Fundamental Laws Of Nature Research Articles

A Fractional Probability Calculus View of Allometry

The scaling of respiratory metabolism with body size in animals is considered by many to be a fundamental law of nature. An apparent corollary of this law is the scaling of physiologic time with body size, implying that physiologic time is separate and distinct from clock time. However, these are only two of the many allometry relations that emerge from empirical studies in the physical, social and life sciences. Herein, we present a theory of allometry that provides a foundation for the allometry relation between a network function and the size that is entailed by the hypothesis that the fluctuations in the two measures are described by a scaling of the joint probability density. The dynamics of such networks are described by the fractional calculus, whose scaling solutions entail the empirically observed allometry relations.

RASAYANA THERAPY: A MAGIC CONTRIBUTION OF AYURVEDA FOR HEALTHY LONG LIFE

Ayurved a is one of the most ancient medical sciences of the world. It is considered the Upaveda of Atharva Veda and thus its antiquity goes back to Vedas, the oldest recorded wisdom on the earth. Based on the fundamental laws of nature, Ayurveda propounds a highl y evolved science of life, health and cure where the concept of aging and rejuvenation finds a prominent place. After birth, growth and senility ultimat ely leading to death are inevitable processes. It is correctly stated that aging begins before birth and continues throughout life at different rates, in different races for different individuals and for different tissues of the body. It involves two opposite processes that simultaneously come into operation i.e. growth and atrophy. Aging represent structura l and functional changes of an organism over its entire life span. In India the Ayurvedic School of medicine is probably the first to describe the science of life, its central theme being efforts to protect life from disease and aging. Rasayana is one of t he eight clinical specialties of classical Ayurveda. Rasayana is not a drug therapy but is a specialized procedure practiced in the form of re j uvenative recipes, dietary regimen and special health promoting conduct and behavior i.e. , Achara - Rasayan a . Rasay ana means the way fo r attaining excellent Rasa i.e. one attains longevity, memory, intelligence, freedom from disorder, youthful age, excellence of luster , complexion and voice, optimum strength of

An optical lattice clock with accuracy and stability at the 10−18 level

Progress in atomic, optical and quantum science has led to rapid improvements in atomic clocks. At the same time, atomic clock research has helped to advance the frontiers of science, affecting both fundamental and applied research. The ability to control quantum states of individual atoms and photons is central to quantum information science and precision measurement, and optical clocks based on single ions have achieved the lowest systematic uncertainty of any frequency standard. Although many-atom lattice clocks have shown advantages in measurement precision over trapped-ion clocks, their accuracy has remained 16 times worse. Here we demonstrate a many-atom system that achieves an accuracy of 6.4 × 10(-18), which is not only better than a single-ion-based clock, but also reduces the required measurement time by two orders of magnitude. By systematically evaluating all known sources of uncertainty, including in situ monitoring of the blackbody radiation environment, we improve the accuracy of optical lattice clocks by a factor of 22. This single clock has simultaneously achieved the best known performance in the key characteristics necessary for consideration as a primary standard-stability and accuracy. More stable and accurate atomic clocks will benefit a wide range of fields, such as the realization and distribution of SI units, the search for time variation of fundamental constants, clock-based geodesy and other precision tests of the fundamental laws of nature. This work also connects to the development of quantum sensors and many-body quantum state engineering (such as spin squeezing) to advance measurement precision beyond the standard quantum limit.

