The origin of pointing: Evidence for the touch hypothesis

Pointing gestures play a foundational role in human language, but up to now, we have not known where these gestures come from. Here, we investigated the hypothesis that pointing originates in touch. We found, first, that when pointing at a target, children and adults oriented their fingers not as though trying to create an “}arrow{” that picks out the target but instead as though they were aiming to touch it; second, that when pointing at a target at an angle, participants rotated their wrists to match that angle as they would if they were trying to touch the target; and last, that young children interpret pointing gestures as if they were attempts to touch things, not as arrows. These results provide the first substantial evidence that pointing originates in touch

Ultraviolet avalanche in anisotropic non-Abelian plasmas

We present solutions of coupled particle-field evolution in classical U(1) and SU(2) gauge theories in real time on three-dimensional lattices. For strongly anisotropic particle momentum distributions, we find qualitatively different behavior for the two theories when the field strength is high enough that non-Abelian self-interactions matter for SU(2). It appears that the energy drained by a Weibel-like plasma instability from the particles does not build up exponentially in transverse magnetic fields but instead returns, isotropically, to the hard scale via a rapid avalanche into the ultraviolet.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures; v3: small textual changes; updated to correspond with version to appear in publicatio