Physical Facts Research Articles

Risk: objective or subjective, facts or values

Perhaps the most fundamental divide in risk research is that between proponents of two contradictory concepts of risk. Some take risk as objectively given and determined by physical facts, whereas others see risk as a social construction that is independent of physical facts. These two views are scrutinized, and it is concluded that neither is tenable. Risk is both fact‐laden and value‐laden, and it contains both objective and subjective components. It is argued that both the objectivist and the subjectivist view of risk are failed attempts to rid a complex concept of much of its complexity. The real challenge is to identify the various types of factual and valuational components inherent in statements about risk and to understand how they are combined. The two oversimplifications both stand in the way of a more sophisticated analysis of risk.

The Uniqueness of Badness

January–February 2010 preface, Whalen states, “I write everything with a fountain pen that must be coaxed and warmed before it will work properly. The following pages were written more for the pen’s benefit and instrumentation than they were for mine or for that of the public.” In this oversized facsimile edition published by Coyote Books, I observe Whalen’s poems and doodles as direct expressions of his thought in a verbal/visual continuum. Witty half-truths and playful elegance characterize this work. Although the book is lovely (rusty staples and all), it is its transparency that I value most. At Powell’s Books, I found So Long (1993) by my favorite contemporary fiction writer, Lucia Berlin, and tore through it over a couple shots of espresso one rainy morning. Books published by Black Sparrow Books are fairly formulaic, especially in their later years, and those designed by Graham Mackintosh (this one wasn’t) are brilliant, though unassuming. Aside from the grotesque cover designed by Barbara Martin and the clunky use of ornaments by a typesetter named “Words Worth” (!), I was so infatuated with her subdued stories that the physical fact of the language I was holding became immaterial. I wonder if Berlin was thinking of one of the characters in Leone’s film when she wrote the last couple of lines of her short story (included in this collection) entitled “Good and Bad”: “There was nobody to speak to. To say I was sorry.” As to which is which, invariably, only the reader can decide (or prefer not to).

Decisive Facts on the Present Climate Delopment

The world temperature will increase at the end of the present century by about 6 °C or more. It is expected that the ice on the Antarctic continent melts within the next generations as well as the ice of Greenland. As a consequence the ocean level may raise up to even 60 meters, not only 2 meters as prognosted by the IPCC. Ocean currants will change, tectonic movements and volcanic eruptions may develop as consequence of the changes on the surface and below the surface of the planet earth as geoid. The basic physical facts are presented. A possible change of the gravity centre may have consequences on the rotation of the planet. The life for man becomes very difficult.

Quantum Mechanics and the Plight of Physicalism

The literature on physicalism often fails to elucidate, I think, what the word physical in physicalism precisely means. Philosophers speak at times of an ideal set of fundamental physical facts, or they stipulate that physical means non-mental, such that all fundamental physical facts are fundamental facts pertaining to the non-mental. In this article, I will probe physicalism in the very much tangible framework of quantum mechanics. Although this theory, unlike “ideal physics” or some “final theory of non-mentality”, is an incomplete theory of the world, I believe this analysis will be of value, if for nothing else, at least for bringing some taste of physical reality, as it were, back to the debate. First, I will introduce a broad characterization of the physicalist credo. In Sect. 2, I will provide a rather quick review of quantum mechanics and some of its current interpretations. In Sect. 3, the notion of quantum non-separability will be analyzed, which will facilitate a discussion of the wave function ontology in Sect. 4. In Sects. 5 and 6, I will explore competing views on the implications of this ontology. In Sect. 7, I will argue that the prior results, based on a thoroughly realist interpretation of quantum mechanics, support only a weak version of non-reductive physicalism.