‘The understanding prescribes laws to nature’: Spontaneity, Legislation, and Kant’s Transcendental Hylomorphism

Abstract:In this paper I argue for the following two related claims. First, a successor version of the scholastic ‘forma-non-afficit’ theorem functions as the key to Kant’s transcendental idealism. Second, drawing on the ‘natural right’ tradition which Kant sees himself being part of, the relation between our cognitive spontaneity and the legislation of the understanding is one of acknowledgment (rather than creation) of the laws of the understanding. This interpretation allows us to make sense of pure concepts and principles of the understanding as the fundamental laws of nature. They rationally constrain our empirical concepts and judgments, and thus warrant the ‘lawfulness in the connection of appearances.’ (Prol, AA 04:§ 36)

Non-linear and non-conservative quasi-variational principle of flexible body dynamics and application in spacecraft dynamics

The law of conservation of energy is one of the most fundamental laws of nature. According to the law of the conservation of energy, the non-linear and non-conservative quasi-variational principle of flexible body dynamics is established. The physical meaning of the quasi-stationary value conditions has been explained in non-linear and non-conservative flexible body dynamics. In the case study, the application in spacecraft dynamics is researched.

Thermodynamics-Based Control of Network Systems

The zeroth and first laws of thermodynamics define the concepts of thermal equilibrium and thermal energy. The second law of thermodynamics determines whether a particular transfer of thermal energy can occur. Collectively, these fundamental laws of nature imply that a closed collection of thermodynamic subsystems will tend to thermal equilibrium. This paper generalizes the concepts of energy, entropy, and temperature to undirected and directed networks of single integrators, and demonstrates how thermodynamic principles can be applied to the design of distributed consensus control algorithms for networked dynamical systems.

Do organic and other exotic superconductors fail universal scaling relations?

Universal scaling relations are of tremendous importance in science, as they reveal fundamental laws of nature. Several such scaling relations have recently been proposed for superconductors; however, they are not really universal in the sense that some important families of superconductors appear to fail the scaling relations, or obey the scaling with different scaling pre-factors. In particular, a large group of materials called organic (or molecular) superconductors are a notable example. Here, we show that such apparent violations are largely due to the fact that the required experimental parameters were collected on different samples, with different experimental techniques. When experimental data is taken on the same sample, using a single experimental technique, organic superconductors, as well as all other studied superconductors, do in fact follow universal scaling relations.

The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought ed. by Chris L. Firestone and Nathan A. Jacobs (review)

Reviewed by: The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought ed. by Chris L. Firestone and Nathan A. Jacobs Mihaela L. Florescu The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought, ed. Chris L. Firestone and Nathan A. Jacobs (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2012) 412 pp. In their book, The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought, Charles L. Firestone and Nathan A. Jacobs have compiled fifteen essays that focus on discrediting the idea that religion was absent in the thinking of modern philosophers. The purpose of the essays is to reverse the secularizing trend evident over the last two hundred years. Although modern philosophers were by no means orthodox theists, their ideas always returned to the sacred. The age of reason did not herald the death of God but the arrangement of faith and reason on an equal platform. Firestone and Jacobs cite Mircea Eliade for the notion that “secular” does not necessarily mean the opposite of “sacred.” The editors denote eight major factors which construct the thesis of desecularization explored by the essays in this volume: none of the thinkers discussed were atheists, the modern rift between philosophy and theology distorts accurate analysis, the present academic trend of specialization did not exist, philosophers maintained their personal faith, labels distort original intent, terms change with new movements and the potential for misrepresentation increases, revisionist readings change the original meaning according to followers’ distinct agendas, textual analysis is necessary so myopic past views may be remedied. The first essay in this compilation is John Cottingham’s “The Desecularization of Descartes.” While Descartes is studied mainly for his ideas on knowledge, science, and the workings of the mind, his references to spirituality are often overlooked in spite of the fact that he generated proofs for the existence of God. Descartes is considered a great rationalist, approaching the study of his surroundings by putting stock in his senses of observation and in the scientific method, yet his rationalism is based on the belief that the ultimate author of truth and reason is a supreme being, the very being which endowed mankind with its powers of observation to begin with. A. P. Martinich offers an analysis of Hobbes’s reconciliation of traditional religion with the new science in his essay “Law and Self-Preservation in Leviathan: On Misunderstanding Hobbes’s Philosophy, 1650–1700.” Martinich explains that Hobbes’s philosophy was misunderstood by philosophers of the second half of the seventeenth century and singles out three beliefs falsely attributed to Hobbes: that there was a time when the state of nature was universal, that self-preservation is the fundamental law of nature, and that the most important obligation human beings have is to preserve themselves. Martinich’s refutation of these charges brings to light Hobbes’s Christian nature. Philip Clayton discusses the debate between the metaphysics of immanence and the metaphysics of transcendence in relation to Spinoza’s reflections on God in his essay entitled “The Religious Spinoza.” Clayton paints Spinoza as “an atheist for whom God was indispensable” showing how Spinoza’s [End Page 313] pantheism led to a new philosophical pantheism. Richard A. Muller explores Boyle’s views on final causality in “God and Design in the Thought of Robert Boyle.” Arguing against the notion that all causality comes from atoms, Boyle maintained that final causality must be understood to come from providence. Boyle did not believe in the notion of double truth, that something can be true in philosophy but false in theology. He believed in science and theology reinforcing each other’s similarities while maintaining separate methodologies. Nicholas Wolterstorff contributes “God in Locke’s Philosophy” interpreting Locke’s writings from an esoteric viewpoint and a more traditional one, coming to the conclusion that the esoteric line of interpretation has little merit notwithstanding contradictions on religion in Locke’s writings which had originally given rise to the esoteric line of interpretation. Stephen D. Snobelen declares Newton’s myth of the clockwork universe to be one of the most pervasive myths in the history of science and sets out to dispel it in his essay, “The Myth of the Clockwork Universe: Newton, Newtonianism, and the Enlightenment.” The idea of the...

