A Historical Perspective on Cancer

It is proposed that cancer results from the breakdown of universal control mechanisms which developed in mutual association as part of the historical process that brought individual cells together into multi-cellular communities. By systematically comparing the genomes of uni-celled with multi-celled organisms, one might be able to identify the most promising sites for intervention aimed at restoring the damaged control mechanisms and thereby arresting the cancer.Comment: 3 pages, plainTeX, no figure

Relativity theory does not imply that the future already exists: a counterexample

It is often said that the relativistic fusion of time with space rules out genuine change or ``becoming''. I offer the classical sequential growth models of causal set theory as counterexamples.Comment: plainTeX, 12 pages, no figures. To appear in Vesselin Petkov (editor), Relativity and the Dimensionality of the World (Springer 2007, in press). Most current version is available at http://www.physics.syr.edu/~sorkin/some.papers (or wherever my home-page may be

Does Locality Fail at Intermediate Length-Scales

If quantum gravity implies a fundamental spatiotemporal discreteness, and if its ``laws of motion'' are compatible with the Lorentz transformations, then physics cannot remain local. One might expect this nonlocality to be confined to the fundamental discreteness scale, but I will present evidence that it survives at much lower energies, yielding for example a nonlocal equation of motion for a scalar field propagating on an underlying causal set.Comment: plainTeX, 24 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Daniele Oriti (ed.), {\it Towards Quantum Gravity} (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Most current version is available at http://www.physics.syr.edu/~sorkin/some.papers/ (or wherever my home-page may be