When I heard that Russian President Vladimir Putin had asked the Federation Council to repeal the resolution on the use of Russian armed forces on the territory of Ukraine I was frankly baffled. Truly, I had not expected such a move. I had noticed that the so-called “consultations” (as opposed to “negotiations”) between the Russian Ambassador to Ukraine Mikhail Zurabov, a senior representative for the OSCE Tagliavini, Ukraine’s second president Kuchma, Ukrainian Choice movement leader Medvedchuk and the Donetsk People’s Republic’s Prime Minister Borodai, South-East movement leader Tsaryov and representatives of the Lugansk People’s Republic had resulted in the Novorussian leaders agreeing to a temporary ceasefire, but I did not expect that the situation would change so rapidly.

The quest for finding the right interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (QM) is as old als QM and still has not ended, and may never end. The question what an interpretation of QM is has hardly ever been raised explicitly, let alone answered. We raise it and answer it. Then the quest for the right interpretation can continue self-consciously, for we then know exactly what we are after. We present a list of minimal requirements that something has to meet in order to qualify as an interpretation of QM. We also raise, as a side issue, the question how the discourse on the interpretation of QM relates to hermeneutics in Continental Philosophy.

Comenzaré diciendo que la división de un gran partido político como el PSUV no es algo que deba verse como algo muy extraño.

Elections, specially in countries such as Brazil with an electorate of the order of 100 million people, yield large-scale data-sets embodying valuable information on the dynamics through which individuals influence each other and make choices. In this work we perform an extensive analysis of data sets available for Brazilian proportional elections of legislators and city councillors throughout the period 1970-2012, which embraces two distinct political regimes: a military dictatorship and a democratic phase. Through the distribution P(v) of the number of candidates receiving v votes, we perform a comparative analysis of different elections in the same calendar and as a function of time. The distributions P(v) present a scale-free regime with a power-law exponent α which is not universal and appears to be characteristic of the electorate.

Con la disponibilidad de datos electorales en formato electrónico los físicos y matemáticos iniciaron sus propios análisis de los datos. Más allá de los modelos teóricos desarrollados para los procesos electorales, nuevas regularidades empezaron a surgir de los datos en muchas elecciones y en muchos países. Aquí discutimos algunas de las regularidades estadísticas encontradas para México. En particular, la aparición de leyes de potencia y modelos Margarita (Daisy models) que se pueden asociar al voto corporativo. Los métodos utilizados son de estadística y física estadística estándar. Como una aplicación particular, discutimos una aproximación entrópica a la distribución de votos del Partido Revolucionario Institucional y demostramos que éste método NO permite diferenciar una compra masiva de votos pues su comportamiento ha sido sorprendentemente consistente. De igual forma otros métodos han resultado infructuosos en determinar signos de fraude.

The quantum theory of Bohr has roots in the theories of Rutherford and J. J. Thomson on the one hand, and that of Nicholson on the other. We note that Bohr neither presented the theories of Rutherford and Thomson faithfully, nor did he refer to the theory of Nicholson in its own terms. The contrasting attitudes towards these antecedent theories is telling and reveals the philosophical disposition of Bohr. We argue that Bohr intentionally avoided the concept of model as inappropriate for describing his proposed theory. Bohr had no problem in referring to the works of others as ‘models’, thus separating his theory from previous theories. He was interested in uncovering ‘a little piece of reality’.

The evolution of theoretical physics in the XX century differs significantly from that in XVII-XIX centuries. While continuous progress is observed for theoretical physics in XVII-XIX centuries, modern physics contains many questions that have not been resolved despite many decades of discussion. Based upon the analysis of works by the founders of the XX-century physics, the conclusion is made that the roots of the “eternal” questions by the XX-century theoretical physics lie in the philosophy used by its founders. The conclusion is made about the need to use the ideas of philosophy that guided C. Huygens, I. Newton, W. Thomson (Lord Kelvin), J. K. Maxwell, and the other great physicists of the XVII-XIX centuries, in all areas of theoretical physics.

It is often thought that the existence of other worlds cannot be scientifically verified and therefore should be treated as philosophical speculation. I disagree. In this paper, I describe several methods for determining that other worlds exist, even without interacting with them. These methods are based on the following premise: if there are many worlds, then the statistical properties of a natural process are biased when measured by an observer whose existence was influenced by the process. The bias is always in the same direction, making the process appear more beneficial for the existence of the observer than it actually is. I suggest several potential ways of measuring the bias, show through a simple model of population dynamics how the bias is generated, and briefly consider whether our current drop in population growth is evidence of many worlds.

Pedro Palma Caracas 30 de Junio 2014. El 12 de abril de 2010 salió publicado en esta columna un artículo titulado “¿Adónde vamos?” En el mismo decía cosas como estas: “Realmente preocupa el rumbo que desde hace un buen tiempo ha tomado la economía venezolana, producto de una política económica errada que ha fracasado en […]

Secretario general de AD alerta sobre la necesidad de rectificación