Pseudoscience beliefs (e.g., astrology, ghosts or UFOs) are rife in American society. Most research examines creation/evolution among liberal arts majors, general public adults, or, infrequently, middle or high school science teachers. Thus, research truncates the range of ersatz science thinking and the samples it studies. We examined diverse beliefs, e.g., extraterrestrials, magic, Biblical c...

We propose a scalar background in Minkowski spacetime imparting constant proper acceleration to a classical particle. In contrast to the case of a constant electric field the proposed scalar potential does not create particle-antiparticle pairs. Therefore an elementary particle accelerated by such field is a more appropriate candidate for an " Unruh-detector " than a particle moving in a consta...

According to astrophysical and cosmological observations, about 20 percent of the total energy in the universe is contributed by dark matter, which, within present observational limits, only exhibits gravitational interaction. Meanwhile, the Standard Model of elementary particles don’t contain such weakly-interacting constituents. To solve this mystery several schemes extending the Standard Mod...

In this article we have summarized the status of the system SANC version 0.41. We have implemented theoretical predictions for many high energy interactions of fundamental particles at the one-loop precision level for up to 4-particle processes. In the present part of our SANC description we place emphasis on an extensive discussion of an important first step of calculations of the one-loop amp...

We present an extended problem appropriate for students in a semester-long introductory elementary particle physics class. This problem requires them to synthesize concepts and investigative approaches learned throughout the class, directed toward answering the question of why muon-to-electron conversion experiments are proposed, but not electron-to-muon experiments. Although direct electron-to...

Abstract. The Higgs field is a central point of the Standard Model supplying masses to other fields through the symmetry breaking mechanism. However, it is associated with an elementary particle which is not yet discovered experimentally. In this short note I suggest a way for expressing the Higgs field through other fields of the Standard Model. If this is the case, being not an independent fi...

We assess the prospects for attaining steady nuclear flow equilibrium in expanding r-process environments where beta decay and/or neutrino capture determine the nuclear charge-changing rates. For very rapid expansions, we find that weak steady flow equilibrium normally cannot be attained. However, even when neutron capture processes freeze out in such nonequilibrium conditions, abundance ratios...

The constrained Hamiltonian formalism is recommended as a means for getting a grip on the concepts of gauge and gauge transformation. This formalism makes it clear how the gauge concept is relevant to understanding Newtonian and classical relativistic theories as well as the theories of elementary particle physics; it provides an explication of the vague notions of “local” and “global” gauge tr...

We develop theory leading to an ability to catalog types of elementary particles. The resulting catalog provides for known interaction-mediating bosons, non-traditional interactioncarrying bosons, and fermions. Ratios of theoretical numbers of analogs of various types of particles match observed ratios of densities for baryonic matter, dark matter, and dark energy.

For example, if for some input x of length len(x) = n, an algorithm requires 2 computational steps, then for an input of a reasonable length n ≈ 300, we would need 2 computational steps. Even if we use a hypothetical computer for which each step takes the smallest physically possible time (the time during which light passes through the smallest known elementary particle), we would still need mo...