Mathematics—An Open Access Journal

As is widely known, mathematics plays a unique role in all natural sciences as a refined scientific language and powerful research tool. Indeed, most of the fundamental laws of nature are written in mathematical terms and we study their consequences by numerous mathematical methods (and vice versa, any essential progress in a natural science has been accompanied by fruitful developments in mathematics). In addition, the mathematical modeling in various interdisciplinary problems and logical development of mathematics on its own should be taken into account. [...]

Mathematics—An Open Access Journal

As is widely known, mathematics plays a unique role in all natural sciences as a refined scientific language and powerful research tool. Indeed, most of the fundamental laws of nature are written in mathematical terms and we study their consequences by numerous mathematical methods (and vice versa, any essential progress in a natural science has been accompanied by fruitful developments in mathematics). In addition, the mathematical modeling in various interdisciplinary problems and logical development of mathematics on its own should be taken into account. [...]

Galaxies: An International Multidisciplinary Open Access Journal

The knowledge of the universe as a whole, its origin, size and shape, its evolution and future, has always intrigued the human mind. Galileo wrote: “Nature’s great book is written in mathematical language.” This new journal will be devoted to both aspects of knowledge: the direct investigation of our universe and its deeper understanding, from fundamental laws of nature which are translated into mathematical equations, as Galileo and Newton—to name just two representatives of a plethora of past and present researchers—already showed us how to do. Those physical laws, when brought to their most extreme consequences—to their limits in their respective domains of applicability—are even able to give us a plausible idea of how the origin of our universe came about and also of how we can expect its future to evolve and, eventually, how its end will take place. These laws also condense the important interplay between mathematics and physics as just one first example of the interdisciplinarity that will be promoted in the Galaxies Journal.

Galaxies: An International Multidisciplinary Open Access Journal

The knowledge of the universe as a whole, its origin, size and shape, its evolution and future, has always intrigued the human mind. Galileo wrote: “Nature’s great book is written in mathematical language.” This new journal will be devoted to both aspects of knowledge: the direct investigation of our universe and its deeper understanding, from fundamental laws of nature which are translated into mathematical equations, as Galileo and Newton—to name just two representatives of a plethora of past and present researchers—already showed us how to do. Those physical laws, when brought to their most extreme consequences—to their limits in their respective domains of applicability—are even able to give us a plausible idea of how the origin of our universe came about and also of how we can expect its future to evolve and, eventually, how its end will take place. These laws also condense the important interplay between mathematics and physics as just one first example of the interdisciplinarity that will be promoted in the Galaxies Journal.

