Related papers: The Seven Messengers and the "Buzzati sequence"
There are two puzzles surrounding the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters. First, why are the mythological stories surrounding them, typically involving seven young girls being chased by a man associated with the constellation Orion, so similar in…
One evening, a father tells his three daughters, Luc\'ia, In\'es, and Ana, a bedtime story unlike any other. It is a tale of four silent architects ($c$, $\hbar$, $G$, and $\Lambda$) whose presence or absence shapes the very fabric of…
In principle, the twin paradox offers the possibility to go on a trip to the center of our galaxy or even to the end of our universe within life time. In order to be a most comfortable journey the voyaging twin accelerates with Earth's…
It is well known that interstellar travel is bounded by the finite speed of light, but on very large scales any rocketeer would also need to consider the influence of cosmological expansion on their journey. This paper examines accelerated…
We discuss the twin paradox or the clock paradox under the small velocity approximation of special relativity. In this paper the traveller twin of the standard twin parable sets out with a non-relativistic speed for the trip leaving behind…
The development of fault-tolerant distributed systems that can tolerate Byzantine behavior has traditionally been focused on consensus protocols, which support fully-replicated designs. For the development of more sophisticated…
In the traveling salesman problem, one must find the length of the shortest closed tour visiting given ``cities''. We study the stochastic version of the problem, taking the locations of cities and the distances separating them to be random…
This paper investigates an open problem introduced in [14]. Two or more mobile agents start from different nodes of a network and have to accomplish the task of gathering which consists in getting all together at the same node at the same…
We have hiked many miles alongside several professors as we traversed our statistical path -- a regime switching trail which changed direction following a class on the foundations of our discipline. As we play the game of research in that…
The peculiar velocities of galaxies are driven by gravity, and hence hold the promise of probing details of how gravity forms structures. In particular it is possible to constrain cosmological parameters and to test extensions to the…
In everyday life, the process of commuting to work from home happens every now and then. And the research of commute characteristics is useful for urban function planning. For humans, the commute of an individual seems revealing no regular…
Commuting is a key mechanism that governs the dynamics of cities. Despite its importance, very little is known of the properties and mechanisms underlying this crucial urban process. Here, we capitalize on $\sim$ 50 million individuals'…
Traditional resilient systems operate on fully-replicated fault-tolerant clusters, which limits their scalability and performance. One way to make the step towards resilient high-performance systems that can deal with huge workloads, is by…
A perplexing problem in understanding physical reality is why the universe seems comprehensible, and correspondingly why there should exist physical systems capable of comprehending it. In this essay I explore the possibility that rather…
We investigate a game where a sender (Alice) teleports coherent states to two receivers (Bob and Charlie) through a tripartite Gaussian state. The aim of the receivers is to optimize their teleportation fidelities by means of local…
A single panel of a comic book can say a lot: it can depict not only where the characters currently are, but also their motions, their motivations, their emotions, and what they might do next. More generally, humans routinely infer complex…
Two fundamental problems for extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs) attempting to establish interstellar communication are timing and energy consumption. Humanity's study of exoplanets via their transit across the host star highlights a…
Data of six flybys, those of Galileo I, Galileo II, NEAR, Cassini, Rosetta and Messenger were reported by Anderson et al \citep{Anderson}. Four of them: Galileo I, NEAR, Rosetta and Messenger gain Newtonian energy during the flyby transfer,…
This paper sets out to explain: 1. Why the speed of light c is a constant and is the maximum speed at which any moving entity can travel. 2. Why time elapsed is different for a moving entity relative to a stationary entity. 3. Why there has…
This paper solves a pursuit-evasion problem in which a prince must find a princess who is constrained to move on each day from one vertex of a finite graph to another. Unlike the related and much studied `Cops and Robbers Game', the prince…