Patrick Coleman, Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer

Death and gratitude: Death reflection enhances gratitude

Although gratitude is important to the good life, little is known about factors that enhance gratitude. Some have suggested that traumatic events such as near-death experiences and life-threatening illnesses might enhance gratitude. If reflecting on death causes one to appreciate life as a limited resource, this might enhance gratitude. This study investigated this theory. Participants were ran...

Aberdeen and the Enlightenment

important contributions made to British rheumatology by the Medical Research Council. As with so many well-meant volumes of this sort, the book becomes more than a trifle self-congratulatory. I have no doubt that in this country the Heberden Society was a much-needed stimulus to the development ofa group of professional rheumatologists, for whom the Society provided self-respect at a time when ...

Thinking with the Coleman Boat

On the Coleman-Hill Theorem

The Coleman-Hill theorem prohibits the appearance of radiative corrections to the topological mass (more precisely, to the parity-odd part of the vacuum polarization tensor at zero momentum) in a wide class of abelian gauge theories in 2+1 dimensions. We re-express the theorem in terms of the effective action rather than in terms of the vacuum polarization tensor. The theorem so restated become...

Coleman progress

As we mark the centenary of Albert Einstein’s seminal contribution to both quantum mechanics and special relativity, we approach another anniversary — that of Einstein’s foundation of the quantum theory of solids. But 100 years on, the same experimental measurement that puzzled Einstein and his contemporaries is forcing us to question our understanding of how quantum matter transforms at ultra-...