Mount Rainier and Indian Economies of Place, 1850–1925

T JL he mountain called Rainier is the tallest peak in Washington's northern Cascade range, forty miles southeast from the city of Tacoma, and at the intersection of Nisqually, Yakama, Puyallup, Muckleshoot, and Upper Cowlitz (Taidnapam) ancestral lands. On a clear day the mountain can be seen from a hundred miles in every direction rising dramatically above nearby hills and prairies. Endowed with significance beyond its physical fact, the mountain has been and continues to be an element crucial to northwesterners* sense of place. The mountain's meaning goes beyond aesthetics and sentiment, however. Indians and whites negotiated the meaning of Mount Rainier in both material and non-material ways, creating an economy of place in the process. The mountain itself has served as a marketplace in which the rules of exchange were worked out and place gained value; that American economic rules came to dominate should not obscure the negotiations and alternative economic possibilities that Rainier represents. Most published narratives about Mount Rainier detail one of three major facets of human engagement with the iconic place: exploration and early mountaineering (1850-1890), the creation of Mount Rainier National Park (1899), and the lengthy debate over the official name (1890-1925). This article will revisit these three familiar episodes but tie them together as related moments in an evolving economic negotiation of Rainier as a western place. Throughout the period from 1850-1925, non-Indians sought out Native peoples for information about the mountain and Indians responded by situating the mountain within their social world. Native people did not think of economic life as distinct from other aspects of life, and their responses to white settlers' inquiries reveal largely unrecognized (to their white audiences) facets of Native political economies. White people at the time, and later historians, interpreted Indians'

Bohmian quantization of the big rip

It is shown in this paper that minisuperspace quantization of homogeneous and isotropic geometries with phantom scalar fields, when examined in the light of the Bohm-de Broglie interpretation of quantum mechanics, does not eliminate, in general, the classical big rip singularity present in the classical model. For some values of the Hamilton-Jacobi separation constant present in a class of quantum state solutions of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, the big rip can be either completely eliminated or may still constitute a future attractor for all expanding solutions. This is contrary to the conclusion presented in Ref.[1], using a different interpretation of the wave function, where the big rip singularity is completely eliminated ("smoothed out") through quantization, independently of such separation constant and for all members of the above mentioned class of solutions. This is an example of the very peculiar situation where different interpretations of the same quantum state of a system are predicting different physical facts, instead of just giving different descriptions of the same observable facts: in fact, there is nothing more observable than the fate of the whole Universe.

Inherent properties and statistics with individual particles in quantum mechanics

This paper puts forward the hypothesis that the distinctive features of quantum statistics are exclusively determined by the nature of the properties it describes. In particular, all statistically relevant properties of identical quantum particles in many-particle systems are conjectured to be irreducible, ‘inherent’ properties only belonging to the whole system. This allows one to explain quantum statistics without endorsing the ‘Received View’ that particles are non-individuals, or postulating that quantum systems obey peculiar probability distributions, or assuming that there are primitive restrictions on the range of states accessible to such systems. With this, the need for an unambiguously metaphysical explanation of certain physical facts is acknowledged and satisfied.

Brain Regions for Perceiving and Reasoning About Other People in School‐Aged Children

Neuroimaging studies with adults have identified cortical regions recruited when people think about other people's thoughts (theory of mind): temporo-parietal junction, posterior cingulate, and medial prefrontal cortex. These same regions were recruited in 13 children aged 6-11 years when they listened to sections of a story describing a character's thoughts compared to sections of the same story that described the physical context. A distinct region in the posterior superior temporal sulcus was implicated in the perception of biological motion. Change in response selectivity with age was observed in just one region. The right temporo-parietal junction was recruited equally for mental and physical facts about people in younger children, but only for mental facts in older children.

Reglas de abreviatura en el diario de un monje español en Australia

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Limits, Perspectives, and Thought

Imagine a universe without human beings. Now imagine a universe devoid of any creatures like human beings, beings who could think about the universe and in so doing consider it as divided up into different kinds of things that could be objects of understanding. Now imagine – this is harder – your not being there, or anyone else, to imagine such a universe. Next think about setting about describing in physical laws such a universe in line with a completist physicalist program: that all the facts about the world are physical facts. But where would one begin? Why would one begin? Remember there is no-one around to take more interest in any part of the universe than any other. This contrasts with what we do now. What we do now is take chunks of the universe – stars, planets, water, trees, air, particles – and demarcate the physical laws in such a way as to explain how these objects behave against a background of other objects and ultimately the universe as a whole. But what if we were not around? Why would we there be any reason to demarcate groups of physical laws in this or any other way? My suggestion is that there would be none. The grouping of the physical laws to form complex classes and layers of explanations (how trees and water are related; how planets move as part of a solar system) is parasitic upon creatures having particular interests giving them a perspective (‘perspective’ is being used here in a somewhat technical sense) upon the universe or world, which in turn derives from the kind of limited creatures they happen to be. But the perspective itself is not a physical fact about the universe. Rather it is a way of coming to form a system of facts about the universe. Further, not only might the perspective have been otherwise, there might be none at all. In which case the demarcation of physical laws, given meaning by their application to entities picked out as having a certain significance to us, would not get off the ground. At best there might be a random bunching of laws covering regions of the universe. But such random bunchings would have no meaning; they would be unintelligible; they wouldn't really be about anything. For laws to be about things you have to have limited creatures who differentiate between parts of the universe, and for whom different parts have a variable significance and value. Things stand out for them; they literally exist. Without such creatures, things we take for granted would, in the literal sense, not exist. It is the very limitedness of our perspective and capabilities, such that things are problems for us, and wherefore we literally or metaphorically bump into things, that brings objects into existence for us. Otherwise the universe would be utterly ‘flat’ and undifferentiated. A limitation of perspective is required for there to be objects of thought, and thus for thought itself. Thus, the intelligibility of the laws of physics is logically parasitic upon our having varying interests in different segments of the universe.

