2,288 research outputs found
Secular Evolution of Spiral Galaxies
It is now a well established fact that galaxies undergo significant
morphological transformation during their lifetimes, manifesting as an
evolution along the Hubble sequence from the late to the early Hubble types.
The physical processes commonly believed to be responsible for this observed
evolution trend, i.e. the major and minor mergers, as well as gas accretion
under a barred potential, though demonstrated applicability to selected types
of galaxies, on the whole have failed to reproduce the most important
statistical and internal properties of galaxies. The secular evolution
mechanism reviewed in this paper has the potential to overcome most of the
known difficulties of the existing theories to provide a natural and coherent
explanation of the properties of present day as well as high-redshift galaxies.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, Invited talk presented at the 2nd APCTP workshop
on Astrophysics, Pohang, Korea (June 2002
A Realist Interpretation of the Quantum Measurement Problem
A new, realist interpretation of the quantum measurement processes is given.
In this scenario a quantum measurement is a non-equilibrium phase transition in
a ``resonant cavity'' formed by the entire physical universe including all its
material and energy content. Both the amplitude and the phase of the quantum
mechanical wavefunction acquire substantial meaning in this picture, and the
probabilistic element is removed from the foundations of quantum mechanics, its
apparent presence in the quantum measurement process is viewed as a result of
the sensitive dependence on initial/boundary conditions of the non-equilibrium
phase transitions in a many degree-of-freedom system. The implications of
adopting this realist ontology to the clarification and resolution of lingering
issues in the foundations of quantum mechanics, such as wave-particle duality,
Heisenberg's uncertainty relation, Schrodinger's Cat paradox, first and higher
order coherence of photons and atoms, virtual particles, the existence of
commutation relations and quantized behavior, etc., are also presented.Comment: 8 pages, submiited to the Proceedings of the international conference
"Albert Einstein Century", held July 2005 in Paris, Franc
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