Why New Hampshire Should Permit Married Couples to Choose Community Property

[Excerpt] “Two states, Alaska and Tennessee, offer married couples the choice of holding their property as separate or community property. Another nine states use community property as the default arrangement. Yet in each of those nine states a couple can opt out of community property rules by agreement. Only in the remaining thirty-nine states are married couples forced to accept separate property. There is no good reason for this condition to exist. This essay sets forth the advantages of offering married couples the choice of community or separate property and deals with some expected objections to this proposal. Section I details the benefits of choice. Section II examines likely objections and finds those objections insufficient to reject the proposal.

The origin of order in random matrices with symmetries

From Noether's theorem we know symmetries lead to conservation laws. What is left to nature is the ordering of conserved quantities; for example, the quantum numbers of the ground state. In physical systems the ground state is generally associated with `low' quantum numbers and symmetric, low-dimensional irreps, but there is no \textit{a priori} reason to expect this. By constructing random matrices with nontrivial point-group symmetries, I find the ground state is always dominated by extremal low-dimensional irreps. Going further, I suggest this explains the dominance of J=0 g.s. even for random two-body interactions.Comment: 5 figures; contribution to "Beauty in Physics" conference in honor of Francesco Iachello, May 2012, Cocoyoc, Mexic

Suspense in the Phaeacian Episode of Apollonius' Argonautica

published or submitted for publicatio

Tracing the evolution of nuclear forces under the similarity renormalization group

I examine the evolution of nuclear forces under the similarity renormalization group (SRG) using traces of the many-body configuration-space Hamiltonian. While SRG is often said to "soften" the nuclear interaction, I provide numerical examples which paint a complementary point of view: the primary effect of SRG, using the kinetic energy as the generator of the evolution, is to shift downward the diagonal matrix elements in the model space, while the off-diagonal elements undergo significantly smaller changes. By employing traces, I argue that this is a very natural outcome as one diagonalizes a matrix, and helps one to understand the success of SRG.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Bostonia. Volume 22

Founded in 1900, Bostonia magazine is Boston University's main alumni publication, which covers alumni and student life, as well as university activities, events, and programs