Allocating Ecological Space

Liberals have long been committed to two axiomatic claims about freedom: that the exercise of control within one’s private space epitomizes individual liberty, and that each person must be free to define and pursue the good life for themselves. Together, these claims form a conception of freedom as autonomy (from the Greek Auto-Nomos, giving law to oneself), conceptualized as a personal space in which each can act according to one’s own view of the good, free from external constraint. Liberal theories of justice have embraced such claims about autonomy, defining justice in terms that recognize sovereignty within one’s personal space and protect individuality. John Rawls’s primary goods, 1 Ronald Dworkin’s resources, 2 and Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach 3 all focus on instrumental goods within a metric of egalitarian justice, allowing individuals full control over their personal spaces of autonomy while maintaining the bases for interpersonal comparison that distributive justice requires. This spatial conception of liberty has dominated liberal thought at least since J. S. Mill’s observation that “the only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to attain it.” 4 Here, Mill not only defines individual liberty in terms of autonomy, but he also specifies its limits: each of us should be free to pursue our own ideas about the good within our own space, bounded only by the space of others, where our acts infringe upon their autonomy. 5 If this autonomous space is to play the role that Mill and other liberals have long assumed, it must be sufficiently large to allow for a wide range of actions and choices, allowing each to express their individuality without encountering the limits that Mill mentions and the constraints on action that they entail. If almost everything that I do impedes others from pursuing the good in their way—harming them directly, limiting their opportunities, or otherwise infringing upon their space—then my personal space becomes vanishingly small, and my liberty but a trivial abstraction. This spatial conception of freedom is challenged by analyses emerging from the ecological crisis, which offer competing accounts of personal space with quite different implications for the exercise of individual autonomy. 6 Given ecological limits, aggregate ecological space 7 (i.e., life-supporting natural resource-based goods and services, conceived in spatial terms) is finite and threatened by current patterns of over-appropriation, yielding imperatives to fairly allocate that space among various claimants, present and future. Uninhibited autonomy, as construed above, is not sustainable, justifying significant limits on both personal space and

Nuclear and particle physics applications of the Bohm picture of quantum mechanics

Aproximation methods for calculating individual particle/field motions in spacetime at the quantum level of accuracy (a key feature of the Bohm picture (BP) of quantum mechanics) are studied. This sharply illuminates not only the deep quantum structures underlying any observable quantum statistical laws of motion of particles and fields in spacetime, but also how the continuous merging of the so-called classical and quantal modes of description actually occurs, with no breaks anywhere. Modern textbook presentations of Quantum Theory are used throughout, but only to provide the necessary, already existing, tested formalisms and calculational techniques. New coherent insights, reinterpretations of old solutions and results, and new (in principle testable) quantitative and qualitative predictions can be obtained on the basis of the BP that complete the standard type of postdictions and predictions. Most of the dead wood still cluttering discussions on the meaning of Quantum Theory and the role of the BP is by-passed. We shall try to draw attention to the physics of this unfortunately hardly known novel formulation of Quantum Theory by giving additional illustrative examples inspired from the daily practices of contemporary Nuclear and Particle Physics, subjects that as yet have not been thoroughly reinterpreted within the BP. These fields of research offer excellent oppurtunities for explaining and illustrating the significance of time in quantum transitions, as well as the closely related features of quantum non-locality and quantum wholeness, as hard physical facts. We claim that in addition we can obtain a substantial gain in predictive powers of the underlying, all-encompassing, Quantum Theory.

