The early work of Lorentz, Abraham and others, evolved through the work of Fokker, Dirac and others to ultimately culminate in the Feynman-Wheeler direct action at a distance theory. However this theory has encountered certain conceptual difficulties like non-locality in time, self force of the electron, pre acceleration and the perfect absorption condition of Feynman and Wheeler, that is the i...

■ Abstract The first law of theoretical physics, the Newtonian law of gravitation, relies on the concept of action at a distance. The success of this law led to the concept being applied to electricity and magnetism, which were next to be explored in depth. Here the action at a distance had a limited success and ultimately had to be abandoned in favor of the increasingly more popular field theo...

A new high resolution crystal structure of the phage lambda repressor reveals the basis for repressor dimer formation and, together with biochemical data, provides insights into the mechanism of repressor tetramer formation, a process essential to the cooperative binding and gene regulatory activities of this protein.

Our Multiple Point Principle (MPP) states that the realized values for e.g. the parameters of the standard model correspond to having a maximally degenerate vacuum. In the original appearence of MPP the gauge coupling values were predicted to within experimental uncertainties. A mechanism for fine-tuning follows in a natural way from the MPP. Using the cosmological constant as a example, we att...

Action at distance in Newtonian physics is replaced by finite propagation speeds in classical post–Newtonian physics. As a result, the differential equations of motion in Newtonian physics are replaced by functional differential equations, where the delay associated with the finite propagation speed is taken into account. Newtonian equations of motion, with post–Newtonian corrections, are often...

Homo sapiens possess a unique behavioural system for social action and response, namely, language. Language permits action at a distance by transmitting messages with specifi c meanings from one individual's mind to that of another. It is a peculiar system as compared with other structures in the environment, because the information in language that specifi es meaning is rather abstract and arb...

Comparing action-at-a-distance electrodynamics in the tradition of Coulomb and Ampère with electromagnetic field theory of Faraday and Maxwell provides an example for a relation between theories, that are on a par in many respects. They have a broadly overlapping domain of applicability, and both were widely successful in explanation and prediction. The relation can be understood as an inhomoge...

A long-standing area of interest in phonological theory has been the analysis of processes that exhibit action at a distance. Consider for example a nasal harmony process in Tshiluba (Bantu; Johnson 1972:75–76, Odden 1994:301), where the applicative suffix (among others) normally contains an l (1a), which is realized instead as n when attached to a stem that contains a nasal (1b). In Tshiluba a...

As a novel approach with possible relevance to semiclassical gravity, we propose to define regions of space as quantum subsystems. After recalling how to divide a generic quantum system into “parts”, we apply this idea to a free scalar field in Minkowski space and we compare two different localization schemes. The first scheme is the standard one, induced by the local relativistic fields; the a...