Action, an Extensive Property of Self – Organizing Systems

The Principle of Least Action has evolved and established itself as the most basic law of physics. This allows us to see how this fundamental law of nature determines the development of the system towards states with less action, i.e., organized states. The intrinsic properties of complex systems are investigated. A system undergoing a natural process is formulated as a game that tends to organize the system in the least possible time. Nash equilibrium strategy profile is being proposed as an attractor for self organizing complex systems.

A reply

We thank Dr Fujii for his letter which, unfortunately, does not address the fundamental basis of the analysis of his work [1]. As has been explained [2], the distribution of means sampled from any population of continuous measurements, no matter how bizarre the original distribution of measurements, is always normal/Gaussian (see Fig. 4, reference [2]). Furthermore, the alleles that contribute to individual characteristics behave according to fundamental laws of nature and thus apply to all populations - including the Japanese - however distinct they may be [2, 3]. The statistical principles underlying the analysis [1] are literally universal. Apart from genetics, they apply to the behaviour of tiny particles (e.g. mass-velocity of atoms) and galaxies (e.g. Doppler shifts), and to analyses of the extremes of time (e.g. the speed of light and the slowest radioactive decay). An exception to these mathematical principles would shake the basis of most of modern scientific knowledge and understanding. Access to Dr Fujii’s original data would help us confirm the veracity or otherwise of his claims.

Buridan’s Principle

Buridan’s principle asserts that a discrete decision based upon input having a continuous range of values cannot be made within a bounded length of time. It appears to be a fundamental law of nature. Engineers aware of it can design devices so they have an infinitessimal probability of not making a decision quickly enough. Ignorance of the principle could have serious consequences.

Software scientist: With a little data, Eureqa generates fundamental laws of nature

servation of energy. Eureqa's creators, Cornell engineer and computer scientist Hod Lipson and then-graduate student Michael Schmidt, used a motion-track ing camera to capture the chaotic swings of two pendulums linked together. After measuring the pendulums' angles and velocities, the researchers fed the num bers to Eureqa. Without any knowledge of geometry or physics, the program came up with Newton's second law of motion and other equations governing the double pendulum's behavior. Now Eureqa is analyzing even messier With a little data, Eureqa generates fundamental laws of nature

CP violation and the matter–antimatter asymmetry of the Universe

Abstract In our everyday environment one observes only matter. Thatʼs quite a fortunate situation! Any sizeable presence of antimatter on Earth, from the enormous energy it would release through annihilation with matter, would prevent us talking about it! For the physicist this fact, at first sight obvious, is nevertheless a kind of surprise: antimatter, which is observed in cosmic rays, in radioactive decays of nuclei, which has been copiously produced and extensively studied in accelerators and which is nowadays currently used in hospitals, turns out to have pretty much the same properties as matter. Moreover, the fact that matter dominates appears to be a general property of our Universe: no evidence of large quantities of antimatter has been observed at any distance from us. Why would matter have taken the advantage on antimatter? In this short review we explain how, through a limited number of basic elements, one can find answers to this question. Matter and antimatter have, in fact, not exactly the same properties: from laboratory experiments CP conservation is known not to be a fundamental law of nature.

