Boundless Skepticism and the Five Modes

There is a difference between the tasks of interpreting Sextus Empiricus and contesting his arguments. Usually, one does the latter relying on some version of the former. Though this seems obvious, it is easy to make mistakes in this endeavor. From this point, I draw two basic recommendations which we should follow, lest we take Sextus to hold implausible positions regarding his Five Modes. However, these recommendations lead us to interpret Sextus’ Pyrrhonism as a limited skepticism. In the final section, as I suggest a counter-example to this commitment, I reconsider the notion of infinite in the Five Modes to better explain interpretation and criticism of Sextus’ arguments

New Spinor Fields on Lorentzian 7-Manifolds

This paper deals with the classification of spinor fields according to the bilinear covariants in 7 dimensions. The previously investigated Riemannian case is characterized by either one spinor field class, in the real case of Majorana spinors, or three non-trivial classes in the most general complex case. In this paper we show that by imposing appropriate conditions on spinor fields in 7d manifolds with Lorentzian metric, the formerly obtained obstructions for new classes of spinor fields can be circumvented. New spinor fields classes are then explicitly constructed. In particular, on 7-manifolds with asymptotically flat black hole background, these spinors can define a generalized current density which further defines a time Killing vector at the spatial infinity.Comment: 13 pages, improved, to match the final version accepted in JHE

What constrains Africa's exports?

This paper examines the effects of transit, documentation, and ports and customs delays on Africa’s exports. The authors find that transit delays have the most economically and statically significant effect on exports. A one-day reduction in inland travel times leads to a 7 percent increase in exports. Put another way, a one-day reduction in inland travel times translates to a 1.5 percentage point decrease in all importing-country tariffs. By contrast, longer delays in the other areas have a far smaller impact on trade. The analysis controls for the possibility that greater trade leads to shorter delays in three ways. First, it examines the effect of trade times on exports of new products. Second, it evaluates the effect of delays in a transit country on the exports of landlocked countries. Third, it examines whether delays affect time-sensitive goods relatively more. The authors show that large transit delays are relatively more harmful because of high within-country variation

TWO-PION EXCHANGE NUCLEAR POTENTIAL - CHIRAL CANCELLATIONS

We show that chiral symmetry is responsible for large cancellations in the two-pion exchange nucleon-nucleon interaction, which are similar to those occuring in free pion-nucleon scattering.Comment: REVTEX style, 5 pages, 3 PostScrip figures compressed, tarred and uuencode

Lyapunov Exponent and Criticality in the Hamiltonian Mean Field Model

We investigate the dependence of the largest Lyapunov exponent of a $N$-particle self-gravitating ring model at equilibrium with respect to the number of particles and its dependence on energy. This model has a continuous phase-transition from a ferromagnetic to homogeneous phase, and we numerically confirm with large scale simulations the existence of a critical exponent associated to the largest Lyapunov exponent, although at variance with the theoretical estimate. The existence of chaos in the magnetized state evidenced by a positive Lyapunov exponent, even in the thermodynamic limit, is explained by the resonant coupling of individual particle oscillations to the diffusive motion of the center of mass of the system due to the thermal excitation of a classical Goldstone mode. The transition from "weak" to "strong" chaos occurs at the onset of the diffusive motion of the center of mass of the non-homogeneous equilibrium state, as expected. We also discuss thoroughly for the model the validity and limits of a geometrical approach for their analytical estimate.Comment: 21 pages, 14 figure

k-deformed Poincare algebras and quantum Clifford-Hopf algebras

The Minkowski spacetime quantum Clifford algebra structure associated with the conformal group and the Clifford-Hopf alternative k-deformed quantum Poincare algebra is investigated in the Atiyah-Bott-Shapiro mod 8 theorem context. The resulting algebra is equivalent to the deformed anti-de Sitter algebra U_q(so(3,2)), when the associated Clifford-Hopf algebra is taken into account, together with the associated quantum Clifford algebra and a (not braided) deformation of the periodicity Atiyah-Bott-Shapiro theorem.Comment: 10 pages, RevTeX, one Section and references added, improved content