The Covenant Never Revoked: Biblical Reflections on a Christian-Jewish Dialogue

Reviewed Book: Lohfink, Norbert. The Covenant Never Revoked: Biblical Reflections on a Christian-Jewish Dialogue. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991

Finding Leaders for Tomorrow\u27s Churches: The Growing Crisis in Clergy Recruitment

Reviewed Book: Oswald, Roy M. Finding Leaders for Tomorrow\u27s Churches: The Growing Crisis in Clergy Recruitment. Washington, DC: Alban Inst, 1993

Igusa's p-adic local zeta function associated to a polynomial mapping and a polynomial integration measure

For p prime, we give an explicit formula for Igusa's local zeta function associated to a polynomial mapping f=(f_1,...,f_t): Q_p^n -> Q_p^t, with f_1,...,f_t in Z_p[x_1,...,x_n], and an integration measure on Z_p^n of the form |g(x)||dx|, with g another polynomial in Z_p[x_1,...,x_n]. We treat the special cases of a single polynomial and a monomial ideal separately. The formula is in terms of Newton polyhedra and will be valid for f and g sufficiently non-degenerated over F_p with respect to their Newton polyhedra. The formula is based on, and is a generalization of results of Denef - Hoornaert, Howald et al., and Veys - Zuniga-Galindo.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

The F-Landscape: Dynamically Determining the Multiverse

We evolve our Multiverse Blueprints to characterize our local neighborhood of the String Landscape and the Multiverse of plausible string, M- and F-theory vacua. Building upon the tripodal foundations of i) the Flipped SU(5) Grand Unified Theory (GUT), ii) extra TeV-Scale vector-like multiplets derived out of F-theory, and iii) the dynamics of No-Scale Supergravity, together dubbed No-Scale F-SU(5), we demonstrate the existence of a continuous family of solutions which might adeptly describe the dynamics of distinctive universes. This Multiverse landscape of F-SU(5) solutions, which we shall refer to as the F-Landscape, accommodates a subset of universes compatible with the presently known experimental uncertainties of our own universe. We show that by secondarily minimizing the minimum of the scalar Higgs potential of each solution within the F-Landscape, a continuous hypervolume of distinct minimum minimorum can be engineered which comprise a regional dominion of universes, with our own universe cast as the bellwether. We conjecture that an experimental signal at the LHC of the No-Scale F-SU(5) framework's applicability to our own universe might sensibly be extrapolated as corroborating evidence for the role of string, M- and F-theory as a master theory of the Multiverse, with No-Scale supergravity as a crucial and pervasive reinforcing structure.Comment: 15 Pages, 7 Figures, 1 Tabl

Split States, Entropy Enigmas, Holes and Halos

We investigate degeneracies of BPS states of D-branes on compact Calabi-Yau manifolds. We develop a factorization formula for BPS indices using attractor flow trees associated to multicentered black hole bound states. This enables us to study background dependence of the BPS spectrum, to compute explicitly exact indices of various nontrivial D-brane systems, and to clarify the subtle relation of Donaldson-Thomas invariants to BPS indices of stable D6-D2-D0 states, realized in supergravity as “hole halos.” We introduce a convergent generating function for D4 indices in the large CY volume limit, and prove it can be written as a modular average of its polar part, generalizing the fareytail expansion of the elliptic genus. We show polar states are “split” D6-anti-D6 bound states, and that the partition function factorizes accordingly, leading to a refined version of the OSV conjecture. This differs from the original conjecture in several aspects. In particular we obtain a nontrivial measure factor $g^{−2}_{top} e^{−K}$ and find factorization requires a cutoff. We show that the main factor determining the cutoff and therefore the error is the existence of “swing states” — D6 states which exist at large radius but do not form stable D6-anti-D6 bound states. We point out a likely breakdown of the OSV conjecture at small $g_{top}$ (in the large background CY volume limit), due to the surprising phenomenon that for sufficiently large background Kähler moduli, a charge $\Lambda \Gamma$ supporting single centered black holes of entropy $\sim \Lambda^2 S(\Gamma)$ also admits two-centered BPS black hole realizations whose entropy grows like $\Lambda^3$ when $\Lambda \rightarrow \infty$.Physic

How many black holes fit on the head of a pin?

The Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of certain black holes can be computed microscopically in string theory by mapping the elusive problem of counting microstates of a strongly gravitating black hole to the tractable problem of counting microstates of a weakly coupled D-brane system, which has no event horizon, and indeed comfortably fits on the head of a pin. We show here that, contrary to widely held beliefs, the entropy of spherically symmetric black holes can easily be dwarfed by that of stationary multi-black-hole ``molecules'' of the same total charge and energy. Thus, the corresponding pin-sized D-brane systems do not even approximately count the microstates of a single black hole, but rather those of a zoo of entropically dominant multicentered configurations.Comment: 4 pages, fourth prize in the Gravity Research Foundation Essay competition 200

Effective action for the field equations of charged black holes

In this article, we consistently reduce the equations of motion for the bosonic N = 2 supergravity action, using a multi-centered black hole ansatz for the metric. This reduction is done in a general, non-supersymmetric setup, in which we extend concepts of BPS black hole technology. First of all we obtain a more general form of the black hole potential, as part of an effective action for both the scalars and the vectors in the supergravity theory. Furthermore, we show that there are extra constraints specifying the solution, which we calculate explicitly. In the literature, these constraints have already been studied in the one-center case. We also show that the effective action we obtain for non-static metrics, can be linked to the "entropy function" for the spherically symmetric case, as defined by Sen and Cardoso et al.Comment: 18 pages, (v2: small corrections, version to be published in CQG