Clarifying tetrapod embryogenesis, a physicist's point of view

The origin of tetrapods is a complex question that webs together genetic, paleontological, developmental and physical facts. Basically, the development of embryos is described by a complex mix of mechanical movements and biochemical inductions of genetic origin. It is difficult to sort out in this scientific question what are the fundamental features imposed by conservation laws of physics, and by force equilibria, and what can be ascribed to successive, very specific, stop-and-go inductions of genetic nature. A posteriori, evolution selects the parameters of this process as found in the observed species. Whether there is a general law to animal formation seems out of the question. However, several concepts developed in biology, like the concept of “organizer” seem questionable from a physics point of view, since the entire deformation and force field should be the “organizer” of development, and one can hardly ascribe such a role to a single small area of the embryo body. In the same spirit, the concept of “positional information” encapsulated in concentration of chemicals seems questionable since the deformation and force fields in embryonic tissues are tensors. Finally, the concept of a development organized in space along three orthogonal (“Cartesian”) axes associated to chemical gradients seems also questionable, since early embryo development is driven by complex vortex fields, with hyperbolic trajectories which span the entire embryo. Such hyperbolic trajectories are best understood by a description in terms of dipolar components of the morphogenetic forces, whose projections along orthogonal axe have no specific meaning except as a mathematical tool. I review here the present state of description of several aspects of tetrapods morphogenesis and evolution, from the point of view of physics. It is getting clear that several basic features of tetrapods body are a direct consequences of fundamental laws of physics. Several lines of work reviewed here show that the topology of the tetrapods may be directly related to the structure of the earliest movements in embryos. The bio-mechanical approach leads to important consequences for the constraints on evolution of the craniates. Such consequences have received a controversial welcome in the last decade, although they may encapsulate the true origin of craniates, esp. simians, and eventually homo .

Causal Essentialism versus the Zombie Worlds

David Chalmers claims that the logical possibility of ‘zombie worlds’ — worlds physically indiscernible from the actual world, but that lack consciousness — reveal that consciousness is a distinct fact, or property, in addition to the physical facts or properties.The ‘existence’ or possibility of Zombie worlds violates the physicalist demand that consciousness logically supervene upon the physical. On the assumption that the logical supervenience of consciousness upon the physical is, indeed, a necessary entailment of physicalism, the existence of zombie worlds implies the falsity of physicalism. How do we determine the logical possibility of zombie worlds? By conceptual analysis of the concepts involved, keeping empirical facts in mind.

Explaining the Reasoning-Fact Gap

The Education Forum by L. Bao et al. (“Learning and scientific reasoning,” 30 January, p. [586][1]) raises the question, why doesn't knowledge of scientific facts (in physics specifically) seem to correlate with skill in reasoning? I suspect that one factor is that American curricula generally emphasize a broad range of technical and nontechnical subjects, only one year of which is devoted to physics. Reasoning skills learned from these other subjects likely compensate for the dearth of physics, relative to that in Chinese schools. A second factor is probably the way in which science is taught. Science education in the United States is not focused on national college entrance exams (neither the SAT nor the ACT test factual science knowledge). Requirements and exams vary from state to state, but guidelines from the National Academy of Sciences emphasize reasoning over facts ([1][2]). Overall, educators have greater leeway to focus on reasoning and other less testable skills. Teaching American students more scientific knowledge is a laudable goal, but we should be careful about what gets sacrificed in the process. It is worth considering how much value most people will derive from advanced specific knowledge (Gauss's Law, for example) compared to broader background in a variety of subjects. Science education in the United States is woefully inadequate in many respects ([2][3]), and the number of failing schools is embarrassing. We must correct these failures but also remember what we've done right. The broad education characteristic of both K-12 and higher education in the United States has done an excellent job fostering creativity and innovation, measured by publications, patents, and growth in the science and technology work force ([2][3], [3][4]). We should work to improve scientific education by building on that success. 1. 1.[↵][5] 1. National Research Council , National Science Education Standards (National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1996). 2. 2.[↵][6] 1. National Science Board , Science and Engineering Indicators 2008 (National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA, 2008) (chs. 3, 5, 7. 3. 3.[↵][7] 1. World Intellectual Property Organization , World Patent Report—A Statistical Review (2008) [www.wipo.int/freepublications/en/patents/931/wipo\_pub\_931_2008.pdf][8]. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1167740 [2]: #ref-1 [3]: #ref-2 [4]: #ref-3 [5]: #xref-ref-1-1 View reference 1. in text [6]: #xref-ref-2-1 View reference 2. in text [7]: #xref-ref-3-1 View reference 3. in text [8]: http://www.wipo.int/freepublications/en/patents/931/wipo_pub_931_2008.pdf

