Search Results (6)

In this article, we revisit the core concepts of nature and of landscape assessment and sustainability, based on which we propose an approach to natural resource management and diversity preservation from the perspective of cultural landscapes. We build on past and contemporary debates on the notion of nature and its relation to “Non-Nature”, attempting to systematize the main variables of the study of past societies as a methodological framework for the analysis of contemporary contexts; this is based on bibliographic references and case studies using such methodological approaches. Landscapes are structured through human activity, which relates to the technological and logistic drivers of historical studies, and are the domain of humans (anthropic nature), as opposed to non-anthropic nature (or wilderness). Sustainable resource management, focused on the preservation of biodiversity and cultural diversity as part of it, needs to overcome the divide between nature and culture, framing debates and conflicts as part of a cultural landscape of discussions served by an established methodological framework, in which education is the main driver and museum-related structures (libraries, etc.) form the flexible institutional backbone. The introduction sets the context for the argument, revisiting some of the theoretical approaches to the notions of nature and landscapes from the late 19th century in Europe, while also referring to reflections in antiquity and traditional and indigenous understandings. A section on materials and methods explains the methodological framework and data used by the author, situating it within a systematization of the humanities’ assessment of the past. A third section explores the interplay between materialities and perceptions, including the relevance of time- and space-driven approaches that shape different perceived landscapes; it proposes a definition of cultural landscape structured through these interplays. The fourth section discusses the dimension of perceived nature as a cultural landscape and characterizes its main drivers, offering two contemporary case studies as examples. A final section of conclusions discusses the role of humanities and of structures like museums, pointing to the new UNESCO program BRIDGES as a useful tool for pursuing landscape transformations. Full article

Superstring flux compactifications can stabilize all moduli while leading to an enormous number of vacua solutions, each leading to different $4-d$ laws of physics. While the string landscape provides at present the only plausible explanation for the size of the cosmological constant, it may also predict the form of weak scale supersymmetry which is expected to emerge. Rather general arguments suggest a power-law draw to large soft terms, but these are subject to an anthropic selection of a not-too-large value for the weak scale. The combined selection allows one to compute relative probabilities for the emergence of supersymmetric models from the landscape. Models with weak scale naturalness appear most likely to emerge since they have the largest parameter space on the landscape. For finetuned models such as high-scale SUSY or split SUSY, the required weak scale finetuning shrinks their parameter space to tiny volumes, making them much less likely to appear compared to natural models. Probability distributions for sparticle and Higgs masses from natural models show a preference for Higgs mass $m_h\sim 125$ GeV, with sparticles typically beyond the present LHC limits, in accord with data. From these considerations, we briefly describe how natural SUSY is expected to be revealed at future LHC upgrades. This article is a contribution to the Special Edition of the journal Entropy, honoring Paul Frampton on his 80th birthday. Full article

Everlasting inflation has far-reaching implications for cosmology and the standing of self-localizing inferences made by observers, which have been subjects of renewed interest in light of the growing acceptance of theory landscapes and the attendant anthropic arguments. Under what assumptions and to what extent does inflation generically produce an eternal “multiverse,” without fine-tuning with respect to measures over the space of inflationary cosmologies driven by a single minimally coupled scalar field? We address this and related questions with numerical simulations of inflationary dynamics across populations of randomly generated inflation models, instantiating a few particular simply-defined measures. Full article

String/M theory is formulated in 10 and 11 space-time dimensions; in order to describe our universe, we must postulate that six or seven of the spatial dimensions form a small compact manifold. In 1985, Candelas et al. showed that by taking the extra dimensions to be a Calabi–Yau manifold, one could obtain the grand unified theories which had previously been postulated as extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics. Over the years since, many more such compactifications were found. In the early 2000s, progress in nonperturbative string theory enabled computing the approximate effective potential for many compactifications, and it was found that they have metastable local minima with small cosmological constant. Thus, string/M theory appears to have many vacuum configurations which could describe our universe. By combining results on these vacua with a measure factor derived using the theory of eternal inflation, one gets a theoretical framework which realizes earlier ideas about the multiverse, including the anthropic solution to the cosmological constant problem. We review these arguments and some of the criticisms, with their implications for the prediction of low energy supersymmetry and hidden matter sectors, as well as recent work on a variation on eternal inflation theory motivated by computational complexity considerations. Full article

Our existence depends on a variety of constants which appear to be extremely fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life as we know it. These include the number of spatial dimensions, the strengths of the forces, the masses of the particles, the composition of the Universe, and others. On the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the death of G.W. Leibniz, we discuss the question of whether we live in the “Best of all possible Worlds”. The hypothesis of a multiverse could explain the mysterious fine tuning of so many fundamental quantities. Anthropic arguments are critically reviewed. Full article

Increasingly encompassing models have been suggested for our world. Theories range from generally accepted to increasingly speculative to apparently bogus. The progression of theories from ego- to geo- to helio-centric models to universe and multiverse theories and beyond was accompanied by a dramatic increase in the sizes of the postulated worlds, with humans being expelled from their center to ever more remote and random locations. Rather than leading to a true theory of everything, this trend faces a turning point after which the predictive power of such theories decreases (actually to zero). Incorporating the location and other capacities of the observer into such theories avoids this problem and allows to distinguish meaningful from predictively meaningless theories. This also leads to a truly complete theory of everything consisting of a (conventional objective) theory of everything plus a (novel subjective) observer process. The observer localization is neither based on the controversial anthropic principle, nor has it anything to do with the quantum-mechanical observation process. The suggested principle is extended to more practical (partial, approximate, probabilistic, parametric) world models (rather than theories of everything). Finally, I provide a justification of Ockham’s razor, and criticize the anthropic principle, the doomsday argument, the no free lunch theorem, and the falsifiability dogma. Full article