Related papers: The C-value enigma and timing of the Cambrian expl…
The hydrogen-rich envelopes accreted by white dwarf stars from their red dwarf companions lead to thermonuclear runaways observed as classical nova eruptions peaking at up to 1 Million solar luminosities. Virtually all nova progenitors are…
We investigate the orgin of ``quantum superarrivals'' in the reflection and transmission probabilities of a Gaussian wave packet for a rectangular potential barrier while it is perturbed by either reducing or increasing its height. There…
Particle physics suggests that the Universe may have undergone several phase transitions, including the well-known inflationary event associated with the separation of the strong and electroweak forces in grand unified theories. The…
Quantum coherence, rooted in the superposition principle of quantum mechanics, is a crucial quantum resource. Various measures, operational interpretations, and generalizations of quantum coherence have been proposed. In recent years, its…
An astrophysical model is proposed to answer Fermi's question. Gamma-ray bursts have the correct rates of occurrence and plausibly the correct energetics to have consequences for the evolution of life on a galactic scale. If one assumes…
Growth of the world population and the world economic growth were hyperbolic in the past 2,000,000 years. Recently, from around 1950, they started to be diverted to slower trajectories but they are still close to the historical hyperbolic…
An extension of standard quantum mechanics is proposed in which the Newtonian time appearing as a parameter in the unitary evolution operator is replaced with the time shown by a `quantum clock'. Such a clock is defined by the following…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
The afterglow emission has become the main stream of Gamma-Ray burst research since its discovery three years ago. With the distance-scale enigma solved, the study of the late-time GRB emission is now the most promising approach to disclose…
Globally disruptive events include asteroid/comet impacts, large igneous provinces and glaciations, all of which have been considered as contributors to mass extinctions. Understanding the overall relationship between the timings of the…
The recently discovered Acanthamoeba polyphaga Mimivirus is the largest known DNA virus. Its particle size (>400 nm), genome length (1.2 million bp) and large gene repertoire (911 protein coding genes) blur the established boundaries…
Next generation CMB experiments with arcmin resolution will, for free, lay the foundations for a real breakthrough on the study of the early evolution of galaxies and galaxy clusters, thanks to the detection of large samples of strongly…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
We explore the connection between evolution and large-deviation theory. To do so, we study evolutionary dynamics in which individuals experience mutations, reproduction, and selection using variants of the Moran model. We show that, in the…
Life emerged on the Earth within the first quintile of its habitable window, but a technological civilization did not blossom until its last. Efforts to infer the rate of abiogenesis, based on its early emergence, are frustrated by the…
Constraints in embryonic development are thought to bias the direction of evolution by making some changes less likely, and others more likely, depending on their consequences on ontogeny. Here, we characterize the constraints acting on…
Within the "complexity=anything" proposal of holography, the complexity growth rate (CGR) can exhibit jumps, interpreted as phase transitions. We demonstrate that the location and amplitude of these jumps are governed by the dynamics of…
It has been argued that a particular type of quantum-vacuum variable $q$ can provide a solution to the main cosmological constant problem and possibly also give a cold-dark-matter component. We now show that the same $q$-field may suggest a…
Cataclysmic variable stars (CVs) are close binary systems consisting of a white dwarf (primary) that is accreting matter from a low-mass companion star (secondary). From time to time such systems undergo large-amplitude brightenings. The…
The study of particle creation phenomena at the expense of the gravitational field is of great research interest. It might solve the cosmological puzzle single-handedly, without the need for either dark energy or the modified theory of…