamics of neutrinos and neutrons in the
context of theories with self-conjugate isospin I=0 and I=1/2 fields.Comment: 23 pages; refs. and acknowledgement added with minor changes;
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