Lightness, heaviness and gravity

Lightness, Heaviness and Gravity

Lightness, heaviness and gravity

From heaviness to lightness during inflation

We study the quantum fluctuations of scalar fields with a variable effective mass during an inflationary phase. We consider the situation where the effective mass depends on a background scalar field, which evolves during inflation from being frozen into a damped oscillatory phase when the Hubble parameter decreases below its mass. We find power spectra with suppressed amplitude on large scales...

Seeing Heaviness

Participants watched a recording of the motions produced when another person wielded a pendulum. The participants’ task was to judge the heaviness of the pendulum. We found that participants were similarly adept at judging the pendulum’s heaviness as when participants wield the pendulum themselves and perceive heaviness haptically. It is hypothesized that people are able to make these visual he...

24 Lightness Perception and Lightness Illusions EDWARD

The amount of light coming to the eye from an object depends on the amount of light striking the surface, and on the proportion of light that is reflected. If a visual system only made a single measurement of luminance, acting as a pho-tometer, then there would be no way to distinguish a white surface in dim light from a black surface in bright light. Yet humans can usually do so, and this skil...