Sybil Gertrude de Clark

Ronin Institute

The emergence of dimensional analysis in the early nineteenth century involved a redefinition of the pre-existing concepts of homogeneity and dimensions, which entailed a shift from a qualitative to a quantitative conception of these notions. Prior to the nineteenth century, these concepts had been used as criteria to assess the soundness of operat...

We present two re-derivations of the Scharnhorst effect. The latter was first obtained in 1990 by Klaus Scharnhorst, soon followed by Gabriel Barton, and consists in the theoretical prediction that the phase velocity of photons propagating in a Casimir vacuum normal to the plates would be larger than c. The first derivation given in the present wor...

The Scharnhorst Effect: Superluminality and Causality in Effective Field Theories. Missing references: The content on slide 90 is a quote from: S. Liberati, S. Sonego, and M. Visser, arXiv preprint gr-qc/0107091 (2001), p.16. The content on slide 91 is a quote from: G. Barton and K. Scharnhorst, Journal of physics. A, mathematical and general 26,...

The rise of dimensional analysis in the latter part of the nineteenth century occurred largely in the context of electromagnetism. It soon appeared that the subject, albeit seemingly straightforward, was in fact wrought with difficulties. These revealed deep conceptual issues regarding the character of physical quantities. Usually, whether or not t...

The fact that various physical effects usually ascribed to vacuum fluctuations can also be accounted for by the radiation reaction field suggests that perhaps, there is little evidence for vacuum field fluctuations.

Dimensional analysis was developed in the 19th c. It can be viewed as a reformulation of the principle of homogeneity following the emergence of numerical equations, implying a redefinition of the concept of dimension. The principle of homogeneity holds that some operations can only be performed on quantities of a similar nature, where dimensions d...

Following Refs. [1,2], we have earlier developed a valence cluster expansion to construct effective 2- and 3-body Hamiltonians for the 0p-shell by performing No Core Shell Model (NCSM) calculations for A=6 and 7 nuclei and explicitly projecting the many-body Hamiltonians onto the 0phi space. These effective Hamiltonians can be separated into 0-, 1-...

No-core shell model calculations of binding energies using the two-body cluster approximation can omit higher-body correlations in small model spaces. To try and remedy this, we include higher-body correlations up to six nucleons in a two-body effective hamiltonian suitable for standard shell model (SSM) calculations, by performing two successive u...