Conspiracy Theories and Evidential Self-Insulation

What are conspiracy theories? And what, if anything, is epistemically wrong with them? I offer an account on which conspiracy theories are a unique way of holding a belief in a conspiracy. Specifically, I take conspiracy theories to be self-insulating beliefs in conspiracies. On this view, conspiracy theorists have their conspiratorial beliefs in a way that is immune to revision by counter-evidence. I argue that conspiracy theories are always irrational. Although conspiracy theories involve an expectation to encounter some seemingly disconfirming evidence (allegedly planted by the conspirators), resistance to all counter- evidence cannot be justified on these grounds

Hadronic physics at KLOE

New KLOE results on scalar mesons, $\gamma\gamma$ physics and $\eta$ physics are presented.Comment: 4 pages, 5 postscript figures, contributed to the Proceedings of CIPANP 2009: 10th Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics, San Diego, USA, 26-31 May, 200

Extragalactic planetary nebulae as mass tracers: biases in the estimate of dynamical quantities

Planetary Nebulae (PNe) are very important kinematical tracers of the outer regions of early-type galaxies, where the integrated light techniques fail. Under ad hoc assumptions, they allow measurements of rotation velocity and velocity dispersion profile from descrete radial velocity fields. We present the results on the precision allowed by different set of radial velocity samples, discuss the hypotheses in the analysis of descrete velocity fields and their impact on the inferred kinematics of the stellar population.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. To appear on ``Galaxy Dynamics: from Early Universe to the Present'', ASP Conf. Ser., F. Combes, G.A. Mamon and V. Charmandaris (eds.

Geometry and physics of pseudodifferential operators on manifolds

A review is made of the basic tools used in mathematics to define a calculus for pseudodifferential operators on Riemannian manifolds endowed with a connection: esistence theorem for the function that generalizes the phase; analogue of Taylor's theorem; torsion and curvature terms in the symbolic calculus; the two kinds of derivative acting on smooth sections of the cotangent bundle of the Riemannian manifold; the concept of symbol as an equivalence class. Physical motivations and applications are then outlined, with emphasis on Green functions of quantum field theory and Parker's evaluation of Hawking radiation.Comment: 14 pages, paper in honour of Gaetano Vilas

Towards obtaining Green functions for a Casimir cavity in de Sitter spacetime

Recent work in the literature has studied rigid Casimir cavities in a weak gravitational field, or in de Sitter spacetime, or yet other spacetime models. The present review paper studies the difficult problem of direct evaluation of scalar Green functions for a Casimir-type apparatus in de Sitter spacetime. Working to first order in the small parameter of the problem, i.e. twice the gravity acceleration times the plates' separation divided by the speed of light in vacuum, suitable coordinates are considered for which the differential equations obeyed by the zeroth- and first-order Green functions can be solved in terms of special functions. This result can be used, in turn, to obtain, via the point-split method, the regularized and renormalized energy-momentum tensor both in the scalar case and in the physically more relevant electromagnetic case.Comment: 13 pages, special issue review article. In the final version, the calculations of Sec. III have been improved, two References have been added and their content has been summarize

The Ising model on the random planar causal triangulation: bounds on the critical line and magnetization properties

We investigate a Gibbs (annealed) probability measure defined on Ising spin configurations on causal triangulations of the plane. We study the region where such measure can be defined and provide bounds on the boundary of this region (critical line). We prove that for any finite random triangulation the magnetization of the central spin is sensitive of the boundary conditions. Furthermore, we show that in the infinite volume limit, the magnetization of the central spin vanishes for values of the temperature high enough.Comment: 28 pages, 2 figures, 1 section adde

Generic Ising Trees

The Ising model on an infinite generic tree is defined as a thermodynamic limit of finite systems. A detailed description of the corresponding distribution of infinite spin configurations is given. As an application we study the magnetization properties of such systems and prove that they exhibit no spontaneous magnetization. Furthermore, the values of the Hausdorff and spectral dimensions of the underlying trees are calculated and found to be, respectively, $\bar{d}_h=2$ and $\bar{d}_s=4/3$.Comment: 29 pages, 2 figures; typos corrected, one section and new references adde

Three-dimensional implicit lambda methods

This paper derives the three dimensional lambda-formulation equations for a general orthogonal curvilinear coordinate system and provides various block-explicit and block-implicit methods for solving them, numerically. Three model problems, characterized by subsonic, supersonic and transonic flow conditions, are used to assess the reliability and compare the efficiency of the proposed methods