<i>Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play Yung-Hsing Wu Jennifer DeVere Brody. Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2008. xi + 221 pp. The opening “For(e)thought” to Jennifer DeVere Brody’s Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play includes a note of regret. “I regret,” Brody writes, “that my coursework for the doctorate degree in literature did not require courses on the history of language, let alone classes in linguistics, paleography, typography, or printing” (23–24). As disciplinary as it is intellectual, this sense of disappointment, of an opportunity lost, offers a way into Brody’s wide-ranging argument about punctuation, its variable contexts and significations, its mundane operations, and whimsical performances. For in her attention to a host of punctuation marks—dots as periods and ellipses, colons and semicolons, question, exclamation, and quotation marks, even the unremarkable hyphen—Brody insists that punctuation matters, that these marks on (and off) the page are not only readable, but necessarily so if one is to account for the meaning-making that takes place in and around language. Brody’s statement of regret suggests an investment in what Jerome McGann has, since the publication of The Textual Condition, called the bibliographic. A term ripe with bookish resonance, McGann’s bibliographic describes those features that comprise the material conditions of textuality. Writing in 1991, McGann declares that We must turn our attention to much more than the formal and linguistic features of poems or other imaginative fictions. We must attend to textual materials which are not regularly studied by those interested in “poetry”: to typefaces, bindings, [End Page 318] book prices, page format, and all those textual phenomena usually regarded as (at best) peripheral to “poetry” or “the text as such.” (13) The physical facts of textuality: these demand illumination precisely because their contributions to textual meaning are significant. If McGann’s point was to begin to provide such illumination, or to suggest how that illumination might occur, Brody seeks to demonstrate that punctuation, so often invisible—and incidental—to the reading eye, is no less crucial to the material life of language. When she observes of punctuation that “it may be neither here nor there and yet somehow . . . is everywhere,” Brody’s turn to location for the (omni)presence that goes unmarked is not surprising. The air of revolution that suffuses McGann’s claims underlies Brody’s rhetoric as well. To mark punctuation is to demystify the naturalization of print that punctuation has all along afforded. The scope of this demystification is apparent in the diversity of Brody’s analyses. Methodologically, Brody claims cultural, literary, performance, and visual studies as the purview in which Punctuation works. For her, the “body shows” of Yayoi Kusama, whose works feature human bodies painted with dots, and the three-dimensional sculptures of Richard Artschwager, whose pieces include stand-alone question marks, have counterparts in the poetry of Harryette Mullen and the performances of Victor Borge. To the extent that the punctuation marks displayed on full-page spreads in Adbusters magazine recall advertising and the practice of texting, they perform the significance of global connectivity. A moment from a Samuel Taylor Coleridge essay embodies the insight that emoticons now suggest: affect resides in punctuation. Or, as Brody puts it, “human ‘being’ leaps off the page when we see a question mark, a period, or exclamation mark” (6). Meanwhile, Truman Capote’s comment that stylists obsess over “the placement [sic] of a comma, the weight of a semicolon” (5) weighs quite differently in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, where literalized punctuation—marks are rendered as words—captures “the struggle for speech” that Cha’s displaced protagonist must undergo (16). And Ralph Ellison, whose repeated ellipses in Invisible Man index the uncertainty of time and identity, becomes a dissenting voice to the “assimilationist” stance Strunk and White take in predicting the “steady evolution” of hyphenates into unified words (89).1 And yet Punctuation is not only a treatise, a subversive guide to the propriety endorsed by manuals like Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. As her subtitle suggests, Brody is as invested in play as she is in [End Page 319] politics, and...

Moral knowledge and moral factuality

For naturalistic and non-intuitionistic moral realists, moral knowledge is more problematic than ordinary and scientific factual knowledge. For without special faculties of moral discernment, how could we ever detect moral facts and properties? Physical facts and properties may be accessible to perceptual recognition. But how could moral facts and properties ever be similarly accessible? To address this challenge, we need a meta-ethical account that does two things. First, it must explain how the discernment of moral facts and properties ultimately consists only of the detection of appropriate physical items. Second, it must explain why, despite this fact, moral perception seems so very puzzling. In this paper I endeavor to provide such an account. It is largely because of the relational nature of moral properties, and the corresponding externalistically determined normative content of moral property terms, I argue, that our epistemic access to moral knowledge appears mysterious. The metaphysics of moral factuality does a lot to explain the seeming elusiveness of moral knowledge, and in ways that are surprisingly mundane.

