192 research outputs found
Pursuit of Wisdom and Quantum Ontology
In his late work (De venatione sapientiae), Cusanus unfolded basic ideas of
his brilliant theology. After a long period, this ingenious teaching became
clearly recognizable especially in our time. Forward with his face to the back,
modern scientific theory adopts nowadays a course to which Cusanus had already
pointed centuries ago. Modern thought revolves with unexpected precision and
unexpected mysteriousness around two issues of his doctrine of wisdom: (i) The
possibility-of-being-made is not a figment of the human brain by which it
organizes one's thoughts, but a fundamental and indispensable manifestation of
reality. (ii) The possibility-of-being-made refers to something antecedent by
which both the feasibility and the being-made get their common shape. This
ultimate ground embodies the omnipotent oneness in the form of an infinite fund
in which the cause of all reality and of all possibility is timelessly stored.
Comparisons with the quantum ontology and the theory of quantum gravity impose
themselves.Comment: a quantum view to the old teaching of Cusanu
Gedanken zur Heilserwartung
People live in this world and expect salvation in the world to come. Therefore, thoughts about eschatology have to cope with God’s overall creation. From a mental point of view, the understanding of timeliness is most important because the hope of salvation has to postulate a deep secret behind temporal progression. Indeed, quantum physics provides a completely unexpected picture of what history means on a fundamental level. Some features of the consistent-history interpretation of quantum physics are highlighted. From our reasoning, two main conclusions can be drawn: (i) The belief in salvation is no less a rational expectation than the atheistic world view. (ii) Even if the hope in salvation would be justified, nevertheless, its promises would be entirely ambiguous
Relativistic diffusion processes and random walk models
The nonrelativistic standard model for a continuous, one-parameter diffusion
process in position space is the Wiener process. As well-known, the Gaussian
transition probability density function (PDF) of this process is in conflict
with special relativity, as it permits particles to propagate faster than the
speed of light. A frequently considered alternative is provided by the
telegraph equation, whose solutions avoid superluminal propagation speeds but
suffer from singular (non-continuous) diffusion fronts on the light cone, which
are unlikely to exist for massive particles. It is therefore advisable to
explore other alternatives as well. In this paper, a generalized Wiener process
is proposed that is continuous, avoids superluminal propagation, and reduces to
the standard Wiener process in the non-relativistic limit. The corresponding
relativistic diffusion propagator is obtained directly from the nonrelativistic
Wiener propagator, by rewriting the latter in terms of an integral over
actions. The resulting relativistic process is non-Markovian, in accordance
with the known fact that nontrivial continuous, relativistic Markov processes
in position space cannot exist. Hence, the proposed process defines a
consistent relativistic diffusion model for massive particles and provides a
viable alternative to the solutions of the telegraph equation.Comment: v3: final, shortened version to appear in Phys. Rev.
A Replica Inference Approach to Unsupervised Multi-Scale Image Segmentation
We apply a replica inference based Potts model method to unsupervised image
segmentation on multiple scales. This approach was inspired by the statistical
mechanics problem of "community detection" and its phase diagram. Specifically,
the problem is cast as identifying tightly bound clusters ("communities" or
"solutes") against a background or "solvent". Within our multiresolution
approach, we compute information theory based correlations among multiple
solutions ("replicas") of the same graph over a range of resolutions.
Significant multiresolution structures are identified by replica correlations
as manifest in information theory overlaps. With the aid of these correlations
as well as thermodynamic measures, the phase diagram of the corresponding Potts
model is analyzed both at zero and finite temperatures. Optimal parameters
corresponding to a sensible unsupervised segmentation correspond to the "easy
phase" of the Potts model. Our algorithm is fast and shown to be at least as
accurate as the best algorithms to date and to be especially suited to the
detection of camouflaged images.Comment: 26 pages, 22 figure
Deficiency in COG5 causes a moderate form of congenital disorders of glycosylation
The conserved oligomeric Golgi (COG) complex is a tethering factor composed of eight subunits that is involved in the retrograde transport of intra-Golgi components. Deficient biosynthesis of COG subunits leads to alterations of protein trafficking along the secretory pathway and thereby to severe diseases in humans. Since the COG complex affects the localization of several Golgi glycosyltransferase enzymes, COG deficiency also leads to defective protein glycosylation, thereby explaining the classification of COG deficiencies as forms of congenital disorders of glycosylation (CDG). To date, mutations in COG1, COG4, COG7 and COG8 genes have been associated with diseases, which range from severe multi-organ disorders to moderate forms of neurological impairment. In the present study, we describe a new type of COG deficiency related to a splicing mutation in the COG5 gene. Sequence analysis in the patient identified a homozygous intronic substitution (c.1669-15T>C) leading to exon skipping and severely reduced expression of the COG5 protein. This defect was associated with a mild psychomotor retardation with delayed motor and language development. Analysis of different serum glycoproteins revealed a CDG phenotype with typical undersialylation of N- and O-glycans. Retrograde Golgi-to-endoplasmic reticulum trafficking was markedly delayed in the patient's fibroblast upon brefeldin-A treatment, which is a hallmark of COG deficiency. This trafficking delay could be restored to normal values by expressing a wild-type COG5 cDNA in the patient cells. This case demonstrates that COG deficiency and thereby CDG must be taken into consideration even in children presenting mild neurological impairment
Gravitational field around a screwed superconducting cosmic string in scalar-tensor theories
We obtain the solution that corresponds to a screwed superconducting cosmic
string (SSCS) in the framework of a general scalar-tensor theory including
torsion. We investigate the metric of the SSCS in Brans-Dicke theory with
torsion and analyze the case without torsion. We show that in the case with
torsion the space-time background presents other properties different from that
in which torsion is absent. When the spin vanish, this torsion is a
-gradient and then it propagates outside of the string. We investigate
the effect of torsion on the gravitational force and on the geodesics of a
test-particle moving around the SSCS. The accretion of matter by wakes
formation when a SSCS moves with speed is investigated. We compare our
results with those obtained for cosmic strings in the framework of
scalar-tensor theory.Comment: 22 pages, LaTeX, presented at the "XXII - Encontro Nacional de Fisica
de Particulas e Campos", Sao Lourenco, MG, Brazi
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