The Origin of Matter

“If we accept the view of complete symmetry between positive and negative electric charge so far as concerns the fundamental laws of Nature, we must regard it rather as an accident that the Earth (and presumably whole solar system), contains a preponderance of negative electrons and positive protons. . ..” This is a sentence in the Nobel Lecture given by Paul A. M. Dirac in 1933. 1) This is the first proposal for baryon-anti-baryon symmetric universe. However, astrophysical observations have ruled out the presence of antimatter in the present universe up to the scale of clusters of galaxies. If our universe indeed began baryon symmetric, those imbalances in numbers of baryons and anti-baryons must be generated by some physical processes in the early universe. I show, in this talk, that decays of the heavy (right-handed) Majorana neutrinos in the early universe generate the imbalances between baryon and anti-baryon numbers. The presence of super heavy (right-handed) Majorana neutrinos is an important prediction of unified theories beyond the standard model. An integration of the heavy Majorana neutrinos induces very small masses for neutrinos via the seesaw mechanism. 2) Thus, small neutrino masses is a reflection of unification at very high energy scale. It is quite natural to consider that the heavy Majorana neutrinos are produced thermally in the early universe. When the temperature of the universe cools down to the masses of the heavy Majorana neutrinos, the heavy neutrinos begin to decay into Higgs boson and lepton or Higgs boson and anti-lepton. The decay may produce the lepton-number asymmetry if CP invariance is violated in the decay processes. The CP invariance can be easily violated by phases in new complex Yukawa coupling of Higgs boson to the right-handed neutrinos and left-handed leptons. The decay processes can easily be out of thermal equilibrium. Thus, the decay processes of heavy Majorana neutrinos can satisfy three Sakharov conditions 3) for baryogenesis. This produced lepton-number asymmetry is converted into the baryon-number asymmetry in the present universe through non-perturbation effects of the electroweak gauge theory. 5) This is called “leptogenesis”. 4) I show that the neutrino masses observed in various neutrino-oscillation experiments are just in the range predicted by the thermal leptogenesis. 6)

Quasiparticles of strongly correlated Fermi liquids at high temperatures and in high magnetic fields

Strongly correlated Fermi systems are among the most intriguing, best experimentally studied and fundamental systems in physics. There is, however, lack of theoretical understanding in this field of physics. The ideas based on the concepts like Kondo lattice and involving quantum and thermal fluctuations at a quantum critical point have been used to explain the unusual physics. Alas, being suggested to describe one property, these approaches fail to explain the others. This means a real crisis in theory suggesting that there is a hidden fundamental law of nature. It turns out that the hidden fundamental law is well forgotten old one directly related to the Landau-Migdal quasiparticles, while the basic properties and the scaling behavior of the strongly correlated systems can be described within the framework of the fermion condensation quantum phase transition (FCQPT). The phase transition comprises the extended quasiparticle paradigm that allows us to explain the non-Fermi liquid (NFL) behavior observed in these systems. In contrast to the Landau paradigm stating that the quasiparticle effective mass is a constant, the effective mass of new quasiparticles strongly depends on temperature, magnetic field, pressure, and other parameters. Our observations are in good agreement with experimental facts and show that FCQPT is responsible for the observed NFL behavior and quasiparticles survive both high temperatures and high magnetic fields.

Ontogenetic phase shifts in metabolism: links to development and anti-predator adaptation

The allometric relationships between resting metabolism (VO(2)) and body mass (M), VO(2) = a(i)M(b), are considered a fundamental law of nature. A distinction though needs to be made between the ontogeny (within a species) and phylogeny (among species) of metabolism. However, the nature and significance of the intraspecific allometry (ontogeny of metabolism) have not been established in fishes. In this study, we present experimental evidence that a puffer fish ranging 0.0008-3 g in wet body mass has four distinct allometric phases in which three stepwise increases in scaling constants (a(i), i = 1-4), i.e. ontogenetic phase shifts in metabolism, occur with growth during its early life stages at around 0.002, 0.01 and 0.1 g, keeping each scaling exponent constant in each phase (b = 0.795). Three stepwise increases in a(i) accompanied behavioural and morphological changes and three peaks of severe cannibalism, in which the majority of predation occurred on smaller fish that had a lower value of a(i). Though fishes are generally highly fecund, producing a large number of small eggs, their survivability is very low. These results suggest that individuals with the ability to rapidly grow and step up 'a(i)' develop more anti-predator adaptation as a result of the decreased predatory risk.