A space mission, OPTIS, has been proposed for testing the foundations of Special Relativity and post–Newtonian gravitation in the field of Earth. The constraints posed on the original OPTIS orbital geometry would allow for a rather wide range of possibilities for the final OPTIS orbital parameters. This freedom could be exploited for further tests of post-Newtonian gravity. In this paper we wis...

Advanced Radio Interferometry Between Space and Earth (ARISE) is a space very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) mission with a nominal launch date of 2008. It consists of an inflatable 25-m radio telescope circulating in a highly elliptical Earth orbit with a perigee of 5,000 km and an apogee of 40,000 km. The objective is to observe in conjunction with Earth-based telescopes to obtain high-r...

the isotropy and constancy of the speed of light, the time dilation (or Doppler effect), the universality of the gravitational redshift with various combinations of high precision clocks. Furthermore, laser tracking and a laser link allows a strongly improved measurement of the gravitomagnetic Lense–Thirring effect, of the gravitoelectric Einstein perigee advance, of the gravitational redshift,...

the contraposition (musāmita) argument is among the arguments for proving the finitude of dimensions that has received attention in discussing physics and has yielded some philosophical consequences. contraposition argument is based on the two concepts of motion and contraposition, and by proving the impossibility of the motion of circle in case of the infinitude of dimensions, it deals with th...

Baker (Mind 114:223–238, 2005; Brit J Philos Sci 60:611–633, 2009) has recently defended what he calls the “enhanced” version of the indispensability argument for mathematical Platonism. In this paper I demonstrate that the nominalist can respond to Baker’s argument. First, I outline Baker’s argument in more detail before providing a nominalistically acceptable paraphrase of prime-number talk. ...

This paper looks at the need for a better understanding of the impediments to critical thinking in relation to graduate student work. The paper argues that a distinction is needed between two vectors that influence student writing: (1) the word-level sentence-level vector; and (2) the grammar inferencing vector. It is suggested that much of the work being done to assist students is only done on...

The argument from fine tuning is supposed to establish the existence of God from the fact that the evolution of carbon-based life requires the laws of physics and the boundary conditions of the universe to be more or less as they are. We demonstrate that this argument fails. In particular, we focus on problems associated with the role probabilities play in the argument. We show that, even grant...

A coamoeba is the image of a subvariety of a complex torus under the argument map to the real torus. We describe the structure of the boundary of the coamoeba of a variety, which we relate to its logarithmic limit set. Detailed examples of lines in three-dimensional space illustrate and motivate these results.