Anti-inflammatory Effects of Electronic Signal Treatment

Inflammation often plays a key role in the perpetuation of pain. Chronic inflammatory conditions (e.g. osteoarthritis, immune system dysfunction, micro-circulatory disease, painful neuritis, and even heart disease) have increased as baby boomers age. Medicine’s current antiinflammatory choices are NSAIDs and steroids; the value in promoting cure and side effect risks of these medications are unclear and controversial, especially considering individual patient variations. Electricity has continuously been a powerful tool in medicine for thousands of years. All medical professionals are, to some degree, aware of electrotherapy; those who directly use electricity for treatment know of its anti-inflammatory effects. Electronic signal treatment (EST), as an extension of presently available technology, may reasonably have even more anti-inflammatory effects. EST is a digitally produced alternating current sinusoidal electronic signal with associated harmonics to produce theoretically reasonable and/or scientifically documented physiological effects when applied to the human body. These signals are produced by advanced electronics not possible even 10 to 15 years ago. The potential long-lasting anti-inflammatory effects of some electrical currents are based on basic physical and biochemical facts listed in the text below, namely that of stimulating and signaling effective and long-lasting anti-inflammatory effects in nerve and muscle cells. The safety of electrotherapeutic treatments in general and EST in particular has been established through extensive clinical use. The principles of physics have been largely de-emphasized in modern medicine in favor of chemistry. These electrical treatments, a familiar application of physics, thus represent powerful and appropriate elements of physicians’ pain care armamentaria in the clinic and possibly for prescription for use at home to improve overall patient care and maintenance of quality of life via low-risk and potentially curative treatments. Key words: Electroanalgesia, electronic signal treatment (EST), inflammation, anti-inflammatory effects, immune system, neurogenic inflammation, chronic pain, steroids, NSAIDs, oscillo/torsional effect, cAMP, membrane repair and stabilization, pain care/management

Medical ethics, clinical judgment, and cognitive science: a critique of Wright’s Means, Ends, and Medical Care

What do medical ethics, clinical judgment, and cognitive science have in common? Well, according to Gary Wright in his recent book, Means, Ends and Medical Care, second-generation cognitive science has shown that both medical ethics and clinical judgment find personal narrative and metaphorical thinking more helpful than abstract moral rules or prescribed medical protocols. Wright’s book will be particularly useful to physicians, health care administrators, and medical school educators because Wright is a physician with 30 years of experience who has also studied philosophy and cognitive science at the graduate level under the direction of Mark Johnson, one of the leading philosophers of cognitive science today. Wright’s discussion is grounded in the recent discoveries by second-generation cognitive science showing that most abstract thinking is based on metaphor, whose source domain is the human body, and in particular our sensorimotor systems. For example, the metaphorical notions that disease is imbalance and health is maintaining balance arise from the physical fact that we embodied beings can literally lose our balance, become disoriented, and actually fall down. Wright discusses seven metaphorical representations of disease: ‘‘(1) Disease Is Mechanical Breakdown (2) Disease Is The Abnormal, (3) Disease Is Disintegration (of the whole), (4) the related Disease Is Disorder, (5) Disease Is Imbalance, (6) Disease Is Loss Of A Vital Fluid and (7) Disease Is Being Under Attack’’ (p. 43). He notes that some of these metaphors are used in professional conceptualization and discourse, such as ‘‘Disease Is Disorder,’’ whereas others, like ‘‘Disease Is Being Under Attack,’’ are more prominent in the conversations and thinking of patients and the general public. The important point here is that everyone,

Constants of Nature from the Dynamics of Time

An archetypal model for the constants of nature is found from the ancient geometry of the the Cosmological Circle and is related to Plato's cosmology, with its dynamics and harmonics of time cycles. The inverse fine-structure constant and the proton-electron mass ratio are calculated, connecting fundamental mathematical constants of geometry with the latest theoretical and experimental values of these physical constants. Continuing in the tradition of George Gamow's suggestion, Since the works of Sir Arthur Eddington, it has become customary to discuss from time to time the numerical relations between various fundamental constants of nature. Although until today such discussions have not led to any practical results - that is, to any valuable road signs toward further development of the theory of the still unclear fundamental facts in physics - it may be of some interest to survey the present status of this 'clairvoyant' branch of science.